Hello, My Son…

A Sailor’s Guide is a lot of things. For starters, it’s the latest masterstroke in an ongoing reclamation of country music from the mainstream by Nashville outsiders — a pretty romantic notion, to be sure, but one that Sturgill Simpson himself refuted in his WTF interview with Marc Maron. It’s also a song cycle, addressed to Sturgill’s first and (so far) only son, that tackles life one stage at a time: infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood. Last but not least, it’s a balls-out journey through luxuriant soundscapes, with Stax-style horns courtesy of the Dap-Kings (R.I.P. Sharon Jones) and string arrangements straight out of a Glen Campbell record, all of it anchored by one of the most distinctive voices in popular music period. Sturgill has transcended the Waylon comparisons that most critics and listeners (myself included) lobbed at his first two records and achieved a range of expression that’s entirely his own, much as Adele and Beyonce have done with their respective forebears; the fact that he managed to steal a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year suggests that the industry agrees with me. If anything, A Sailor’s Guide sounds more like Elvis’s Afternoon at the Garden than any one piece of country music: the densely layered arrangements, the wide assemblage of session aces (guitarist Laur Joamets picks on par with the great James Burton), the energy of their performances, the quality of the songwriting, and — above all else — the swagger. Let this sailor guide you across Earth — from the edge of a newborn’s crib to the edge of the sea, from Kawasaki to Kuala Lumpur, from the moment you first heard Nirvana to the moment you first fell in love — and you might just live a little in the process.