Review and setlist: Sturgill Simpson, getting his groove back in the first of two nights at the Met Philly

Sturgill Simpson was punctual on Tuesday, hitting the stage at the Met Philly at 8 p.m. sharp for his first of two shows on his “Why Not? Tour” at the North Broad Street opera house.

But the country-rock iconoclast was also conscientious, taking care to make sure that any stragglers didn’t miss any songs.

His solution? Start off what turned out to be a 26-song, three-hour marathon with a 15-minute version of “It Ain’t All Flowers” from his 2014 breakthrough album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.

That way, fans who might have been a few minutes late due to slow-moving security lines had time to arrive before the first song was finished and get the gist of what the often unpredictable and always compelling Simpson was up to in his first Philly-area headlining show in six years.

Which is: dig deep into a body of work that’s ranged from the expansive country of Metamodern and 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth to the 2019 Japanese anime techno-rock soundtrack Sound & Fury to purist bluegrass on two 2020 Cuttin’ Grass albums to the lovely, new Passage du Desir, which he recorded under the name Johnny Blue Skies.

He did all that while playing a ton of sparkling, lyrical guitar, joined by his Estonian bandmate Laur Joamets, a lead guitarist and pedal steel player who’s a standout in a stellar band that also includes drummer bassist Kevin Black, drummer Miles Miller, and keyboard player and saxophonist Robbie Crowell.

And oh yeah, Simpson also kept the sold-out crowd — full of midweek date-night couples flying the flannel on a chilly autumn evening — on its toes with a selection of classic rock and soul covers sprinkled throughout the generous, unhurried set and woven seamlessly into his own material.

The choice selections began with the Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” intro’d with a profane non sequitur “You see what happens Larry?” Big Lebowski reference that served as a running gag throughout the evening. That was soon followed by Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” well-suited to Simpson’s burly baritone.

A soaring take on Prince’s “Purple Rain,” was every bit as cathartic as it aimed to be, if not quite so sexy as the original, or the version I heard by Philly’s Johnny Goodtimes and Martha Graham Cracker just last week at Ardmore Music Hall. (Hmmm … maybe a Johnny Blues Skies and Johnny Goodtimes duet is in order?)

The final two covers connected the Kentucky-born Simpson to his Southern origins. First, there was William Bell’s 1961 Stax Records classic “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” which led into the sorrowful soul groove of Passage du Desir’s “Jupiter’s Faerie.”

Then later, Simpson and band choogled through the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider.” That followed the cheerful “Scooter Blues,” in which the Navy veteran and father of three rhymed “making chocolate milk and Eggos” with “stepping on Legos,” and preceded slow-closing antiwar salvo “Call to Arms.”

The dark, foreboding tone of “Call to Arms” is typical of Simpson, whose scheduled March 2020 show at the Met with fellow Bluegrass state native Tyler Childers was an early casualty of the pandemic. (He did play an all-bluegrass set at the Mann Center in 2021 as part of Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival, but otherwise hasn’t been in the Philly market since co-headlining the XPoNential Music Festival with the War on Drugs in 2018.)

When Simpson has a song with a title like “Living the Dream,” it’s probably not actually about living the dream, but more concerned with trying to escape a cycle of “going through the motions / A means to an end, but the ends don’t seem to meet.”

The peripatetic nature of Simpson’s career speaks to that search, an ongoing journey for creative fulfillment that has seen him on screen as an actor in recent years in Danny McBride’s The Righteous Gemstones and in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

“Been dancing with the demons all my life,” Simpson sang on Tuesday in “It Ain’t All Flowers.” “Every time I find my groove they cut in like a knife.”

The Johnny Blue Skies moniker is surely meant ironically, and an undercurrent of discontent was still there on Tuesday. But the music was wholly satisfying and completely cathartic (even if a little guitar solo heavy for some Sturgill fans, like my date).

The “Why Not? Tour” could be subtitled “How Sturgill Simpson got his groove back.”

The answer to that question has something to do with the Grateful Dead. Simpson sat in at the Dead Ahead festival in Mexico this past January, and said in an interview that the realization that Jerry Garcia “played folk, country, bluegrass and blues, the same way I play guitar” reanimated his love for playing music.

Simpson’s unstated goal in staging the “Why Not? Tour” is clearly to lose himself completely in the music. Mission accomplished.

After praising his bandmates, Simpson introduced himself, saying, “I’m nobody, I don’t live here anymore,” a seeming reference to the War on Drugs song of the same name. “I’m just a dude, playing with the best [expletive] band on Planet Earth.” On Tuesday night, it was hard to argue with that.

He returns to the venue at 858 N. Broad St. on Wednesday night.

“It Ain’t All Flowers”

“Long White Line”

“Railroad of Sin”

“The Promise”

“A Good Look”

“L.A. Woman”

“All Around You”

“Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)”

“Best Clockmaker on Mars”

“A Whiter Shade of Pale”

“Breakers Roar”

“Fastest Horse in Town”

“Mint Tea”

“One for the Road”

“Purple Rain”

“Just Let Go”

“Right Kind of Dream”

“All Said and Done”

“Living the Dream”

“If the Sun Never Rises”

“Brace for Impact (Live A Little)”

“You Don’t Miss Your Water”

“Jupiter’s Faerie”

“Scooter Blues”

“Midnight Rider”

“Call to Arms”