“Johnny can do what he wants,” Sturgill Simpson told Uncut when his new alias debuted on 2024’s Passage Du Desir, which found him rolling through Paris streets “like a cork in a bottle” while listening to ‘70s soft rock and Serge Gainsbourg. His first five albums proper had burned Nashville bridges during an odyssey through outlaw country, psychedelia, synths and Kentucky bluegrass, while tracing the five metaphysical phases of the Western soul.
“Johnny can do what he wants,” Sturgill Simpson told Uncut when his new alias debuted on 2024’s Passage Du Desir, which found him rolling through Paris streets “like a cork in a bottle” while listening to ‘70s soft rock and Serge Gainsbourg. His first five albums proper had burned Nashville bridges during an odyssey through outlaw country, psychedelia, synths and Kentucky bluegrass, while tracing the five metaphysical phases of the Western soul.
Johnny Blue Skies blew this preordained cycle away. He feels more real this time round, not as a Ziggy-style persona but as a means of instantaneous, unshackled creation. Mutiny After Midnight is a dirty boudoir record, a Southern take on Emotional Rescue, staged in a small-town honky-tonk cleared for a disco. “I wrote words to what is happening in the world and my life in real time,” Simpson says of a “dance record” meant to be “offer some relief from darkness”. The ‘70s sleeve, slur of a needle hitting the groove and crackle between tracks implicitly conceptualises a vintage record made for an audience lost in music, sweating away its cares.
Mutiny After Midnight is also a bulletin, adding to a groundswell of American art led by One Battle After Another responding almost in real-time to a country being ripped apart by its government. Johnny’s response is short on politicising rhetoric, talking from the gut. Simpson’s own ongoing grapples with identity, the musician’s life and depression become raw material to survive a general malaise.
Johnny doesn’t have to be vaingloriously great, and isn’t thinking like his President and his cruel, uptight, culturally barren cronies. His campaign promise instead? “Make America Fuk Again”. This epic opener’s stream-of-consciousness sighs with relief at self-sabotaged stardom and details neurodivergence, Johnny’s assumed name permitting deeper confession and pointed, non-partisan fantasy: “I’ve got that Hunter Biden energy/ I make a hooker fuck around and fall in love.” Career and therapy notes are inseparable from a nation needing libidinous revival, to “wanna love again”. Fuzzed-up slide wails over the itchy rhythm, embodying the dancing cure.
“Excited Delirium” gets more specific. “Can’t breathe with your knee on my neck,” Johnny sings, inhabiting George Floyd’s awful last moments. The revved-up guitar and fat R&B sax invoke Cold War rock’n’roll for the new repression, the singer swept up in bad news too fast to fight, and facing lawmen a lot like outlaws: “Why you dressed up like a soldier/ What the hell are you wearing a face-mask for?”
Long-term love and sex are, though, a salve that can wipe cares clean. “Don’t Let Go” rediscovers that low Sturgill country croon, sax and steel guitar smooching as he finds comfort in his wife’s arms, respite as “the world outside these walls is getting colder”. Mutiny After Midnight’s heart stays in the bedroom, the dancefloor or both, insisting on what counts beyond the purview of government.
“Stay On That” is pure country-funk, pedal-steel bending, groove burning, and about nothing but its own sound. “Viridescent” honours the singer’s loved one while slide and lead guitar duel, his bond with his band The Dark Clouds also crucial. “Situation” pays more carnal tribute to a body “hotter than a brothel in Guam”, matched by slow, slinky music which comically speeds up to inspire one last, crazed dancing push.
ICE raids and Constitution-shredding haunt Mutiny After Midnight’s finale. “Everyone Is Welcome” finds Johnny “praying to ghosts” and floating through distracting, divisive walls, identifying systemic misery deeper-rooted than political parties. Freedom here lies beyond tax-paying, familial conformity in “fluid” sexuality, not to mention Simpson’s own voyage out past “relevance” and even his name. “Nothing matters, didn’t you hear?” he asks with bitter, ambivalent irony. “Everyone’s welcome to drown here.”
“Ain’t That A Bitch” also peers past the “distraction” of Trump’s “manufactured chaos” to see “us fighting each other/because that’s’ how they win”. The Dark Clouds’ enlightening groove stays relentless, somewhere between ZZ Top and Chic. This record’s full engagement with its modern moment refuses to engage on that moment’s terms, instead offering its own blissful, unified escape.
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