Passage du Désir

Simpson takes risks that provide rich payoff across Passage Du Desir — the album opens with transportive accordion and strings that could be just as effective providing the ambience during a stroll along the Seine as they are at kicking off a country record.

There's no heaviness here, no sense of torment. Even when he's singing about a "Swamp of Sadness" and wondering "If the Sun Never Rises Again," it's clear that Simpson has made his way through the darkness, settling into a place where he's utterly comfortable in his skin and scars.

Down-home majesty. [Sep 2024, p.29]

It’s been only three years since Dood & Juanita, but Passage still feels like a comeback. .... On Passage du Desire, he sounds more like himself than he has in ages.

Passage du Desir is a return to the style of 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, mixing cowboy honky-tonk with bluesy guitar and sweeping strings. Its songs are characteristically poetic.

Simpson’s voice is more resonant than ever, his melodic sensibilities on full display. Over eight songs and 41 minutes, he forges sublime and heartfelt work, evoking the epic poles of experience: loneliness and belonging, forlornness and gratitude, faith and doubt.

While Johnny Blue Skies may not boast the adventurous songwriting of Sturgill Simpson’s most daring epics, there’s something about Passage that is honest and comforting. It feels like we’re getting an actual glimpse into his life for the first time in nearly a decade, and while it’s not all rosy (see the nine minute closer about falling out of love with your soul mate), it’s at least all real.

Rather than completely reinventing himself via the new moniker, Sturgill Simpson delivers more of his same idiosyncratic stylings. Passage Du Desir uses a classic Nashville base that allows ‘Johnny Blue Skies’ to springboard to more pop-oriented sounds and slightly tripped-out structures with varying degrees of success.

Escape and new beginnings are constant themes in these eight mostly superb songs, but his old preoccupations keep yanking him back onto familiar turf. [Sep 2024, p.85]

The extended solo that closes the song drips with the heartache that courses through the rest of the songs. In the end, Passage du Desir serenity belies an intense human longing.