<body><div>The videos reached me at Dad Hours: lightly faded on the couch at 9 p.m. on Saturday night, my wife out with her girlies, all quiet on the baby monitor. All of a sudden my timeline was taken over with footage of the mercurial country music wizard Sturgill Simpson playing a cover of The Allman Brothers Band’s 1970 classic “Midnight Rider,” and—best I could tell from a shaky iPhone upload—doing it with the precision and bonhomie of a jam band that is actively getting away with murder.With some scrolling, it quickly became apparent that aficionados of Southern rock and related noodling were on high alert: For his Why Not tour, which kicked off in earnest in September, Simpson was apparently on an absolutely molten hot streak, playing hours-long sets: No breaks, no talking—just tight harmonies, rousing saxophone solos, some stupidly audacious covers ( “LA Woman”? “Purple Rain”??) and new arrangements of original tunes featuring brain-melting slide-guitar solos from a genuine virtuoso, an Estonian named Laur Joamets.If that doesn’t light up your orbitofrontal cortex, I don’t know what to tell you—I immediately blocked off his upcoming New York show in the family Google Calendar. But I was also a little surprised. Simpson is an essential artist of the last decade or so (Pitchfork called him the “premier Nashville outsider”; Barstool called him “the best working musician alive”), but you never know what you’re going to get when he picks up a guitar. The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica described Simpson as “someone whose zigzag path has been idiosyncratic and misunderstood” as he turned away from country music to release a hard-rock record. After that, he a put out a (great) hillbilly concept album, re-recorded most of his discography with “most likely the greatest bluegrass band on the planet” (his words), and had an identity crisis that landed him in Paris (by way of Thailand) and led him to assume the name Johnny Blue Skies.In fact, earlier this year GQ spent some quality time with Johnny Blue Skies in France ahead of the release of his latest album, July’s excellent Passage du Desir, which marked a return to alt-country form. He sounded happy, like he had figured out some important truths about himself. But he did not sound like a guy who was about to try to pull together the greatest Southern-rock five-piece on the planet in order to play 32 songs in a row in Huntsville, Alabama.I had my own reasons to proceed cautiously. I had seen Simpson once before, in 2017, at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall. It was on an off night: He struggled to fill that unforgiving 6,000-seat venue with a honky-tonk-scale band, and his voice failed him during a long solo acoustic set. There were moments of brilliance, but afterwards I figured I’d be perfectly happy appreciating him as a studio artist. A few years later, after he ruptured his vocal cords while touring with Willie Nelson in 2020—an inciting incident of his globe-trotting identity crisis— Simpson announced a hiatus from performing that would end up lasting four years.Given all that, you can imagine the shiver of delight I experienced as Simpson belted the high harmonies that make up the emotional peak of “I Don’t Mind” as the first song of his set at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens this past weekend. He was indisputably “in voice” that night, as the opera divas say. And true to what I’d read online, he didn’t let up for three hours. I was expecting a fairly wooly jam band set, but what I got was even better: a red-hot quintet playing tighter than a kombucha left in a hot car. Simpson and Joamets traded leading lines with an easy facility, the humor of the tongue-in-cheek bluegrass love ballad “Juanita” only hit harder remade for Shakedown Street, “A Call to Arms” stretched out for 16 minutes of pyroclastic guitar flow, until the very moment it would be in violation of local ordinances. But I don’t think I can say it better than the community of the jam recording clearinghouse nugs.net: "What a night! Sturg and the boys are absolutely killing it right now. If you have a chance to catch a show you won’t want to miss out,” wrote a commenter going by “Tony Bologna.”Earlier that day I had been jokingly comparing Simpson’s tour to The Eras Tour, Taylor Swift’s world-conquering behemoth. But as we entered hour three, I realized that comparison was unironically apt: an intensely physical marathon performance that created a can’t-miss musical happening. Another similarity? Everyone in attendance seemed to have already experienced the show vicariously on the internet. Simpson’s stunt covers got by far the biggest crowd response, presumably because those were the nuggets that had been floating around Instagram and TikTok. It was a little strange, but given the fact that social media was the big reason I was in the stadium myself, it was hard to complain. (Also, there was also at least one guy in the crowd looking to trade friendship bracelets.)Very much unlike Taylor Swift’s concerts, right now you can see a Sturgill Simpson show by just buying a ticket, direct from the promoter, for a relatively normal amount of money. There are, as of this writing, still 12 shows left on this tour. I’ve been texting and DM’ing every music fan I know in the remaining cities letting them know the good news—that there’s an Eras Tour for dads who like twangy guitar solos. (My own father most of all, the guy who first played me “Whipping Post.”)If you miss that, there’s always the 2025 jag to the U.K. and Europe. Maybe consider flying out for the March 15 show in Tallinn, Estonia, for Laur Joamets’s big homecoming? People have certainly done crazier things to see a hot band.</div></body>

Mountain View, CA

NewsBreak

Is Sturgill Simpson the Greatest Live Act in Music Right Now?

The videos reached me at Dad Hours: lightly faded on the couch at 9 p.m. on Saturday night, my wife out with her girlies, all quiet on the baby monitor. All of a sudden my timeline was taken over with footage of the mercurial country music wizard Sturgill Simpson playing a cover of The Allman Brothers Band’s 1970 classic “Midnight Rider,” and—best I could tell from a shaky iPhone upload—doing it with the precision and bonhomie of a jam band that is actively getting away with murder.