Sturgill Simpson conducted a rare and exclusive 3-minute interview on Beats 1 Radio with Zane Lowe, and announced his upcoming 3rd studio solo album A Sailors Guide to Earth. Sturgill also played a new song as part of the interview called Brace For Impact, and unveiled the official artwork for the album. However he did not announce a release date for the album as of yet, but it is expected to hit the streets in or around June according to previous reports.
Well I approached the last record when it was finished, I kind of had this feeling that it might possibly destroy my career, and it did just the opposite, Sturgill says in the interview. So I figured if anything I had to sort of take the same fearlessness into the studio on this one as well. But really, theres nothing intentional, its just a representation of where my heart and where my head were at the time when we went into the studio.
As for what fans can expect from the new record, Sturgill says, Like Ive always said, I wanted to express a lot of other influences that are outside of country music, that I think theres a lot of room to explore, in certain terms of sonic templates in the genre. If there was any intentional approach, I wanted to reverse engineer the songcraft. 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. Then I decided I was going to frame those poems to music while in the studio.
As for if the album will be a country record or not, Sturgill says,
If you take a chance, and try to progess a little bit, which for me is what its all about you know. I had already made Metamodern [Sounds in Country Music] so I didnt want to make another psychedelic country record. But Ive said it before: As soon as I open my mouth, its always going to be a country record
A lot of this record came from me figuring out my place in that world while it was all happening because it was such a sudden and intense transition around the same time that my son was born. I just wanted to do something really beautiful for him.
