Best Way to Make It In Nashville? Don’t Go, Says Sturgill Simpson

Outlaw country artist Sturgill Simpson has built a flourishing career atop flouting Nashville industry norms. His biggest mistake, though? Moving to the Music City in the first place, according to Simpson.

“Where I screwed up, I moved to Nashville thinking I wanted to be a songwriter… but I didn’t know what writing songs in Nashville now really meant until I got here as a 35-year-old man and looked around,” Simpson said on a 2020 episode of the left-leaning Trillbilly Workers’ Party podcast.

Sturgill Simpson, country musician, blasts 'hegemony and fascism' in Nashville, mocks gun owners – https://t.co/pNiihYjipO…performance Wed…

— Maverick Rainero (@MaverickRainero) November 9, 2017

‘The Job is the Job’

Simpson, now 45, said that “99 percent” of Music Row is made up of “good people… just doing a job.” But to the “Use Me” singer, that’s part of the problem: money, not music, is king.

The Kentucky native learned this the hard way in 2005, when he first moved into a cinderblock garage apartment behind a house in East Nashville to chase his bluegrass dreams. After less than a year, with his career going nowhere, Simpson left Nashville to take a freight-shipping job for the Union Pacific Railroad in Salt Lake City.

[RELATED: Watch Sturgill Simpson Join Bob Weir, Margo Price, and More for a Cover of The Band’s “The Weight” at Dead Ahead Festival]

Six years later, Simpson was back in Nashville. His self-funded, self-released debut High Top Mountain hit shelves in 2013, drawing comparisons to traditional country legends such as Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. It’s been mostly uphill from there.

“If you pour your heart out, and you’re honest with yourself and your human experience and your life, and you put that into music, you don’t have to be talented,” Simpson told the Nashville Scene in 2016. “… People will connect, and they’ll spread it for you. You don’t need radio. You don’t need some big machine throwing it out there. I’m living proof of that.”

I may be at the club, but I have my AirPods in listening to Sturgill Simpson.

— Kentuckian BC Hatchett (@bchatchett) January 30, 2024

‘Get a Van and Start Playing’

So what would Simpson suggest to today’s country music hopefuls? Get a lawyer, find a trustworthy booking agent, maybe a good publicist… and then skip Nashville altogether.

“My advice to anybody coming to Nashville is: Don’t come to Nashville, just get a van and start playing everywhere else,” Simpson said during the Trillbilly episode. “Because you’re not going to get paid to play here. There’s only like 30 players and they’re all going to show up and decide whether your star is bright and shiny enough for them. And if they decide ‘no,’ then you’re just gonna end up spinning your wheels here for five years for nothing when you should’ve been playing everywhere else.”

Featured image by Jason Kempin/Getty Images