Sturgill Simpson’s latest album as Johnny Blue Skies, Mutiny After Midnight, is a disco-fried country rock meditation on all things sex and politics. It offers up the theory that sex is the cure for all that ails us, as individuals and as a society, and does so with genuine sincerity, but also lots of freaky little jokes and one-liners. One of the funniest appears on “Make America Fuk Again,” the album’s opener and thesis statement, in which Simpson drawls, “I’m a sensitive boy when push comes to shove/I got that Hunter Biden energy/I’ll make a hooker fuck around and fall in love.”
There are, of course, plenty of people with the notorious stature of former President Joe Biden’s son — whose infamy is very much rooted in that seedy pit of sex and politics — who probably wouldn’t take kindly to such a shoutout. But Hunter Biden is not that kind of guy. He’s a huge Sturgill fan, and considers his place in “Make America Fuk Again” an honor.
Biden praised Simpson as “the greatest singer songwriter out there right now” on X, Tuesday, where he’s been posting up a storm lately. (This was an unprompted response to someone highlighting the “Hunter Biden energy” lyric after Simpson finally made Mutiny After Midnight available to stream.)
And Biden’s no bandwagon fan either. “I’ve been obsessed with his music and message since Metamodern Sounds in Country Music,” he continued. “’Turtles All the Way Down’ is one of my favorite songs ever.”
He went on to praise Simpson’s rendition of Nirvana’s “In Bloom” as maybe “the best cover of any cover ever,” and name-checked Simpson’s excellent, and underrated, 2019 scuzz-rock album, Sound & Fury, and its accompanying anime movie. The album came out, Biden said, “in the early days of my recovery” and “it played in the background as I painted almost everyday.”
As for the shoutout in “Make America Fuk Again,” Biden called it, “By far the coolest thing to ever happen. Sturgill is my favorite.”
