Review Summary: Singin’ ‘bout outlaws and the way things used to be
Over the past 8 years, Sturgill Simpson has carved out a totally singular place for himself in the music world. Much has been made of his restless flitting from genre to genre, and not undeservedly so. His winding stylistic path— from neotraditional country and bluegrass, to psychedelia and Muscle Shoals soul, to hard rock and even synth-pop— paints a clear picture of an artist with a voracious appetite for experimentation, never content to just settle into a particular sound and crank out an endless procession of minor variations on it. But if we strip away all those stylistic pivots, all the CMA antics and Netflix animes, who
is Sturgill Simpson— as a songwriter and as a performer? Well, after 2019’s scorching
Sound & Fury, Simpson himself seemed more interested in the answer to that question than anyone, ghosting Elektra Records and holing up with a rogue’s gallery of bluegrass all-stars to cover nearly his entire songbook. As both a distillation and a compilation of his catalogue, the
Cuttin’ Grass albums did a lot to reveal the core of Simpson’s artistic persona: a sharp, self-deprecating storyteller and a self-styled antihero, both a consummate outsider preoccupied with exploring the fringes of polite society and a devoted family man with an underappreciated romantic streak.
The Ballad of Dood & Juanita tells the story of a rugged pioneer homesteading in 1862 Kentucky, who sets out to find his wife after a bandit captures her. In other words, it’s smack-dab in the center of Simpson’s wheelhouse. The big departure comes in the narrative nature of the album— Simpson has rarely written outside his own perspective before— but even then,
Dood & Juanita winds up Simpson’s most comfortable outing to date, and often his least rewarding.
Naturally, for a story literally set in the Bluegrass State, the album generally sticks to the down-home acoustic pickin' of
Cuttin’ Grass, with a handful of ventures into adjacent styles of appalachian folk to spice things up a bit. Across the album’s 10 tracks, Simpson and his band ably handle all manner of old-time mountain music, and if there’s anywhere the album ought to be praised it’s here. Between the liberal use of foley sound and the pitch-perfect pastiches of a half-dozen strains of folk and country, the story is realized vividly on a sonic level. Whether it’s the gunshots and military chanting that open the album, the jaw harp in “Go In Peace” or the a capella interlude of “Sam”,
Dood & Juanita really
feels like a classic western pulp or an old John Wayne flick, the perfect musical backdrop to this straightforward western.
The western it’s a backdrop for, however, is arguably
Dood & Juanita’s greatest weakness. 27 minutes is short for any album, doubly so for a concept album, and though it’s refreshing to get a musical narrative this direct and to-the-point, the bare bones of the story aren’t quite strong enough to consistently support the music. Simpson has said he wrote the story for the album in about a week, and unfortunately it does come off more than a little hastily-considered. Stoic, tough-as-nails Dood doesn’t make for an especially compelling protagonist, and Juanita is only serviceable as a damsel in distress. More importantly, the events of the story mostly seem to sort of just happen at Dood, and his reactions to them aren’t interesting enough to distract from how arbitrary it all feels. Simpson offers a few hints at something a bit more interesting and character-driven, like Dood’s romance with Juanita tempering his violent tendencies, and his dog Sam’s death resulting from his single-minded pursuit of the bandit. The album’s brevity works against it, though, and those feints towards richer thematic territory fall by the wayside for what turns out to be a fairly rote, unadorned capture-and-revenge fable.
Between the instrumentation and the narrative sit the songs themselves. There are undeniably some real highlights, particularly in the back half of the album. The sentimental mariachi of “Juanita”, aided by a lovely Willie Nelson solo, makes for a beautiful and heartfelt love song, and does the crucial work of fleshing out the relationship at the heart of the album. The plucky hoedown “Go In Peace” packs a bounty of melody and impressive turns from both fiddler Stuart Duncan and harmonicist Jelly Roll Johnson, and “Played Out” offers a mournful glimpse of real emotional detail with a downtrodden western ballad. Other tracks falter somewhat: “Shamrock” lopes on for a minute or two too long, wearing a repetitious melody thin in the process, and both parts of “Ol’ Dood” entangle themselves in fawning descriptions of Dood, standing in stark contrast to the self-aware affability Simpson brought to earlier material. While he can effortlessly cast himself as a loveable, rough-around-the edges rascal, Simpson can’t quite seem to find the crunchier, flawed humanity in Dood, and despite a fairly strong chorus and solid instrumental contributions all-around, the songs centering on him largely turn out fairly one-dimensional.
It’s tempting to cast
Dood & Juanita as an outright disappointment, an insubstantial story backed up with music that’s competent and diverse, but rarely mind-blowing. I can’t deny that I miss the depth and expanse of
Metamodern Sounds and
A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, but I also can't deny that the germ of what makes those albums tick is still mostly present here— lit from a less flattering angle and dressed in plainer clothes, but present nonetheless. Underdog individualists fighting to secure a place for themselves in the world, free-spirited men finding joy in domesticity— through and through, it’s a Sturgill Simpson album as they’ve come to be defined. Simpson kicked off his career complaining about a label suit asking him to “sing a little more ‘bout outlaws and the way things used to be”. Perhaps, after nearly a decade of detours, there’s something to be said for him coming full circle and trying to fit those very things into his own idiosyncratic mold, even if the results are hit-or-miss.
