A Sailor's Guide to Earth

The Grammy for Best Country Album went to Sturgill Simpson for A Sailor's Guide to Earth, which I found unremarkable. It's not a terrible record, but after listening to it in the car for a week (since it's short I probably heard it 20 times) only a few songs stuck with me. Ordinarily, I might chalk this up to my general disdain for country music, but this album really isn't all that country.

For one thing, the album's theme, as indicated by its title, is the sea. Not too many guys with cowboy hats and pickup trucks have boats. There's some steel guitar in some of the songs and Simpson's voice has an Appalachian twang but this isn't the kind of music that used to played on Hee-Haw.

That being said, I'd be all in for an intelligent album about sailors and the sea, but this one didn't speak to me. As I mentioned, I only liked two songs, and one is cover of Nirvana's "In Bloom," which is very well done.

The other is the opening track, which gave me hope when I first started listening to it. It's called "Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)" and is about the birth of a man's first child:

"Hello, my son
Welcome to Earth
You may not be my last
But you'll always be my first.
Wish I'd done this ten years ago
But how could I know that the answer would be so easy?"

This might make father's cry as much as "Cat's in the Cradle."

One of these days I'm determined to like country music that doesn't involve Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson, but my search continues.