Sturgill Simpson headed to New York’s Forest Hills Stadium on Saturday for another impactful, three-hour performance as part of the ongoing Why Not? tour, his first outing in several years.
That is to say, Johnny Blue Skies—as he was billed on the tennis stadium‘s marquee, and on his 2024 “comeback” album Passage du Desir—played the gig. He was playing Sturgill Simpson’s songs (plus a handful borrowed from Prince, The Doors, The Allman Brothers Band, Procol Harum, and others), but Sturgill Simpson had said in no uncertain terms that he was retiring “Sturgill Simpson” after five albums—a cycle completed in 2021 with the release of The Ballad of Dood & Juanita.
[Photo: Otis Sinclair]
The distinction between Sturgill Simpson and Johnny Blue Skies could be maddeningly layered or anticlimactically simple depending on your perspective, but at Forest Hills Stadium the country-rock outlaw and his band thrived within that ambiguity.
The setlist for the concert, which began promptly at 7:00 p.m. and ran straight to the 10:00 p.m. curfew sans breaks, pauses, spoken interludes, and other such filler, pulled from all five Sturgill Simpson LPs—a run of records that had notably shifted in style and approach as they arrived between 2013 and 2021. Six of the eight Johnny Blue Skies songs from Passage du Desir made appearances, as did a number of notable covers, but for those of us in the crowd not intimately acquainted with Sturgill’s catalog (read: me), it was often hard to pinpoint which “version” of this artist was in the hot seat at any given moment. The country singer? The lyrical storyteller? The outlaw? The art-rock cognoscente? The Western cowboy? The Grateful Dead convert? The “new guy?” It all commanded the crowd just the same.
More than any one iteration of his perceived persona or season of his style, the singer-guitarist seemed most interested in playing the role of “band member.” While Simpson’s velvet voice and affable, self-assured charisma led the way, the performance almost never felt like a “country singer singing his country songs.” Rather, this was longtime band playing a gripping, cohesive live show that never stopped feeling in the moment. It had that elusive feeling of being a rock show in which one could lose themself—a feeling Sturgill seems to be chasing.
With his band—Laur Joamets (electric guitar, pedal steel), Miles Miller (drums), Kevin Black (bass), and Robbie Crowell (keys, sax)—arranged in a tight horseshoe around him despite the stadium stage’s wide berth, Simpson repeatedly retreated from the microphone, huddled close to his bandmates, and blended into the sound around him. More often than not he would call out the next tune while the current one was still going, leaving no extra time to fill with reflections or stories as many artists tend to do at such career-spanning shows.
A run of understated band member introductions following an electric take on The Doors’ “L.A. Woman” served as one of Simpson’s only speaking parts in New York. Once Sturgill had listed his fellow players, Joamets walked over to center stage to introduce the man in the spotlight: “Ladies and gentlemen, on vocals and guitar, the one and only…” he said, leaving space at the end for anticipation, “Johnny Blue Skies.”
Blue Skies smiled—almost as if he hadn’t been sure which version of the intro he’d get tonight—but didn’t correct him. Instead, he led the band into a Sturgill Simpson song, the dreamy “All Around You” from 2016’s Album of the Year Grammy-nominated A Sailor’s Guide to Earth.
Who The F–k Is Johnny Blue Skies? Sturgill Simpson Explains Alias In New Interview [Watch]
Call him Sturgill Simpson. Call him Johnny Blue Skies. They may or may not be the same guy. But on this tour, his name doesn’t matter as much as his mission: He’s got a band, and they’re trying to rock. Anything else is just a waste of precious minutes.
Below, view a video playlist featuring 20 songs from the Sturgill Simpson show at Forest Hills Stadium via Matt Frazier. Find tickets to upcoming Sturgill Simpson tour dates here.
Full-show audio recordings from the ongoing Sturgill Simpson tour are available to stream now via nugs.net. Sign up for a seven-day free trial here. [Editor’s Note: Live For Live Music is a nugs affiliate. Ordering your nugs subscription or purchasing a download via the links on this page helps support our coverage of the world of live music. Thank you for reading!]
Sturgill Simpson – Forest Hills Stadium – 10/19/24 – Live Video Playlist
Setlist: Sturgill Simpson | Forest Hills Stadium | Forest Hills, NY | 10/19/24
Set: I Don’t Mind, Brace for Impact (Live a Little), You Don’t Miss Your Water [William Bell], Railroad of Sin, The Promise [When in Rome], A Winter Shade of Pale [Procol Harum], Right Kind of Dream, All Said and Done, Long White Line [Moore & Napier], Water in a Well, Juanita, Mint Tea, Some Days, Turtles All the Way Down, Purple Rain [Prince], Just Let Go, A Good Look, L.A. Woman [The Doors], All Around You, Living the Dream, If the Sun Never Rises Again, Scooter Blues, Midnight Rider [The Allman Brothers Band], Voices, Jupiter’s Faerie, Welcome to Earth (Pollywog), It Ain’t All Flowers, Best Clockmaker on Mars, Fastest Horse in Town, Life of Sin, Call to Arms