Review | Neo-Outlaw Hoedown, Bowl-side

In the improvisation-friendly free zone of a Johnny Blue Skies concert, time seems to get rubbery, in the sweetest way. As we heard in all of its strange and moving splendor last week at the Santa Barbara Bowl, in concert, one song morphs into the next and the basic verse/chorus/bridge bones of a song gives way to jamming and dynamic tapering with his ace band, presently called Johnny Blue Skies and the Dark Clouds.

We lose track of time and place, before being yanked back into another of his well-crafted songs. Despite that freedom principle in his music, his inner clock is ticking and taking control. At the Bowl concert on Wednesday, his band started promptly at 6:30. “This band starts on time,” he informed the crowd, up front. “If you’re on time, you’re already late,” he added, quoting the phrase traced back to the military and Vince Lombardi. Apparently, it is also a workplace truism in the life of Nashville session musicians.

“Lombardi time” fed into what amounted to a three-hour show, ending promptly at 9:30. No encore. Bam, another savory reminder of the chameleonic wonder of Johnny Blue Skies, aka Sturgill Simpson, on a hot and steamy show on an unseasonably hot night. 

And just to be clear: Johnny Blue Skies — Kentucky-born, long Nashville-based and now a partial Parisian — is the new identity, reportedly not just a fleeting alias, for legendary new outlaw country hero Sturgill Simpson. In concert, he tiptoed into a few actual country songs from his book — and nailed them — from his 2014 masterpiece Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, in the true type twangy form of “Long White Line,” “A Little Light,” and “It Ain’t All Flowers.” Some of us longed for more of that facet of his musical being, but his new phase carries its own unique and multi-personality charisma. 

At this point in his complicated and evolving artistic saga, Skies/Simpson has created a unique mutant persona — as an inter-cosmopolitan cowboy with a restlessly creative brain and nimble band at hand.

In some ways, the show was reminiscent of another hot night in the current Bowl season, with Tedeschi Trucks Band, earlier this summer. Both followed personal paths on the outskirts of Southern Rock, with plenty of diversions under that umbrella. And in both concerts, what partly justified the extended jam treatments was the presence of truly stellar guitarists in the primary spotlight — slide guitar virtuoso Derek Trucks in one and this band’s stunning and tasteful Telecaster master phenom Laur Joamets.

Joamets hails from Estonia but has become a sensation in Nashville. His versatility and free-flowing creativity in the wide-open spaces of the Skies project accounts for a strong part of the current band’s power.

Skies’s virtual logo, beamed in epic scale on the Bowl stage backdrop (in an otherwise no-nonsense concert staging), finds a flanking pair of skeletons. One is clearly reddened, pitchfork-bearing and Satanic, the other a smiley white guy — a lesser demon? The paradoxical twain thereof possibly runs through his songs and the general outlook on life for this gruff but loveable character.

A single break between songs appeared at the two-hour mark of the show, after the heat and heft of an extended version of “Don’t Let Go.” “After one like that,” Skies murmured, tongue partly in check, “there’s only one thing to do — we’re gonna’ do one for the ladies.” They fell into the almost-ballad “All Said and Done,” from the 2019 album Sound and Fury.

Surprisingly, the setlist leaned away from the first official Johnny Blue Skies album, Passage du Jour — the tour which brought him to the Bowl two years ago. This Bowl show kicked off with “Make America Fuk Again,” the lead track from the new record Mutiny After Midnight, and the song suite was off and running and jamming. “Don’t know why everyone’s afraid of me,” the mystery man sings in the song, “I’m a sensitive boy when push comes to shove.” Maybe.

Also from the new album, Skies dipped into the chugging old school rock ‘n’ roll of “Excited Delirium” and the varied shades of funkiness and R&B with “Stay on That” and “Viridescent,” ending the evening with his cover of William Bell’s old soul hit “You Don’t Miss Your Water.” But the actual evening’s end arrived in the form of one of those jam sections of almost orgasmic intensity, rising to a feverish pitch of energy and sustaining it, and then accelerating and easing off, for dramatic effect.

For this once towering King of New Country, there is life beyond twang, much as we might long for more of its presence. By whatever genre measure or definition, Skies packed a layered punch and summoned up an enigma, generally supplying Santa Barbara one of her finest concerts of the 2026 crop.