Review: Sturgill Simpson at Billy Bob’s Texas

There were moments Friday night — the briefest flickers — when it seemed the burden of potential stardom wasn’t necessarily one Sturgill Simpson had much interest in shouldering.

At one point, he delivered the line, from Living the Dream, like a brush-back pitch: “Time and time again Lord I keep going through the motions/A means to an end but the ends don't seem to meet.”

The song, a weary riff on a rag-tag musician’s life, is probably beginning to feel like art imitating life.

In the five months since Simpson played two, thoroughly sold-out shows at Dallas’ Club Dada, the spotlight on the Kentucky singer-songwriter has only grown bigger and brighter.

Newly signed to Atlantic Records in January, but continuing to maintain a relentless touring and promotional schedule (he taped an episode of Austin City Limits earlier this week, heads to Lubbock Saturday and back to Austin Sunday), Simpson occasionally seemed spent during his Billy Bob’s Texas debut.

It was a little head-spinning from an audience perspective as well, going from a cram-packed, 400-capacity club to a room capable of comfortably holding over 6,000 people — a vivid, tactile example of just how much his career has changed in such a short span of time.

Simpson and his four bandmates were as solid Friday as they were in November, an impressive display of road-tested consistency, even if guitar wizard Laur Joamets, a skilled technician capable of amphetamine-laced riffs, wasn’t prone to quite as many flights of fancy this time around.

Pulling from his breakthrough album, last year’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, Simpson earned some of the night’s bigger cheers for that record’s familiar singles: Life of Sin, Turtles All the Way Down and his spare cover of When in Rome’s The Promise.

As before, Simpson’s penchant for rooting around in Nashville’s past was rewarding: Lefty Frizzell’s I Never Go Around Mirrors fit snugly alongside Simpson’s own It Ain’t All Flowers.

Unfortunately, a lot of the subtleties of Simpson’s style were swallowed up by the Billy Bob’s showroom, as well as the well-lubricated, extremely chatty crowd — the near-capacity audience yelped appreciatively for the up-tempo numbers, but the more contemplative selections dissipated in the large space.

That said, there was a particular kick hearing Simpson sing a tune like Long White Line in the World’s Largest Honky Tonk, as ideal a match of material and venue as could be hoped for.

Back to the idea of reluctant celebrity — Simpson brought things full circle, ending his brisk, 90-minute set (as he did in November) with Steve Fromholz’s I’d Have to Be Crazy, its lyrics serving as wry counterpoint to his earlier existential anguish: “I'd have to be crazy/To stop all my singing/And never play music again.”

Whatever attention Sturgill Simpson is enjoying seems merely a byproduct of something innate, a form of expression he’d be indulging whether he had an audience of 12 or 20,000.

Perhaps what’s perceived as burn-out is merely Simpson forging himself in the crucible of country music, harnessing the heat of that spotlight to fashion himself into a bona fide superstar on his own terms.

This story was originally published April 4, 2015 at 2:04 AM with the headline "Review: Sturgill Simpson at Billy Bob’s Texas."