Remember this one?
A couple years ago, Sturgill Simpson announced that his next album would be a “sleazy, steamy, rock and roll record.” An announcement that perhaps took many fans by surprise:
“We went in without any preconceived notions and came out with a really sleazy, steamy rock n roll record. It’s definitely my most psychedelic.
And also my heaviest. I had this idea that it’d be really cool to animate some of these songs, and we ended up with a futuristic, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, samurai film.”
And then in September of 2019, Sound & Fury was born.
A complete curveball for fans who were expecting one of the best artists the country music world has ever seen to make an album that was, well… country.
But in retrospect, it wasn’t the first steamy rocker we heard from Stu.
Remember the theme song from the 2016 HBO series Vinyl?
Created by Mick Jagger, Martin Scorsese, Rich Cohen and Terence Winter, Vinyl told the story of the changing landscape of the music industry in the late ’70s.
Sturgill Simpson was tasked with recording the theme song, a fuzzy, distorted, face-melting rock and roll tune titled “Sugar Daddy.”
And it still SLAPS.
While the style wasn’t quite the same as what we saw on Sound & Fury, it did give us one of our first clues that Stu could rock out with the best of them.
Sturgill would go on to release the Grammy-winning A Sailor’s Guide To Earth just a few months after this, and of course, has a new concept album coming out in a few weeks, but in the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with throwing it back to a little “Sugar Daddy.”
Enjoy.