“In 2014, just after the birth of my son, I spent 18 months on the road. The separation allowed me to see what I really wanted. I wanted to speak to my son. I used the sea as a metaphor. The record is a love letter to my boy and my wife for having saved me from a life of despair.”Sturgill Simpson (974)

“I wrote it for my son. The idea of the letter, the concept behind the record – my paternal grandfather, when he was in the Army in WWII he was over in the South Pacific and he thought he was going to die and he wrote a letter to my grandmother and their new born son thinking he wasn’t going to come home. This letter – my father’s sister was a big antique collector and she held on to this letter forever and nobody in the family had read it, nobody would read the letter, and it sat on a night stand almost on display in a guest room at her house. So about 10 years ago after she passed away, my father and I were at her house for the funeral. I never got the chance to know my grandfather very well, it was very stoic…he was very shut-off between war trauma and his wife dying very young from cancer, he just wasn’t emotionally available a lot. Years later after he was dead and then she passed I was at her house and I read the letter. I probably learned more about him in those few pages than I ever could have sitting in a room with him. I remember going down the road in a bus one day thinking, “what if I could write a letter to my kid telling him exactly who his dad was and everything I’m going through right now at this point in my life.””Sturgill Simpson (975)

Breakers Roar is Sturgill’s favorite track from the album.

“The message for my son is: love, all around. Just thinking a lot of points in my life, younger, angrier, confused or just misplaced or lost. You have this tendency to not be aware how much it [love- Ed] is around you and you can shut it out as well. So, it’s a kind of a reminder.”Sturgill Simpson (975)

“It’s actually all about drugs. Some other stuff, mostly drugs.”Sturgill Simpson (1016)

“That’s one of those songs I wish I hadn’t written. I wrote it as a joke. I wanted to write a laundry list song, sort of making fun of those laundry list songs that are really popular in country – but about my life, so I just pulled out every cliche, token country-ism I could and put it in the song. My biggest problem with the “hustle” in Nashville when you’re going out, it seems like everybody’s fighting for the same nothing. People are always shaking your hand and looking over your shoulder to see who else is in the room they should be talking to. It made me sick, I didn’t want any part of it, so I felt like King Turd on shit mountain. So I wrote that and now I’m King Turd on shit mountain.”Sturgill Simpson (1034)