The Fighting Side of Sturgill Simpson

After years of struggle, the country trailblazer has found success on his own terms. But he’s not letting Nashville off the hook.

- David Ritz

ON A HOT NASHVILLE LATE summer afternoon, 38-year old Sturgill Simpson sits at a small table and looks me dead in the eye. We’re in the city’s German town section, in the writing room he shares with singer-song writer John Prine. A pool table dominates the space. An antique jukebox stands silent. Down the hallway is the studio where last year Simpson cut his haunting album A Sailor’s Guide to Earth in less than a week.

Simpson’s conversational currency is unfiltered sincerity. His humor is built on self-deprecation. “Rolling Stone is doing a long-form exposé on what an asshole I am,” he tells engineer David Ferguson, who drops in at one point. Months earlier, we’d met at a birthday dinner for Shooter Jennings, where Simpson’s intellectual range took me by surprise. Most country stars aren’t intimate with Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud – or, for that matter, Marvin Gaye’s most esoteric recordings.

Along with artists like Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton, Simpson has breathed new life into Americana music, heavily indebted to Seventies outlaw country as well as a wide range of other influences, including soul artists like Otis Redding and Bill Withers. But it was in the old-school outlaw tradition that Simpson recently caused a sensation by blasting the Academy of Country Music after it announced the “Merle Haggard Spirit Award.” Simpson accused the organization and others of trying to “hitch their wagon to his name while knowing full and damn well what he thought about them.”