Sturgill Simpson is back in the United States on a mission to tell audiences, Who the F**k is Johnny Blue Skies? The trend-bucking country singer-songwriter started his concert in Austin off with a bang on Monday, as Sturgill Simpson opened the show with his first “You Can Have the Crown” since 2015.

If there’s one thing Simpson is famous for, besides simultaneously celebrating country music’s traditions while also steamrolling it into the new century, it is his defiant streak. After he wasn’t invited to Bridgestone Arena for the CMA Awards in 2017 (despite winning “Best Country Album” at the Grammys that year), Simpson turned up outside the ceremony and busked on the sidewalk—Grammy in his guitar case—only to sell out Bridgestone in 2024. After redefining a new era of country music with 2014’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, he turned around and made a hard-driving psych-rock record on 2019’s SOUND & FURY. Simpson followed this with more artistic mutations on bluegrass reduxes of his classic songs (Cuttin’ Grass) and a folk concept album (The Ballad of Dood & Juanita).

“If something works or is successful, I just feel like I don’t deserve it, so I run from it,” Simpson said in a 2024 interview when asked if every album is merely a reaction to the reception of the previous one. “Or if people say, like, ‘Well, this is great, we want more of this,’ my brain is like, ‘No, you can’t have it. I do this now.’ It’s a fault.”

This brings us to “You Can Have the Crown”. Taken from Simpson’s 2013 solo debut High Top Mountain, the track became an early favorite of Sturgill’s nascent career. On Spotify, the track has over 68 million streams—his third most popular song based on raw numbers alone. For many fans, it was their introduction to Simpson’s music. For Sturgill, the song was a joke that he regretably took into the studio.

Years ago, Simpson explained to a live audience that “You Can Have the Crown” started as a satire of “laundry list” songs eminating from Nashville’s Music Row. Per Simpson, the “laundry list” songs are about nothing more than stating just how country you are—written by a team of songwriters sitting in cubicles.

“I decided, just to take the piss, I’m going to write a laundry list song,” Simpson said. “So, I tried to squeeze in every token cliché I could think of that was still realistically applicable to my life. I was proud of myself [laughs]. We ended up going into the studio that day, unfortunately. … I didn’t really have any other songs I was sitting on that I was particularly excited about. So, I played it for Dave [Cobb, High Top Mountain producer] and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great.’ And we cut it.

“Later that night, sitting in the control room, I heard the playback and I thought, I’ll never forget, I was like ‘Well, there it is. There’s the song I’m going to wish I never wrote,’” Simpson recalled. “Sure as sh-t, that’s the one everybody wants to hear.”

Simpson had not performed “You Can Have the Crown” since November 5th, 2015, in Denver, CO, per Setlist.fm. He got it out of the way early on Monday, using it to light the fuse of a 38-song concert. Hopefully, there were some songs during the three-and-a-half-hour, single-set marathon performance at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q that he liked better than “You Can Have the Crown”.

Sturgill Simpson — “You Can Have The Crown” — 4/7/25

If you are a member of the Sturgill Simpson Fans group on Facebook, you can watch the “You Can Have the Crown” bust-out here. nugs subscribers can stream audio of the entire show below. [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!]

Simpson will continue a swing through the South this week with shows in Alabama and Mississippi before heading to Colorado. Find tickets and tour dates here.

Sturgill Simpson — Stubb’s Bar-B-Q — Austin, TX — 4/7/25 — Full Audio

Setlist: Sturgill Simpson | Stubb’s Bar-B-Q | Austin, TX | 4/7/25

Set: You Can Have the Crown [1], Life Ain’t Fair and the World Is Mean, Railroad of Sin, The Promise (When in Rome), Voices, Midnight Rider (Allman Brothers Band), Welcome to Earth (Pollywog), It Ain’t All Flowers, Party All the Time (Eddie Murphy), Best Clockmaker on Mars, A Whiter Shade of Pale (Procol Harum), I Don’t Mind, Mint Tea, Brace for Impact (Live a Little), Red Red Wine (Neil Diamond), Just Let Go, A Good Look, L.A. Woman (The Doors), You Don’t Miss Your Water (William Bell), Fastest Horse in Town, I’d Have to Be Crazy (Steven Fromholz), Right Kind of Dream, All Said and Done, Long White Line (Moore & Napier), Sing Along, All Around You, I Never Go Around Mirrors (Lefty Frizzell), Turtles All the Way Down, Living the Dream, If the Sun Never Rises Again, Jupiter’s Faerie, Scooter Blues, Water in a Well, Juanita, Life of Sin, One for the Road, Purple Rain (Prince), Call to Arms > Machine Gun (Jimi Hendrix) > Call to Arms

[1] LTP 11/5/15