Sturgill Simpson has been a thorn in the side of Nashville for most of his career. In 2017, his album A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, won the Grammy Award for Best Country Album. In response to not being invited to that year's Country Music Awards, Simpson spent the evening busking outside the venue and donated his tips to the ACLU. He said the move was to highlight the disconnect between the mainstream country music industry and the artists.
Simpson has never colored inside the pop country lines. Instead, his catalog is a diverse string of multi-genre albums with elements of rock and Americana, a few bluegrass albums, and his 2019 release SOUND & FURY — a psychedelic rock album accompanied by a full-length anime video produced by the Japanese director Junepi Mizusaki.
In an effort to separate his private and public lives, Simpson released the album Passage du Desir in 2023 under the moniker Johnny Blue Skies. The album had a beach country vibe in the vein of Jimmy Buffett.
Johnny Blue Skies and his band The Dark Clouds are back with Mutiny After Midnight. The theme of the record is that we could solve a lot of our societal problems if people engaged in more acts of joy. He uses a non-radio-friendly-word for the specific act of joy he champions. It’s another multi-genre album with elements of disco, funk, and hard rock.
In his latest salvo against the music industry, Simpson vowed to only release Mutiny After Midnight on vinyl, CD, and cassette. Then, a few weeks before the mid-March official release, he dropped the entire album on YouTube for people to hear for free. It’s unclear how this stunt will impact sales, but Johnny Blue Skies doesn't seem to care.
So far, we’ve only gotten the single, Situation, a funky, gritty, bawdy rock song, and we’re digging it. We look forward to sharing the other radio-friendly songs from Mutiny After Midnight when we get our hands on them.