Go out and eat 10 grams of mushrooms and you'll understand life. It kind of becomes a funk song: Just by the nature of playing it back that way, all of a sudden there's this different kind of rhythm that the song is infused with. Let's talk about another track off the album, called "It Ain't All Flowers. " © 2023 Pandora Media, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Which was focused around what? Just in the song "Turtles All the Way Down, " w e've got references to Jesus and Buddha, drugs and turtles; there's a lot going on. It's absolutely beautiful, and the valley sits between two gorgeous mountain ranges. Sturgill simpson song lyrics. Pandora isn't available in this country right now... Anytime I ever have met someone that was very angry or full of negativity, nine times out of ten if you really take a good look at that person's life, there's probably not a whole lot of love going on there. Sturgill Simpson's new album is Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. How old were you at the time?
Can you unpack it for me? But yeah, to be cliché and incredibly trite about it, I wanna make art: something that I can wake up in 30 years and look back on and still feel proud of. I think there's a lot of negativity in the world that stems directly from belief. Point me to a track or a lyric that you think illustrates that. Sturgill simpson just let go lyrics calvin richardson. You know, any of those bars in East Nashville that are hotspots, that you can walk into on a Friday or Saturday night — back then there'd be six people in there. My wife] said, "You're probably gonna drive yourself crazy, but you're definitely driving me crazy, so maybe you should get this out of your system and write some songs about it. " It's never something you ever think for a second growing up, "Oh, I can do this for a living. " Sturgill Simpson won many fans with his 2013 debut album, High Top Mountain. I'm not really big on process questions but I am interested in what made you think, for song in particular, th at that device of playing it backwards worked. His visionary work on this album opens the gate wide on that frontier.
Now I'm in an office, conference calls, getting screamed at by people I'll never meet. Just let go sturgill. I had been reading a lot of pretty heady stuff and getting kind of obsessive about it. I moved to Nashville the first time in 2005, for about nine months, but I was still very much in a highly focused, traditional mindset. For his sophomore date, he and his band entered a Nashville studio with producer/engineer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell), and cut Metamodern Sounds in Country Music live-to-tape in four days. The track features Cobb's nylon-string guitar, the wafting tapes of a Mellotron, electric bass, acoustic and electric guitars, and sharp drums framing Simpson's lyrics that refer to Jesus, the Old Testament, Buddha, mythology, cosmology, drugs, and physics, before concluding that "love is the only thing that saved my life, " making it a glorious cosmic cowboy song.
No, actually, I can't take credit. One, I'm very happily married and have a child on the way. We would switch the trains out and break 'em apart, consolidate the freight that was headed to similar destinations and build other trains. Anyone interested in cosmology and physics, especially certain breakthroughs in modern physics and the comparisons that some of these subjects were having — it just absolutely blew my mind. I don't pretend to be able to sit down and pontificate on any of these subjects. It is unapologetic in its evocation of '70s outlaw country. And I was no longer out on the yard. "There's a gateway in our mind that leads somewhere out there beyond this plane / Where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain, " goes a line from the opening track. So I headed out west for about three or four years, working on the railroad. And that's what you got. But a lot of the journalists have gotten hung up on one or two things that weren't really the main objective for me writing it. But when you hone in on the lyrics, there are some unusual themes. NPR's Rachel Martin spoke with Simpson to find out what inspired such heady lyrics and whether he considers himself part of the country tradition at all.
Well, in "Turtles, " for instance, there's a line: "Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, DMT, they all changed the way I see / But love's the only thing that ever saved my life. " That's a great song. Stuff you shared with your grand father. Or maybe people really just want to hear somebody sound like Waylon Jennings, so it could all just be psychosomatic. For them, the highlight of life was the entire coal camp gathering around one radio on Saturday nights and listening to the Opry. As an artist of uncommon ability, he has learned from its hallowed lineage and storied past that in order for it to evolve, it cannot be reined in; it must be free to roam in order to create its future. There's an old joke that if you play a country song in reverse, your dog runs home, your wife comes back to you, and your pickup truck starts running again — the point being, modern country music is usually filled with distinctly blue-collar, down-to-earth woes. So there are these kind of obscure references, but you say it's an album about love. You know, I don't pretend to be an astrophysicist or anything, even though I do read about certain things like metaphysics and cosmology that I've always just been really interested in. Well, I get labeled a country artist. Then let's do two things: Answer my question that's annoying to you, and then tell me what the bigger takeaway is that you think is more sig nificant.
So yeah, there's a lot of soul and funk and blues and everything that I've kind of obsessed about at certain stages of my life. I'm also influenced by a lot of modern music — electronica, which will turn off a lot of country fans, I'm sure. If you're gonna make a record, I wanna make records that people want to listen to all the way through. Is your grandfather still around? And then another book by Dr. Rick Strassman called The Spiri t Molecule, which touches on a lot of these same subjects but through a five-year government-funded research study on dimethyltryptamine.
When we found out we were having a baby, I kind of went into what I will call my last great existentialist dilemma. I'd say 80 percent of the influence came from earlier chapters in my life, which I've chosen to just completely leave behind now, and certain experiences that maybe mirror or coincide with what I've been reading. And I think the main purpose, or at least from my observation and what I've learned about myself — I used to be a pretty negative, angry, self-destructive human being, and once you get to the root of why those things are taking place, it helps you to understand a little bit more about things you see on the news every night. That's hard to do these days. I screwed up really good and proper and took a management position. Well, it was very physical and element-exposed. The set is introduced by his 82-year-old coal-mining grandfather Dood Fraley on opener and first single "Turtles All the Way Down. " And he recovered, but I was gone long enough to kind of self-terminate my position at the railroad. He's trucking along. His songwriting and confidence have grown exponentially.