Two Nights!
A Good Look'n Tour
Sturgill Simpson
Tyler Childers
In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Sturgill Simpson shows on May 5th and May 6th have been cancelled. Tickets purchased will automatically be refunded from the ticketing company in approximately 30 days. For purchases made in-person at a box office please contact the venue directly.
This event is all ages.
$99.50 – Reserved Seating
$69.50 – General Admission Floor
$69.50 – Reserved Seating
*plus applicable service fees
Tickets are also available with a $5.00 service charge fee at the Fox Theater – Oakland’s Box Office (located on the 19th street side of the theater) on show dates and on Fridays from noon – 7:00pm. Please note all ticket sales are subject to availability.
All doors & show times subject to change.
Sturgill Simpson has emerged as one of music’s most inspired and genre-bending artists. Each of Simpson’s three universally acclaimed solo albums explore different elements of American music history (bluegrass, country, rock, R&B, soul) and continue to push his work beyond expectations and musical boundaries. Following the release of his new album, Sound & Fury, the GRAMMY award-winning singer-songwriter has announced North American dates for his 2020 Sturgill Simpson: A Good Look’n Tour.
Acclaimed country breakout star and very special guest, Tyler Childers, will join Simpson on the tour for a once-in-a-lifetime live show experience. Simpson produced both albums from Childers, including his August-released Country Squire, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart.
On the heels of releasing his latest album Sound & Fury, and accompanying anime film of the same name released simultaneously via Netflix, Simpson hit the road for a brief six date club tour, donating 100% of the proceeds from these shows to the Special Forces Foundation – a nonprofit organization that provides immediate and ongoing support to the Special Forces community and their families. $1 from each ticket sold for the Sturgill Simpson: A Good Look’n Tour will also be donated to benefit the Special Forces Foundation.
Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? isn’t really a gospel album. “I feel it’s more of a spiritual record,” Tyler Childers says. “Growing up in church I was scared to death of going to hell. But a lot of it shaped me for the better, too. Getting through that and finding the truth and beauty, the things that you should think about, and expelling all the damaging parts, has been something I’ve thought about my whole life.”
The three-record album explores this theme through a collection of eight songs (each recorded in three different ways for twenty-four tracks total) that are both joyful and profound.
The original songs on Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?, his fifth studio album, are among his best. The title track uses rural sensibility to imagine an inclusive heaven and is inspired not only by Childers’ thoughts on how he’d want his own dogs with him but also a passage in The Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic that has been central to Childers’ spiritual life since he was a young man. “Purgatory”, about a man who fears for his soul asking a girlfriend to pray for him, is a familiar one to Childers’ fans, but he and the band say this is the version they always wanted to record. “We finally found our way of playing it,” Childers says. “Way of the Triune God” is a testament to the power of sobriety and an intricate display of picking and singing that will lead listeners to sway in place and want to praise the music itself with its Holiness-infused piano, head-nodding tempo, and irresistible riff. “The Heart You’ve Been Tendin’” meditates on Childers’ experiences with psychedelics and how in the end all we have is the love we’ve cultivated. Led by percussion, it’s Childers at his calmest yet most passionate vocals, backed by the band at the height of its game as the players luxuriate in the easy-as-Sunday-morning tempo that builds to an epic scale by song’s end. There are also the traditional tunes “Two Coats” and “Jubilee”, both such fixtures in the religious and old-time canon that Childers felt they had to be included and reimagined here, as well as the classic gospel tune “Old Country Church”, that opens the album. On the surface the song is a slice of nostalgia, looking back to simpler days when everything was better because everyone went to church together. In the context of this album it can also be taken as a lament for times when people of faith leaned more on love than judgement. It’s the first song Childers ever learned to play on guitar, when he was five years old. All of these are tied together by the aforementioned “Angel Band”.