Something very surprising happened last fall when my teenager—who has, at her request, accompanied me to concerts by everyone from The Cure to Gorillaz—started high school, made a new best friend, and quickly became obsessed with country music, all the way back to The Carter Family. That left turn, or maybe southern turn, led us to Denver’s Mission Ballroom last night to see the Kentucky-born, genre-defying Sturgill Simpson on his Who The F–k Is Johnny Blue Skies? tour. She wanted to hear the 46-year-old Simpson play his Waylon Jennings-esque “Life Ain’t Fair and the World Is Mean” and got a lot more.
With no opening act, the Grammy-winning Simpson and his four-piece backing band took the big Mission stage at 8 p.m. sharp, and the smattering of pot smoke and tie-dye around us quickly started to make sense, with the mellow set-opener “All Around You” including a surprising saxophone solo and sinewy Americana grooves. Johnny Blue Skies isn’t an alter-ego for Simpson like Ziggy Stardust or Chris Gaines—a Kentucky bartender simply gave the singer/songwriter/guitarist/actor that name—but he’s been through hell and back the last few years and at Mission Ballroom he seemed to be leaving any sense of attachment to genres or expectations or even filter behind.
Sturgill Simpson — “All Around You”, “Breakers Roar”, “Who I Am” — 4/14/25
[Video: Chris Handley]
By the time Simpson and his band got to the fourth song of their sprawling set, “Right Kind of Dream” from last year’s stunning Passage du Desir, he was lending his wailing Waylon voice to a sort of Nashville version of Broken Social Scene—and admitting to the sold-out crowd that he was sick.
“Full disclosure,” Simpson said, “I’m rocking a nasty chest cold. But I’m a superhuman badass. I’m gonna try what Bill Monroe would call ‘wise note selection.’”
Over an hour into the set, as he threw all he had into the hard-nosed country bop of “Living the Dream”, Simpson rightly boasted that he and the band were “warming up.” He and his fantastic quartet featuring drummer Miles Miller, bassist Kevin Black, Laur Joamets on several types of guitars, and Robbie Crowell on keys plus saxophone crammed songs back-to-back and played as long as Ween, Pearl Jam, or even Bruce Springsteen. But I’ve never seen anyone juxtapose stop-on-a-dime transitions (that even include tempo changes) with seamless jamming of songs into each other and, when they want, true Allman Brothers Band southern-psychedelic guitar clinics.
Joamets played gorgeous, haunting pedal steel as well as tasteful honky tonk and soaring solos that conteded with Derek Trucks or even Mike McCready, but part of last night’s charm was the intermittent playfulness of Simpson’s own dirty-blues soloing. Those forays succeeded on countrified bangers like “Long White Line” because Simpson always seemed to just be expressing himself, not posing as a guitar god.
As the night went on, Simpson became less bashful about his cold and let it all hang out, saying “It breaks my heart” to have to sing with a cold, “but we’re gonna f–ing do this goddamn thing anyway.” He vowed to do his best to channel the legendary cool of J.J. Cale, and after a particularly tasty jam on “Pinball Blues” where Simpson and his band were on fire like the old days of NBA Jam, he told the audience “We’re all doomed and nothing matters anymore, so you all might as well go home, get naked and f–k. That’s my dream.”
Simpson and his band play music that’s deep and smart, mellifluous and razor-sharp. His lyrics are wise beyond their stylistic confines, which I realized through the admitted awkwardness of sitting next to my teenage daughter while Simpson sang the brilliant, tripping-positive “Turtles All the Way Down” and its encouragement “To other realms our souls must roam / To and through the myth that we call space and time.” It was like hearing lyrics written by William Blake and Alan Watts sung by Merle Haggard fronting The Beatles.
As Simpson sang later in the show during the mighty blues-rock of “Brace for Impact”, we are all “Dyin’ to live / Living to die / No matter what you believe.” Simpson’s brash, you-only-live-once creativity is as punk-rock as country music gets, a spiritual descendant of Johnny Cash’s attitude in the ’60s that fits right into our own sadly historic modern times.
More than anything, I’m glad my kid could see firsthand that country music isn’t one sound any more than jazz is and witness a rock star with the guts to tell a sold-out 4,000-capacity venue about his “treatment-resistant depression” and his happiness around recently canceling arena shows to play smaller venues.
But in the end, the element of the Who the F–k Is Johnny Blue Skies? tour that brought the pot-and-tie-dyes crowd to Denver, roaring as Simpson launched into the Allmans’ “Midnight Rider”, was too much for my discerning teenager.
“It was getting too jammy,” she told me as we were walking out of the venue. “I liked it when they were playing songs, and then they just starting jamming.”
Sturgill Simpson’s Who the F–k is Johnny Blue Skies? tour continues through late May, with dates in the Western United States, Midwest, East Coast, and Southeast. Find tickets and a list of tour dates here.
Check out some of photographer Brad Niederman‘s photos of Sturgill Simpson at Mission Ballroom and some fan-shot videos.
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Setlist: Sturgill Simpson | Mission Ballroom | Denver, CO | 4/14/25
Set: All Around You, Breakers Roar, Who I Am, Right Kind of Dream, All Said and Done, If the Sun Never Rises Again, Turtles All the Way Down, Living the Dream, Pinball Blues (Moore & Napier), Long White Line (Moore & Napier), I Don’t Mind, Brace for Impact (Live a Little), One for the Road, Water in a Well, Scooter Blues, Jupiter’s Faerie, Midnight Rider (The Allman Brothers Band), Welcome to Earth (Pollywog), It Ain’t All Flowers, Party All the Time (Eddie Murphy), Best Clockmaker on Mars [1], I’d Have to Be Crazy (Steven Fromholz), In Bloom (Nirvana), Life of Sin, A Good Look [2], The Promise (When in Rome), Fastest Horse in Town
[1] w/ “Bulls on Parade” (Rage Against The Machine) snippet
[2] w/ “Black Dog” and “Living Loving Maid” (Led Zeppelin) as part of extended jam
