Accompanied by some of the best players in the scene, the country maverick performs bluegrass versions of highlights from his back catalog, revealing the hidden roots of his idiosyncratic songwriting.
Back in June 2020, Sturgill Simpson confessed his bluegrass dreams to an empty Ryman Auditorium. “I decided after climbing the ropes of country-music stardom and then completely destroying that career to make a rock’n’roll record. Now I have great ambitions of a life of gravel parking lots and Porta Potties,” he joked during the livestream concert, flanked by a small band featuring some of the greatest talents in bluegrass. His jab was affectionate: Simpson says he was a fan long before he moved to Nashville and became one of the biggest country stars ever to insist that he wasn’t really country. His new album Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1: The Butcher Shoppe Sessions, a collection of bluegrass versions of songs from Simpson’s own back catalog, grew out of a fundraising challenge with his fans, but you get the sense Simpson eventually would have gotten around to recording a bluegrass record anyway, if only because the genre’s emphasis on acoustic instrumentation and technical chops flies in the face of what many perceive to be Nashville’s reliance on slick production and cookie-cutter stars—qualities that, fairly or not, he has repeatedly lambasted.
In that Ryman Auditorium livestream, Simpson stressed the influence of bluegrass on his own playing and songwriting. Whether he was revving them up for his early punk-country group Sunday Valley or exploding them on Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, Simpson was heavily influenced by the rhythms, melodies, and sentiments of the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, and others. But he’s also a master of concision, often refusing to repeat some of his catchiest passages and typically eschewing the verse-chorus-verse format. There’s a military precision to his songs—fitting for a guy who spent three years in the Navy and then used that experience as the thematic foundation for his breakout album, 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. So his tunes slide easily into bluegrass, a style that prizes individual precision within a larger group dynamic.
Simpson has recruited a band of barnstormers for Cuttin’ Grass, which he recorded at the Butcher Shoppe Recording Studio with friend and producer David Ferguson. Almost every player on the album was up onstage at his Opry and Ryman shows, and they’re all among the best at their respective instruments. Guitarists Tim O’Brien and Mark Howard toggle fluidly between lead and rhythm to ensure everything moves at a steady clip. Banjo player Scott Vestal and fiddler Stuart Duncan treat “All the Pretty Colors” like a Cubist canvas, finding new angles in the central melody and slyly reinterpreting Simpson’s metaphor about heartache washing all the color out of his world. If anyone dominates these arrangements, it might be Sierra Hull, a mandolin prodigy whose picking is as sensitive as her backing vocals, especially on a tender, soulful version of “Breaker’s Roar”—arguably the most transformed song on the album.
The best bluegrass players balance blazing technique with close attention to the song and deep knowledge of the canon. Even when the picking is deft, it’s rarely showy; instead, there’s a modest ostentation to Cuttin’ Grass, which simultaneously plays up the cosmic quality of Simpson’s songwriting but also grounds it in earthy arrangements. Dreams are constantly intruding on reality in his songs; God infuses everything, light constantly battles darkness, and death just takes us to another plane. “Gonna transmigrate to my destination far beyond time in an eternal dream,” he sings on “Just Let Go,” right before the band joins him on the chorus: “Am I dreaming or am I dying?” It’s a murder ballad where the ego gets the knife.
Cuttin’ Grass at times plays like a covers album, with the artist and the subject both the same, but overall it’s a de facto greatest hits, surveying nearly the full breadth of Simpson’s career. Granted, his success should have put the lie to “Life Ain’t Fair and the World Is Mean,” which sounds like sour grapes from an artist who can convince a major label to fund the anime film that accompanied his lackluster 2019 rock’n’roll record SOUND & FURY. Otherwise, his choices are compelling, especially the three songs from Sunday Valley, which only released one album and one EP before Simpson went solo. He and his bluegrass band transform them from rowdy, rusty alt-country numbers into this collection’s biggest revelations. The best of the lot, “I Don’t Mind,” takes the conventions of country music and subtly inverts them. Against Miles Miller’s two-step drum pattern, he describes heartache as an existential conundrum, striking a bittersweet balance between defeat and desire. “If you think you can ever love me again, please go ahead, I don’t mind,” he sings, as the players offer their consolations.
The appeal of Cuttin’ Grass goes beyond the novelty of hearing familiar songs in a new setting. This isn’t Pickin’ On Sturgill Simpson. Rather, these performances emphasize the cosmic and the sentimental in Simpson’s catalog. What’s missing, however, is the sense of possibility that defines his other albums, even the lackluster SOUND & FURY. As a country artist, Simpson is determinedly subversive; as a bluegrass artist, he’s incredibly conservative. There are none of the abrupt stylistic changes that made Sailor’s Guide sound as big as the world and none of the sonic experiments that made Metamodern Sounds such a trip. Simpson can’t quite sustain a double album in this style, and Cuttin’ Grass loses some steam toward the end. However, there are more than enough bracing moments here to make you wonder what Volume 2 will sound like, especially if it’s all those ’80s covers he promised his wife.
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