I think we can all agree that thinking about the early days of lockdown isn’t a particularly fun or constructive activity. Four years on, it’s still hard to process the traumatic strangeness of normal everyday life being put on pause while we all became medium-term shut-ins. The plans that were made and then unmade, the experiences that you didn’t even know you were missing, the life that was unlived — it’s too much to take in, even now.
In the grand scheme of things, missing out on a concert might not amount to much in this context. But for the sake of conversation: The show I’m saddest about not seeing in 2020 is Sturgill Simpson’s truncated Sound & Fury tour, which began in January and like everything else ground to a halt in early March, about a month before it was originally scheduled to hit my town. I had been eagerly anticipating that night for months, ever since downloading a bootleg recording of a gig from the previous fall in Washington D.C., part of a pre-tour warm-up club tour. The music on that tape was thick, gnarly and above all furious, which matched Sturgill’s personal temperament at the time. When I interviewed him in February 2020, he talked about the tour with palpable dread. His previous road campaign in 2017 drove him to substance abuse, he confessed. He also pledged he would never do a “big tour” like this ever again. So, when the Sound & Fury tour was subsequently canceled, I suspect that Sturgill was the opposite of disappointed.
Flash forward to 2024. Sturgill is back on the road, and he has apparently broken the “no more big tours” pledge. Or maybe not — since Sturgill made that promise and this jaunt — dubbed the Why Not? tour — is official billed as a “Johnny Blue Skies” show. No matter. The semantics are irrelevant. What matters is that Sturgill Simpson is playing live again and his current tour is 2024’s most musically thrilling and flat-out life-affirming live experience.
The optimal word here is joy. I saw Sturgill last week at one of the dumpier venues in the Twin Cities area, and for three hours he played 31 songs with his brilliant band and positively radiated ebullience. The music just poured out of these guys like well-aged bourbon into a well-worn tumbler — honky-tonk stompers, revved-up electric bluegrass, stoned southern rock, duel-guitar psychedelic jams. They played originals from throughout Sturgill’s catalog with muscular authority, successfully merging the traditional country and soul sounds of the early records with the gut-punch rock of the Sound & Fury era. And they skillfully inserted covers that acted as signposts acknowledging where this music comes from: The Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider,” William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” Procol Harum’s “A White Shade Of Pale,” an absolutely apocalyptic version of The Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” and Prince’s “Purple Rain,” which merged seamlessly with Sturgill’s own gently weeping guitar elegy, “One For The Road.”
