Watch Sturgill Simpson Deliver an SNL Performance for the Ages

Talking to the Scene about performing back in September, Sturgill Simpson said, for him, going onstage feels like walking into a fight, and he’s never lost a fight.

“Dude, you don’t have any fucking idea how I’m in that shit,” he said. “It’s just this inner drive to, like, crush it, do the fuckin’ absolute best you can.”

And crush it Simpson did while making his debut on Saturday Night Live over the weekend. Backed by the bad-ass brass-section-boasting band he toured the world with in 2016 matching his every ounce of intensity, Simpson stormed 30 Rock with a pair of barn burners off A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, which is up for Album of the Year at the Grammys next month.

The two performances clocked in at about nine minutes, and each second counted. The first, a greasy, hard-groovin' run through “Keep It Between the Lines” (above) was enough to make one killer impression. But the second performance — a cranked-up, brass-on-blast sprint through the Sailor’s Guide rocker “Call to Arms” (below) — exploded on the SNL stage and  screens across America like a runaway train of country, soul and rock ’n’ roll.

Watching it, I could only imagine that this must have been what it felt like to watch Elvis Costello and the Attractions lifetime-ban-earning, hand-that-feeds-biting romp through “Radio Radio” in 1977, or watching Fear introduce America to the concept of the mosh pit in 1981, or watching The Replacements careen through a loud and loose “Bastards of Young” in 1986, live on national television.

“Call to Arms,” Simpson’s hardest-rockin’ jam, typically stretches over the 8-minute mark in concert. But somewhere in the frenzy to bring the tune to a bloodletting climax before it was time to cut to commercial, it seemed the stage-stalking singer and his band had forgotten all together that they were in the controlled confines of a television studio. Instead, they were attacking their instruments — jumping atop organs and knocking cymbals off their stands — with the intense ferocity of, well, a riled-up biker gang in a bar fight.

Nirvana, Simpson’s childhood favorite rock band, made its instrument-demolishing, legendary SNL debut 25 years ago this week. And while Simpson didn’t play his cover of Nirvana’s “In Bloom” on Saturday night, it seemed like an equally fitting tribute when, on the final beat, the singer slammed his Telecaster — which, it should be noted, was outfitted with a Star Wars Rebel Alliance badge — to the ground.

Going up against the likes of Adele, Beyoncé and Drake, Simpson is still a longshot to take home the Album of the Year Grammy. But after this SNL performance for the ages, it seems his chances just got a helluva lot better.