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An Evening with Sturgill Simpson at Forest Hills Stadium
In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2021, country music artist Sturgill Simpson stated that he was done making albums under his own name, following the release of his 2021 album The Ballad of Dood and Juanita.
“I always said there would be five, and I wondered if I’d go back on that. But it really has cemented every step of the way how much I don’t want to carry all that weight. Not having to stand up there behind my name would allow me to be even more vulnerable, in a way,” he said in the interview.
This year, he made good on the promise when he announced the release of Passage Du Desir – named after a storefront on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in Paris – under his new moniker, Johnny Blue Skies. Shortly after the release of this rebrand, he also announced a tour supporting the album with a band full of members from his original group: the “Why Not?” tour. The album comprised eight songs, including some of my personal favorites such as “Mint Tea” and “Scooter Blues.”
On Saturday, October 19, he brought the tour to Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, NY. The opener was Durand Jones, but since we are perpetually a little late – not to mention that we hit a ton of traffic on the way down – we missed him.
Ironically enough, I think we had the best weather for an outdoor concert that we’ve had literally all season. When we first arrived at Forest Hills Stadium, the first thing that struck me was how nice it was. I had never been there before, so this was a new experience for me. My friend had previously seen Zach Bryan there a few years ago and raved that it was a pretty nice, small stadium to see a show in.
Forest Hills Stadium
Being hungry, as always, we headed for the food first. They had a variety of cuisines to choose from, including pizza, Korean chicken, Greek-American, and coffee. I had a hankering for french fries, so we got in line for the Stacked Sandwich Shop, which thankfully, also had the shortest line. We ordered things to share, including fries, mozzarella sticks, a Philly Cheesesteak, and a hot pastrami sandwich, then quickly made our way into the stadium.
Given that Forest Hills Stadium is located very close to many residential neighborhoods in Queens, the stadium has a strict curfew of 10pm for concerts and events. That worked for me, especially considering that we had a two hour drive home ahead of us.
When walking up the stairs into the stadium, I found myself glancing at the signs on the stairwell wall stating that we were currently in the “bass trap,” which traps the sound to muffle it and prevent it from disturbing the neighborhoods around the stadium. I think that Forest Hills truly has one of the best bass traps I’ve ever walked through, as the music in the stairwell was so muffled it almost felt like my ears were popping. It was kind of a crazy experience.
When we made it out of the stairwell, we discovered that Sturgill had just taken the stage and was performing his first song, so thankfully, we didn’t miss much of the show. What ensued directly after was us trying to find our bleacher row and then the uncomfortably shimmy past people in order to get to our seats to sit down. It’s unavoidable and awkward every time.
Once we made it to our seats – a term which I am using loosely here, considering that we had bleacher seats, which means that our “seats” were really just a marked number along a bleacher bench – we took a moment to look around and realize that while we were packed so closely onto the benches that we felt like sardines in a can, we did indeed have a pretty good view!
I’m not sure if it was the acoustics, or the fact that Sturgill has an incredibly deep voice and can be a bit of a mumbler, or perhaps more likely both, but we were struggling to understand what the hell he was saying the entire time. While this wasn’t exactly a problem during the songs that we knew, it proved to be difficult during the songs that we didn’t know.
The music, however, sounded great! Sturgill’s band – made up of guitarist Laur Joamets, bassist Kevin Black, drummer Miles Miller, and Robbie Crowell on keyboards – was completely locked in and in-tune with each other.
On the setlist
Sturgill and his band play a pretty long show – typically clocking in at just under three hours. One of the things that I really appreciated as well is that they play a lot of covers throughout the show, in addition to all of the Sturgill Simpson and Johnny Blue Skies songs that they perform.
Some of the covers that they performed on Saturday included “Purple Rain” by Prince, “The Promise” by When in Rome, “L.A. Woman” by The Doors, and “Midnight Rider” by The Allman Brothers Band.
The band performed a good mix of songs from all of Sturgill’s albums. They performed a few songs from High Top Mountain, released in 2013, including “Railroad of Sin” and “Water in a Well,” as well as “Turtles All the Way Down” and “Just Let Go,” from his 2014 album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.
They also performed six of the eight tracks from Johnny Blue Skies’ latest release, Passage Du Desir, including “Right Kind of Dream,” “Mint Tea,” “One For the Road,” “If the Sun Never Rises Again,” “Scooter Blues,” and “Jupiter’s Faerie.”
We decided to make our leave just after they performed “Midnight Rider,” since we had been there for a little over two hours and the bleacher benches were starting to kill our backs. It proved to be a pretty good time to leave, as they only had a handful of songs left anyway.
Overall, I would say it was a pretty good show. Given that the drive to get to Forest Hills Stadium is kind of a nightmare, I’m not sure I would go there again unless someone I really loved was performing. It’s a great stadium, and if it were a little closer, I would definitely frequent it more often.
Listen to the setlist from the show below: