Sturgill Simpson Walks Onstage Wearing New Balances

Sturgill Simpson Walks Onstage Wearing New Balances

There are two different types of country performers: Those who play up to the aesthetic trappings of the music’s cowboy-hat-and-rhinestone-suit history and those who don’t bother making an effort. But even among those who don’t work those connections, it’s pretty common practice to wear cowboy boots onstage. Not Sturgill Simpson. At least a couple of the guys in his backing band wore boots, but Simpson ambled onstage in the same pair of New Balances you’d wear to the gym. Simpson had no use for theater. He treated it like just another gig, bellowing his Waylon Jennings-esque old-school outlaw country and never saying much to the crowd. (And it was another gig. Simpson is, I believe, the only performer on the Coachella bill who’s sticking around for Stagecoach, the country music festival that takes over the same Polo Grounds the week after the second Coachella weekend. He’s going to be there for a few weeks, and he’s just settling in.) So he just showed up and did his job with a casual sense of asskickery. He made it look easy.