After several years out of the spotlight, Sturgill Simpson is finally starting to poke his head out of his shell. The alt-country ass-kicker recently announced headlining sets at Outside Lands and Austin City Limits, his first solo performances in three years. While Simpson has remained adamant about only releasing five albums as a solo artist, Sturgill is revisiting his landmark 2014 LP Metamodern Sounds in Country Music for its tenth anniversary and this week delivered a new annotated video for his breakout single “Turtles All the Way Down”. Never one to mince words, Simpson made some intriguing revelations in his annotations.
First off, Simpson revealed that he wrote “Turtles” in a motel shower, though good art is not without suffering. Leaping from the shower to go write it down, Simpson said he slipped and hit his head on the toilet, and that’s when inspiration came.
“Everything went dark and the elf angels came to me and said I had to deliver this message for them,” the famously smart-ass Simpson wrote. “I sang the first verse to the guys at the van, and they all looked at me like I just asked them to join a cult.”
The song’s references to marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, and DMT made it an easy angle for music writers and perhaps country music outsiders to latch onto. While it may have gotten some new ears to country music, Simpson was less than pleased with what he called “lazy music journalists” who only focused on the drug angle of his exploration of human consciousness.
“To appease lazy music journalists, I’ve always said this song was about drugs,” Simpson wrote. “It actually came from recreational reading. DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman and the Omega Point theory by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.”
While the song itself may have not been explicitly inspired by drugs, substances certainly played a part in the creation of the music video. Simpson explained, “[Shooting a video is] extremely awkward and unnatural for me. We were all high as giraffe balls while filming this. If I were to reshoot this video today I would wear a mask and change my name.”
Sturgill Simpson – The Making of ‘Turtles All The Way Down’ (Vevo Footnotes)
The annotated “Turtles All the Way Down” marks the latest milestone of Simpson’s slowly building inertia. After hemorrhaging his vocal cords in summer 2021, Simpson canceled his remaining tour dates and cautioned fans “its gonna be a long hot minute before I can return to stage.” This came shortly after the release of Sturgill’s fifth and allegedly final solo album The Ballad of Dood & Juanita. With no tour and no new music, fans didn’t hear much from Simpson for a couple years save for some studio collaborations with Angel Olsen and Diplo. Simpson gave his first public performance in nearly two years at Farm Aid in 2023, making a surprise appearance to play with Bob Weir & Wolf Bros and Margo Price. Simpson, Weir, and Price would all share the stage again several months later in Mexico for the Dead Ahead destination event, where Simpson also sat in with acoustic Goose offshoot Orebolo. He is set to return to the stage for his first solo performance since September 18th, 2021 at Outside Lands in San Francisco from August 9th–11th (exact performance date not yet confirmed).