Review: Even hurricane couldn’t stop Sturgill Simpson’s return to Rupp

As he stepped onto the Rupp Arena stage Friday evening at exactly 8 o’clock, Sturgill Simpson made it clear he was not going to let his Kentucky homecoming be upstaged by a “(expletive) hurricane.”

Granted, about nine hours earlier a nasty party crasher named Helene roared through Central Kentucky, slicing up trees, downing power lines and sowing a general fear of Mother Nature. Honestly, lady, if you can’t behave yourself when you call, just stay home.

Simpson’s answer was a storm of his own — specifically, a sprawling three-and-a-half-hour concert with no intermission or encore. Indulgent? Yeah, a little.

But for the home state faithful, this show was a feast that covered songs from all eight of his albums and soundscapes that shifted from outlaw-savvy country to unexpectedly spacious rock ‘n’ roll jams. Oh, yeah — and covers. Lots of ‘em. Roughly one-third of the setlist was devoted to the Breathitt County native’s takes on hits by Prince, The Doors, Procol Harum and more.

Sound like a show that kind of ran all over the place? Well, it did for the most part. While the pacing seemed a little out of whack at times and the jamming a mix of the resplendent and the repetitious, it was hard to imagine any serious Simpson fan going away from this one disappointed. Exhausted, maybe, but not disappointed.

The blueprint persona of Simpson many fans were introduced to just over decade ago kicked off this massive party off with “Railroad of Sin,” a two-minute whirlwind shuffle full of honky-tonk gusto with a spirited, but largely conversational mountain tenor from Simpson serving as tour guide.

From there, in piece-by-piece fashion, the performance began to shapeshift. With the return of guitarist Laur Joamets to Simpson’s band, the country-ish temperament to the songs, especially those from the headliner’s early albums, got a little trippy. Some of that was built into the design of the music, as in the cover of When in Rome’s “The Promise” from Simpson’s rightly celebrated sophomore album, 2014’s “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.” But Joamets was the catalyst, taking the tune into Pink Floyd-ian terrain, a territory Simpson and band would return to several times during the performance.

Then there were the jams, which often served as segue ways from a Simpson tune to a cover, like the ones that bridged “A Good Look” (from 2019’s synth-infused rock anime album “Sound & Fury”) with a streamlined roadhouse version of The Doors’ “L.A. Woman” and the chiming “Voices” (from “Metamodern”) with a sleek reading of The Allman Brothers Band staple “Midnight Rider.”

The sharpest results of this change-up formula were saved for late in the program when “One for the Road,” a nine-minute dissertation on heartbreak from the July-released “Passage du Desir” already plump with guitar breaks, fell into the lap of the Prince classic “Purple Rain.”

This proved to be a near show-stealing moment for Joamets, whose careening solo prompted the packed Rupp house to sing the song’s wordless finale chorus over his solo. Having drummer and Versailles native Miles Miller (playfully dubbed by Simpson earlier in the show as “the little brother I never wanted”) anchoring the groove simply heightened the songs’ collective drama.

In all honesty, the show should have called it a night after that. The two-fer was a powerful display of how convincingly far Simpson can stretch the conventions of reflective country narratives and his band’s tight and tireless command in executing those visions. But seemingly determined to carry on the show until an apparent 11:30 curfew, Simpson squeezed in a few more tunes and jams, each appealing but, ultimately, anti-climactic.

Oh, yes. You know that whole deal of Simpson’s claiming a new professional identity as Johnny Blue Skies beginning with the release of “Passage du Desir” this summer? Well, that kind of went out the window Friday evening. The name game was never mentioned in any of the few stage remarks given during the marathon concert. And while it may be presumptuous to say so, it didn’t seem to matter one way or another to the Rupp crowd. The man onstage could call himself whatever he wanted. Still, with a 30-plus song serving of gutsy country-and-more music to lap up, the home state hero of the evening will be forever Sturgill.

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