Press Play Archives #2: An Interview with Grammy-Winning Outlaw Country Musician Sturgill Simpson

This RETRO series republishes essays from the first U.S. column on metamodernism, "Metamericana," which IndieWire's Press Play imprint hosted in the 2010s. IndieWire published this article in 2014.

{Note: Years ago, Indiewire inexplicably pulled off-line a significant percentage of its archives. My mid-2010s column Metamericana was one of the hundreds of casualties of this decision. I’ve now recovered my articles from the publication, many of which deal with topics, artworks, and personalities still of significant interest today. I’ll be republishing all of them at RETRO.}

Introduction

In early 2016, Rolling Stone reported that country music artist Sturgill Simpson’s Grammy-nominated 2014 album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music had been a “psychedelic, psilocybin love trip inspired by deep thinkers like philosopher Seth Abramson.”

Back in 2014, Simpson had told The Fader, of the “metamodern idea” for Metamodern Sounds in Country Music,

I read weird shit. This guy called Seth Abramson was talking about oscillation between naivety and our current culture’s love for nostalgia. It’s exactly what I see happening in Nashville [the country music scene] right now. Everyone is just spinning their wheels trying to think of what’s next, but nobody’s got the balls to make the gamble so they keep spinning their thumbs and counting on the formula. It seems so self-destructive; they’re praying to a dying business model. I certainly love the sound of old records, but I don’t ever want to be a novelty niche thing and live in that world. It’s important to pay homage, but at the same time, [when] they say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” [I think] the only way to fix it might be to break the fuck out of it.

If there was ever any doubt that Sturgill Simpson was and is a badass, his artistic ethos—the paradoxical (and conspicuously metamodern), “the only way to fix what ‘ain’t broke’ is to break the fuck out of it”—should erase any doubt.

So as you can imagine, I was thrilled to learn that my essays on metamodernism, many of which will appear in the coming weeks and months at RETRO, inspired an album that I loved dearly the moment I heard it. And I was thrilled when Sturgill invited my now-wife and I to drive out to Milwaukee from Madison and hear him in concert. The concert was incredible—energetic, profound, soulful, and inspiring—as was hearing Sturgill talk about my writings on metamodernism from the stage of the Turner Hall Ballroom and get a chance to speak with him after the show. My small role in helping to inspire an album subsequently nominated for a Grammy Award also led to an opportunity, in mid-2014, to interview Sturgill for Press Play, an imprint of Indiewire.

At the time I interviewed Sturgill, I was working with Press Play editor Max Winter to publish Metamericana, America’s first-ever column dedicated to metamodernism—an emerging cultural paradigm that is an evolution of postmodernism and helps us understand how the internet influences both art and the way we process information.

{Note: I’ve written dozens of articles about metamodernism, in both scholarly and popular publications, but one primer can be found in my mid-2010s Huffington Post column, here.}

As you might guess, part of the basis for my interest in Sturgill was the same as his basis for being interested in my writing: we saw one another doing important work in metamodernism, albeit in different fields. Sturgill had found a way to marry seeming opposites in his music, be it nostalgia and seer-like visions of the future, reverence and irreverence, or belief and cynicism. During his show at the Turner Hall Ballroom, I remember that he told the crowd that he hated the mechanistic theatrics of encores—i.e., the idea that if a fan cheers loud enough, their favorite artist will re-emerge at the end of their set to play some more, and if they cheer loud enough a second time, the artist will emerge yet again—and that he wanted, therefore, to instead play all his encore songs as part of the main show and then take his leave. He promised to play the hell out of those “non-encore encores,” and boy, did he ever—they were incredible. They also underscored Sturgill’s willingness to be transparent, even naively so, about his own hard-won calculations. His non-encore encore existed in a state of animated suspension within his live performance that was mesmerizing to both watch and hear.

I guess all this is my way of saying (again) that Sturgill is a badass, and I was so happy to speak to him just as his career was taking off. Indeed, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, his next album after Metamodern Sounds in Country Music—which itself would appear on many end-of-year “best of” lists in 2014, including the one at Rolling Stone—won him a Grammy, and his albums since then have continued to be extremely well received.

At the time I interviewed Sturgill, my focus was on his music videos for Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, which were both psychedelic (expansive) and sober (intimate). I sensed, as did my editor Max, that Sturgill had a unique vision for how multimedia could play a role in his career. And boy, were we right! See the coda to my article in Metamericana, below, to see what I’m talking about. You’ll be glad that you did. And as you watch the video in the coda, remember that Sturgill is billed as a country artist.

If you understand how and why that’s still possible despite the shockingly diverse music he’s made, you’ll be catching a first glimpse of what metamodernism is about.

Unfortunately, Sturgill suffered a vocal cord hemorrhage a few weeks ago, and has cancelled all his 2021 tour dates; it’s unclear when or if he will return to writing or recording. This said, Sturgill has long insisted that he intended his music career to be brief, and his run of albums a conceptual enterprise charting the course of a human life, so given that his last album appears to have been the final one in that run, it’s safe to say that whatever happens, we can rest easy knowing Sturgill has told us at least one story (in full) that he intended to tell. {Note: more videos from Sturgill appear below.}

Outlaw Country Goes Psychedelic: An Interview with Sturgill Simpson on His Music Videos

By Seth Abramson | Press Play

Thursday, August 14, 2014

If any album of 2014 can be said to have received universal acclaim, it’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, released in May by country artist Sturgill Simpson. It is a mesmerizing and sometimes bewildering mix of traditional sounds, contemporary philosophy, and psychedelic recording-studio wizardry; its appeal appears to cross all boundaries of age and genre. Pitchfork called it “a surprisingly tender....vehicle for big, unwieldy ideas about human consciousness and the nature of life”, while no less an old-media stalwart than The New York Times called it “a triumph of exhaustion, one of the most jolting country albums in recent memory.” NPR wrote that Simpson had “perfected the trick of distilling classic country from many eras and moving away from it at the same time…a trick that takes skill and affection for the history of the genre, as well as a willingness to stand alone”; meanwhile, a television channel built to capture the hearts of the Heartland, Country Music Television, credits him with “a voice that recalls Merle Haggard, and guitar licks that bring Buck Owens to mind.”

Other glowing reviews of Metamodern Sounds by Rolling Stone (“equal parts haunted, tender, and trippy”), The Austin Chronicle (“the rising rural talent....uses the genre’s classic narratives to obscure right and wrong in the search for higher truths”), and Record Collector (“Simpson truly scores in the ease with which he ponders life’s bigger questions while couching them in familiar country language and sounds”) have helped seal the album’s reputation as one of the year’s most acclaimed releases. And now the LP has earned Sturgill an Emerging Act of the Year nomination from The Americana Honors & Awards, and popular Americana blog Twang Nation calls Metamodern Sounds a “dark horse candidate” to win a Grammy Award for Americana Album of the Year—a claim that’s now been echoed on the personal ites of countless fans of Americana.

The music charts love Simpson, too. Metamodern Sounds has thus far spent nine weeks in the Billboard Top 200, peaking at #59, and just as long on the country music charts, peaking just outside the top ten. And to top it off, Simpson just appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman.

What hasn’t yet been much discussed are the three oddball music videos Simpson has thus far released: the first two, “Turtles All the Way Down” and “The Promise”, from  Metamodern Sounds, and the third, “Railroad of Sin”, from his 2013 debut album High Top Mountain. Simpson has been interviewed countless times this year—by everyone from Rolling Stone to The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio to Billboard—but never once asked to discuss in detail the multimedia rollout that accompanied the release of Metamodern Sounds (let alone the sole video release from Simpson’s first album, which is every bit as strangely juxtapositive [as it offers traditional bluegrass music against a Japanese backdrop] as his Metamodern Sounds videos). This oversight may be attributable to the fact that the lyrics and music of Metamodern Sounds require so much careful attention and discussion; or, it may be that even the media outlets now praising Simpson underestimate the scope and ambition of his project. Certainly, on the evidence—the videos themselves—it seems clear the visuals accompanying Metamodern Sounds in Country Music are as critical to the project as the album’s songs.

Last week I caught up with Simpson to ask him some pointed questions about these three videos, as well as the artistic vision behind them. In this article you’ll find links to each of the three, as well as by Simpson’s discussion of them with Press Play [and two additional cuts off Metamodern Sounds in Country Music].

Seth Abramson (SA): In filming videos for a country album that’s in many ways unconventional, what are your influences? Any favorite videos by musicians in other genres?

Sturgill Simpson (SS): I’m a movie buff/indie film whore. Lots of foreign [films]…lots of 60’s westerns. I someday hope to find the time and coin to invest more of my creative energy towards the visual media side of releasing music. I’d love to make short film videos pushing the conventional standards of what a country music video can be.

SA: The video for “Turtles All the Way Down” features psychedelic CGI and gorgeously styled shots of the band, but it also gives viewers a first-person look at a virtual wormhole during the lyrics’ denouement. Do you see this idea of a short-cut between two far-flung positions as being important to the work you’re doing on Metamodern Sounds in Country Music? If so, what’s on either end of the wormhole?

SS: More than anything, I believe the themes, content, and sonic palette of the album created the wormholes and sort of formed the juxtaposition on their own. I’m not sure how much of it was intentional, looking back now. Even with most finite planning you never know what the final result will reveal itself to be until it’s staring back at you. I think the album just really shows where my head was at that moment in time.

SA: The videos for “Turtles All the Way Down” and “The Promise” juxtapose an almost DIY ethic (e.g., close-up tracking shots of you and other members of the band) and a real commitment to using technology (e.g., computer-generated visual effects) to mesmerize. Can you talk about the process of filming these videos? How much of the concepts were drawn from your own sense of Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, and how much was a multimedia collaboration with other artists?

SS: Well that’s another story in itself. My buddy Graham Uhelski directed and edited everything. I gave him a mental outline of what I was after and wanted to see on both songs and he filtered that through his interpretation to get what you see. For “The Promise” we decided a single simple tracking shot filmed inside a bleeding heart was all it needed. I knew the video for “Turtles” had to employ inter-dimensional/thematic elements. Really I just wanted to make it look like a live performance at the Omega Point. Our budget was next to nothing. We put together a small team of highly talented, dedicated players and turned an empty warehouse into a soundstage. I was introduced to a generative software artist in New York named Scott (Spot) Draves through Dr. Rick Strassman and his colleague Andrew Stone. Scott created an interface A.I./synthetic consciousness software called Electric Sheep. I sent him the album and explained the message I was trying to get across with the project. He was sympathetic to the cause and my budget and very graciously offered his assistance.

SA: The video for “Turtles” definitely achieved that “inter-dimensional” ambition—it’s a wild mix of religious lighting, pharmaceutical-friendly animation, “infinite regress” cosmological theory, and lyrics that run the gamut from Jesus to Buddha, fairy tales to aliens. How concerned were you about trying to tie everything together visually?

SS: That was the challenge and for me, simultaneously the source of the excitement in tackling it.

SA: It’d be impossible to watch these three videos without thinking about the use of color in each; not many live-action videos are more spectacularly colored than these are, and in each case the use of color feels not just aesthetic but rhetorical. Was featuring transformative, blurred, and technicolor displays a particular emphasis in putting together these videos, and if so, how do you see that emphasis interacting with Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (and/or earlier work from High Top Mountain) lyrically and thematically?

SS: Everybody is on drugs . . . just give ’em what they want.

SA: In addition to the references to various drugs in “Turtles,” a lot of people have homed in on your album’s use of the word “metamodern.” Do you think of these as metamodern music videos?

SS: Now that’s a question I’d really much rather hear your thoughts on.

{Author’s note (2021): Stay tuned to RETRO for quite a lot of writing on my thoughts about metamodernism in art and culture.}

SA: The second release from Metamodern Sounds, “The Promise,” uses vignetting to leave us with the uncanny feeling we’re literally looking through someone’s heart. It’s a song with a clear narrative bent, so I wondered if you could talk about the role (if any) of narrative in that video. Did you and your team imagine the moment you’ve captured on film as a contextualized one, or was the concept primarily aesthetic?

SS: Nailed it. We wanted it to look like you were staring directly into a bleeding heart or a very vulnerable love light.

SA: “Promise” also superimposes black-and-white film-reel visual effects over a static, “real-world” shot of you sitting on a stool; the reel effects are later replaced by an over-saturated color palette and the same “ink” effect we briefly saw in “Turtles All the Way Down.” Is foregrounding the different ways reality can be framed—music, writing, cinema, photography, et cetera—important to your “metamodern” approach to songwriting, and if so, how do you see it playing out in the work?

SS: I believe framing reality is one of the only ways we can ever be sure it actually exists. In that regard, I feel as though I’m still learning who I am as an artist.

SA: Switching to the 2013 video for “Railroad of Sin”—it makes Tokyo subways and business districts the setting for a classic rockabilly sound. It’s not a combination many would come to organically, but it really works, so I wanted to ask you how you conceived of it? And also the video’s epigraph—“a single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities”—feels critical to what you’re up to. What can you tell us about that video?

SS: I lived in Japan when I was younger for about two years. I spent my time equally between religiously studying Aikido in Shinjuku by day and hard partying in Shibuya and Roppongi by night. On more than a few nights, those subways were my own personal stage coach to hell. I thought it would be fun to return and work with some friends to capture the techno advanced world of Tokyo against the backdrop of a high octane country song about a reckless life of abandonment and personal disregard represented as a speeding train.

SA: A side note about all three of these videos: the distribution channels for music videos today are obviously a world apart from what they were in the 1980s, when you and I were more or less coming online culturally; did the new potential for “virality”—a strange word—play any role in the design and execution of these videos?

SS: Of course. As you pointed out, there was no such thing as “viral” in the 80’s and 90’s video world. I knew before making these videos the only place people would ever see them would be on YouTube. With that said, CMT actually picked up the “Turtles” video for rotation, so go figure. That in and of itself is a win in my book.

SA: Looking ahead, are there plans for any additional videos for Metamodern Sounds in Country Music? If so, any details?

SS: Yes. Eventually, I want to have a video or visual representation for every song on the album so you can watch the album in order of its track listing. This may take a year or more.

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Coda

At the time of this interview, I couldn’t have known—perhaps even Sturgill couldn’t have known—the intensely innovative direction he was soon to take with his music videos. In 2019, he and a team of animators released an anime punctuated by songs from his album Sound & Fury, which he has since said was inspired by his growing disillusionment with the music industry. As a man who has himself become immersed in and then walked away from many industries, I can relate to the tenor of this album and the bitterness (among many other emotions, of course) that helped to give it birth.

All of Sturgill’s output is worth listening to—and no two albums are at all alike (his second-to-most-recent one is straight bluegrass, which is something to really think about after watching the video below)—so I recommend you look into all of his work.

Below is a taste of what Sturgill and his artistic collaborators did with Sound & Fury (please note that these videos, and several others from the album, are NSFW):

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