Top 76 Quotes & Sayings by Sturgill Simpson
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Sturgill Simpson.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
You make a little noise, and you can sell out your local hometown club. But then you drive an hour down the road to the next town, and there might be eight people there.
I tried to make a honky-tonk country record - rough-hewn, cut fast, and all analog - like I wasn't hearing anymore.
I'm grateful to all the non-risk-takers.
Anything that I'm naturally curious about, I get really into. Maybe it's O.C.D. I get really consumed by something until I absorb it, then I'm done with it.
I've been reading about the idea of cyclical lives - it matches up to the idea of string theory and a multiverse. So I wanted to write a record about that instead of another song about broken hearts and drinking.
I knew I wanted to make a concept record in song-cycle form, like my favorite Marvin Gaye records where everything just continuously flows.
I just don't see myself as a songwriter or a country singer or any of those things anymore. It's more trying to express ideas and emotional textures.
I had a great job with the railroad, a good salary.
I wanted to make an album that takes a journey through all my favorite periods in music and then culminates in something that will most likely end my career.
There are no expectations other than those I place on myself to be a great father and husband.
Kentucky isn't particularly religious.
I just can't sit down and write three verses and a chorus and a bridge anymore. It just don't find it inspiring.
I'd love to make short film videos pushing the conventional standards of what a country music video can be.
London's been really good to me - England as a whole - but the Scots and the Irish especially are very appreciative because that's kind of where it all came from.
I could go back to the railroad. I liked that job.
Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard and Keith Whitley - guys like that were huge influences.
I lived in Japan when I was younger for about two years. I spent my time equally between religiously studying Aikido in Shinjuku by day and hard partying in Shibuya and Roppongi by night.
Atlantic has been great to me. They didn't flinch when I told them I was self-producing, and nobody was popping their head in the studio.
I needed a writing space to get out of my house with the little guy. Because any time I try to write or sit down and do things, he wants to be there with me and play the guitar.
I didn't graduate from college, so I might as well be on Atlantic Records, right?
I walked in, looked around, and the navy recruiter was a really hot brunette, so I signed up with her.
Fewer and fewer bars are doing live music. Instead it's more DJs and dance parties.
All I'm really interested in musically is trying to make concept albums. Serving a larger sum than the parts.
Elvis was a way bigger influence than Waylon Jennings, but you don't wanna tell people, 'I never really listened to Waylon.'
The art is what can't be put on a timeline. You can't say, 'Well, I'm going to make a record in May because that's when the producer has a window.' So just recording and getting things out is paramount for me.
I worked for Union Pacific. I started out as a conductor at an intermodal switching facility outside of Salt Lake City. We'd pull in trains from all over the country, break them apart, consolidate the freight, and build other trains. It was great until I screwed up and took a management position. Then it became no fun very quickly.
I want people to focus on listening, not the image. And I want to play to everyone: rednecks, dubstep kids, punk rockers, and people who like as-real-as-it-gets country music.
Let's just cut a live record with three microphones in four days and talk about lizards and aliens. If I had taken that idea to even an independent label, I don't see a label out there that would've said, 'Oh yeah, that sounds great. We know how to market this.'
I just have to do what it is going to make me happy, first and foremost - what is honest and what is sincere. Anybody that listens will hopefully connect with that.
That might be completely self-indulgent, to write your first major-label debut as a dedication to your family. But, you know, that's where my heart was.
It's hard enough to sit at a table and talk to most people as it is. But we can go to some town, and there's 300 people we've never met before, and by the third song, we're connecting with everyone in that room.
There's a lot going on in country music, with indie-label hipsters and underground bloggers arguing their interpretations of what country is, and pop-country stars defending themselves. That deserves to be poked fun at.
Some people will say, and have said, that I'm trying to run from country, but I'm never going to make anything other than a country record.
Back home, playing music is never anything you imagine you can do for a living. It's what you do after work.
My wife thinks I'm crazy.
I fail to see how anything can still be weird in 2016.
I pretty much just hang out with the kid. I want, like three more, because that's all I ever want to do.
I love tape. It's another member of the band, the way it settles and blankets everything.
There have been many socially conscious concept albums. I wanted to make a 'social consciousness' concept album disguised as a country record.
I want all that dirt and grime and life-sauce. A lot of my favorite old soul records have it, but you don't hear it on country records anymore.
I'm very grateful, but at the same time, I'm glad all this happened when I'm 36 instead of 26 because I - I'm just such a homebody, and I just want to write songs and make the best record that I can.
I just really want to make - to be cliche about it, I want to make pretty music. Like Roy Orbison or Elvis, man. Those guys made beautiful, tender music.
I find that I have to just kind of avoid the Internet as much as possible. And even more so, when I go and look at it, I remember why I should be avoiding it.
Saviours get crucified.
Even with most finite planning, you never know what the final result will reveal itself to be until it's staring back at you.
I used to play a lot of electric guitar. I don't really consider myself a guitar player anymore. Then I got really into how the pickups work. And winding and de-winding Telecaster pickups. And then building Telecasters. And I became more fascinated with making them than I was with actually playing them. So it's a slippery slope.
Country music especially can get very formulaic - you know, you have to have your verses and a bridge and a chorus, and a lot of the songs are written as just plain and simple poetry on the road.
I thought it was hilarious when 'Brace for Impact' was released, and people said I had abandoned country, even though the song is dripping with pedal steel. If anything, that tells me I'm making progress.
I'm interested in exploring various forms of newer media that might allow those who otherwise don't listen to country to find and connect with my music.
I knew I loved playing bluegrass, so I'd end up down there on Sunday nights at the bluegrass jam.
Part of me still feels like I've never had the opportunity to properly express all my earliest influences, so for now, I find isolation to be my biggest influence.
I someday hope to find the time and coin to invest more of my creative energy towards the visual media side of releasing music.
I grew up listening to everything. I was in rock n' roll bands and punk bands, and I loved bluegrass and country music, too. Then, when I moved to Nashville, I put out a very traditional country record because that's just what you do. I had a bunch of very traditional country songs. Next thing you know, you're a country singer.
Both my grandfathers and my mother's brother were musicians.
Somebody told me once it takes an Americana song five minutes to say what a country song says in three - so I try to write country songs. But really, all good music is just soul music.
It's a long road, so we are just trying to stay focused and grounded and keep moving forward. I'll take it, though.
I'm just gonna write a record for my kid, and if people hate it, it doesn't matter.
My paternal grandfather, when he was in the army in World War II - he was over in the South Pacific, and he thought he was gonna die. And he wrote a letter to my grandmother and their newborn son, thinking he wasn't gonna come home.
You spend all this time reading or thinking or praying or searching or exploring.Maybe there's an Omega Point of love.
I never really had any grand aspirations of mainstream country success because I know what that entails, and I'd probably be too much trouble for people to work with. If I can just reach the point where I can get 200 or 300 people in small clubs and I'm carving out enough money to pay my bills, then I'm the happiest guy I know.
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