In late 2013, Sturgill Simpson walked into Low Country Sound in Nashville with four musicians, a producer, and enough songs to fill thirty-four minutes of tape. He was in his mid-thirties. He had served in the Navy, worked as a railroad man, and turned his songwriting from a sideline into a full-time pursuit largely at the urging of his wife, Sarah. His debut album, “High Top Mountain,” had come out earlier that year and announced him as a serious voice. But what he cut at LCS in those four days, released on May 13, 2014, as “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music,” was something else. It was the record that proved country music could still hold a genuinely restless mind.
The band was Simpson’s road crew, the people he had been playing with every night: Laur Joamets on electric and slide guitar, Kevin Black on bass, Miles Miller on drums and percussion, and Mike Webb on keyboards and mellotron. Producer Dave Cobb, who had made “High Top Mountain” with Simpson and had already recorded Jason Isbell’s “Southeastern” in 2013, sat behind the board and also picked up classical guitar and percussion on the sessions. The whole thing was cut live-to-tape. No pedal steel, which was a deliberate departure from the debut and from the Waylon Jennings-era outlaw template that Simpson’s voice naturally evoked. The album was engineered by Cobb, with assistance from Justin Herlocker and John Netti, mixed by Cobb and Simpson together, and mastered by Pete Lyman at Infrasonic Mastering. The credits are clean and spare, which is exactly what the music sounds like.
The record opens with “Turtles All the Way Down,” released as a single in April 2014, and the opening move sets the terms for everything that follows. Simpson’s baritone sits warm and unhurried over a bed of guitar and mellotron, and the lyrics move through psychedelia, Eastern philosophy, and plain old country heartache without treating any of it as a novelty. The title of the album itself signals the reach: it is a deliberate nod to Ray Charles’s 1962 record “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music,” and it also references the philosophical aesthetic of metamodernism, the oscillation between sincerity and irony that was very much in the cultural air. None of that reading and listening sounds like homework on the finished record. It sounds like a man who had been thinking hard and then walked into a room and played.
The ten tracks cover a lot of emotional ground in thirty-four minutes. “Life of Sin,” the second track, is roadhouse-ready and direct, the kind of song that earns a Letterman performance, which it did. “Long White Line” is a road song that earns its weariness. “Living the Dream,” one of the album’s singles, carries a bitter irony in its title that the music makes plain. “It Ain’t All Flowers,” the album’s most expansive track, takes the outlaw country template somewhere genuinely strange, Mike Webb’s mellotron pressing against Joamets’s slide guitar until the song opens up into something closer to psychedelia than honky-tonk. “The Promise” sits in the middle of the record as a kind of anchor, Simpson’s voice finding the grief in it without any visible effort. “Panbowl,” the closing track, arrives quietly after everything that came before it, a story-song that lets the record breathe out. The week the album came out, Florida Georgia Line and Luke Bryan had spent a collective twenty weeks at number one on country radio in the first half of 2014. That contrast was not lost on anyone paying attention.
The album debuted at number eight on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and number fifty-nine on the Billboard 200, a strong performance for an independent release with no country radio presence. It was later certified Gold by the RIAA. The Recording Academy nominated it for Best Country Album at the Grammys, a recognition that confirmed what listeners had already decided: this was a record that mattered. It peaked in the top ten on every major country chart, which made the silence from radio all the more pointed.
What “Metamodern Sounds” did, and what made it matter beyond its own considerable quality, was give permission. The album directly influenced Chris Stapleton to record his breakthrough album “Traveller” in the same manner, with a small band, live, with Dave Cobb producing. And Simpson himself would go on to co-produce, alongside David Ferguson, Tyler Childers’s 2017 album “Purgatory,” a record that carried some of the same openness and moral seriousness forward into a new voice. The lineage is direct and traceable. A man in his mid-thirties, who had come to music late and seriously, cut a record in four days in Nashville that reminded a generation of listeners and musicians what the music was capable of when the room was small and the tape was rolling and nobody was trying to please the radio. The record still holds that.
