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Johnny Blue Skies: Passage du Desir review – heartache all the way
Misfit American country singer-songwriter Sturgill Simpson adopts an ironic pseudonym for this deeply emotional mix of honky-tonk and bluesy guitar
The offbeat pseudonym belongs to Sturgill Simpson, American country’s most singular star, for whom five albums under one name is enough (he has actually issued seven, two being old songs recast in bluegrass style). His new guise proves deeply ironic, as opener Swamp of Sadness makes clear, with most of the other numbers similarly cast under a pall of heartache, anguish and regret. Its songs are characteristically poetic, whether describing a sojourn in Paris – “a drunken sailor lost and lonely in a sad and magic swamp”– or the tender grief on hearing an old lover has died, on Jupiter’s Faerie.
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