March 7, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic listens to the latest album from country music’s most devout rule-breaker and traces its sound back to a deeply misunderstood genre.

Image of Johnny Blue Skies & the Dark Clouds

Edwin Keeble

Hello slippery people,

Earlier this week, Sturgill Simpson dropped his second album under the nom-du-fuzz pedal Johnny Blues Skies, Mutiny After Midnight, on YouTube, about two weeks before its scheduled sell date. My phone instantly lit up with fans of the unpredictable country insurgent eager to discuss what he was up to this time. Simpson had used the word “fusion” to hint at the shape this 45-minute excursion might take, pointing to one band in particular — Stuff, an obscure but mighty supergroup of mid-1970s New York session players whose resumés included hits by everyone from John Lennon and James Brown to Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones. Also dropping Marvin Gaye’s name in promising an album about dancing and making love as the world is ending, Simpson set the bar extremely high for an album he and his touring band had written “on the spot” in Nashville’s Easy Eye recording studio, and my texting pals quickly questioned whether he’d met his goal. “Three songs in, it is not a fusion album,” one wrote. “Most definitely not,” another replied.

I begged to differ. I’d been doing a little snooping around on YouTube, looking for the live clips of Stuff that Simpson had said inspired him to pivot in this direction. What I’d found (mostly from a 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival gig) was a very different band than the ones usually named as fusion titans, like Weather Report or Return to Forever. While those bands built upon jazz’s electrification to explore its connections to rock and global music, the all-Black Stuff leaned into funk and soul, laying down the grooves that Johnny Blue Skies and the Dark Clouds seek to resurrect throughout Mutiny. Simpson turns in those directions while maintaining some country flavor — one commenter’s quickly circulated kudo called Mutiny “Horny Political Country Funk.”

As with their West Coast equivalent, The Section, and Southern aces the Atlanta Rhythm Section, Stuff’s cadre of studio wizards brought what they’d learned jumping across genres in their day jobs into the music they made together. This is where fusion came from. In the 1970s especially, fusion was a big space encircled by open doors, where the era’s boundary-breaking mood met a cohort of skilled players eager to show off and grow at the same time. Listening to Mutiny After Midnight on repeat, though, I could hear what Simpson meant to claim. It was a certain approach to dexterity and inventiveness. I would call it greasy.

If you search that word, greasy, on musicians’ message boards, you’ll find a lot of debate over what it means, exactly. “It’s a feel,” many posters declare, a distinctly unhelpful comment, since feel in music is by definition something that can’t be described fully. Some say greasy music is slow; others say it’s got to move, to put on those boogie shoes. Greasy music, most agree, is earthy, soulful and sexy; it also might be funny, it could get loud and it’s definitely not reverential. Stuff’s songs are greasiest when they put band founder and bassist Gordon Edwards front and center, slapping out a riff that’s going to make you pucker your lips.

The songs on Mutiny After Midnight are greasiest when Simpson and his longtime guitar foil Laur Joamets lock into interplay that evokes the elastic style of Eric Gale, one of the two dazzling guitarists in Stuff (along with Cornell Dupree) — an approach that effortlessly melds funk, soul and blues elements. Across time and space, the reason to get greasy remains the same: to dazzle in a relaxed manner, motivating awe in the listener without compromising the essential mandate to get people’s bodies moving.

Fusion is such a misunderstood and ill-defined category within music history that I’m always looking for ways to go beyond it. Mutiny After Midnight made me realize that greasy music is a subcategory that deserves more attention. Its lineage would surface somewhat differently. Instead of mostly jazz players responding to rock’s siren call to go flashy and break new boundaries, greasy music is full of blues, soul and country mavericks who pushed against the confines of their home schools by fattening up their sound and bending the rules of their genres. It’s fundamentally shaped by funk, the music of the loose booty and the open mind (to paraphrase both George Clinton and Greg Tate). It also always returns to New Orleans, the fulcrum of American music in general, where cross-pollination and syncretic combinations have always mattered more than setting up rigid categories. Greasy music is made by Black, white and brown players; it often originates in interracial collaboration. Steve Gadd, for example, is a drummer whose style is greasy enough to have earned him a place in Stuff. The Allman Brothers, a group that deftly balanced greasiness and transcendence in its jams, was a rare Southern rock band with a Black member, drummer Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johanson.

For Black musicians across genres, getting greasy has long meant blending prowess and playfulness, being outrageous with such expertise and authority that no one can challenge their expressiveness. For white players, especially in the South, what often gets greased is that barrier between the races. Given that every white artist appropriates Black styles to some extent, committing to greasiness involves maintaining respect for those original forms of blues and gospel and the rhythms that are at their heart and can’t be contained within any era — and for the people who invented and remain central to those genres. Simpson acknowledges this on Mutiny’s final track, “Ain’t That a Bitch,” imagining a spaceship fleeing earth and declaring, “If there ain’t no Black people on that ship I ain’t going.” (That said, the Dark Clouds is an all white band; I wonder what would happen if Simpson booked a session with Shaboozey, whose vocal style is supremely greasy, especially in the music he made before mainstream country success.)

What does it mean to say music’s greasy, anyway? It definitely has to do with feel: A greasy player is expert enough to be relaxed even when stunting. Simpson’s guitar foil Joamets pulls out killer solos throughout Mutiny — on slide, pedal and plain old electric guitar — and he eases them in with such calm authority that they never occlude the band’s funky interplay. Greasy music gives the groove room to breathe in this way. They somehow figure out how to lay into a part while also laying back a little, letting the band as a whole define the sound instead of relying on the flash of one star. Jump into Mutiny halfway through, when the sequencing puts listeners firmly on the country disco dance floor, and enjoy how Simpson and Joamets’s riffing and vamping guitars strut around and through the rhythm section’s adroit maneuvering. On a song like “Venus,” there’s no need for solos; so much is happening within the swamp of elements. Simpson’s vocals, which can sometimes veer into shouting when he’s not careful, find their place in this blend and end up existentially cool. He gets away with outrageous lyrics about foursomes and fluid sexuality — and confident jabs at a world leader he calls “a bad cartoon in an ill-fitting suit grabbing women by the poon” — by finding that sweet spot where fury finds release in humor, where, as he sings, “everyone is welcome to drown.”

Some earnestness, always part of Simpson’s charm, does break through on Mutiny, especially on the songs directed at the longtime love one has to assume is his wife, whom he may be reassuring amidst all the talk of adventurous 1970s-style free love. “Don’t Let Go” is a throwback to the vulnerable accounts of long-term love on 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide To Earth, while “Viridescent” takes that tenderness and makes it psychedelic. Those songs fit into the album while acknowledging Simpson’s country roots because of their viscous expansiveness. Greasiness also redefines country, as not a product of Nashville’s commercial impulses but as actual country — a landscape dotted with juke joints and chicken shacks, where nothing’s too fancy and the pressures of the music industry fade away in the humidity.

I like grease as a metaphor for fusion music because of the way it touches on other loving practices — both cooking and sex. Grease is a conduit for flavors to meld, for something new to emerge from the process of stirring and pushing. It’s a lubricant, too, a function Simpson embraces by filling Mutiny After Midnight with those amusingly smutty lyrics that he says he composed in situ. One aspect of greasiness, and maybe a reason that it’s not so prevalent in music today, is that it exists at the edge of the unsavory: Its looseness can feel decadent, erotically risky, unpoliced. The distance that often dominates pop music in the 2020s, the sense that the pose comes before any emotion or bodily sensation, can’t be maintained when the grease is poured on.

In honor of the greasiness revival that Mutiny After Midnight signals, I made a playlist (Spotify here; Apple Music here) that offers a condensed history of the quality over the past half-century or so. It starts with James Brown, because what doesn’t — but also because it was for “Get Together” that Brown legendarily instructed his guitarist Alphonso “Country” Kellum to play the “extra stroke” that defined what became known as “chicken grease guitar.” We go to New Orleans for The Meters and producer Eddie Bo’s Vibrettes and into the edgier corners of country with Jerry Reed and Bobbie Gentry. Favorites by Rufus and The Staple Singers show how greasy a hit can be, while Southern obscurities by Donnie Fritts and Mother’s Finest show how greasiness spread throughout the South. The Prince b-side “Horny Pony” shows how that legend got greasy; D’Angelo got into the “Chicken Grease,” too. Recent purveyors include the North Mississippi All-Stars, Charley Crockett, Thundercat and The Cadillac Three. Greasy music will slide you in many directions. Spend some time and relax into it.

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Here are some things, greasy or not, that I enjoyed this week

Speaking of NOLA gods, this account from food writing legend Robert Sietsema of eating very spicy food with Dr. John is unforgettable.
I’m not as optimistic as writer CT Jones is about fan edits solving the literacy crisis, but their insights add a layer to my own about how reading, watching films and listening to music are complementary activities and the internet is giving us a way to witness that.
I fell in love with two albums from Continental women artists this week: You Better Get Used To It, the sharp-witted and tender-hearted song cycle about coming out by Zurich-based Pina Palau, and la femme aux yeux de sel (Le long voyage) by Parisian polymath chanteuse Gabi Hartmann.
I’m easing into the weekend with this new one from longtime fave Shakey Graves. Time does fly.

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