“Sit down, baby,” Sturgill Simpson sings. “I got some things that you need to hear.”

These words lead the last track on country singer Simpson’s most recent album, Passage du Desir. On the winding nine-minute track, Simpson searches for a way to tell his lover that it’s time they moved on. “What if I told you / I’m not the man that you think I am?” Simpson wonders. “Would you listen / or would I only hear / the door behind you slam?”

Though these words close Passage, they opened Simpson’s Salt Shed concert earlier this month. The Sturgill Simpson coming onto the stage was not the Grammy Award–winning Kentuckian who’d won hearts with outlaw stories in the style of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. That’s no longer the man Simpson is. But the end of one thing inevitably marks the start of something else—perhaps something wiser, toughened, brighter. It’s that cycle, freighted with tragedy and promise, that plays out in the lyrics of Simpson’s latest songs and on the strings of his electric guitar.

After a vocal cord rupture cut short Simpson’s 2021 tour, no one knew if Simpson would return to the recording studio, the stage, or even, for that matter, the United States. Simpson, struck dumb, absconded to Paris, and indeed that’s where the first lines of Passage du Desir find him: “Spend my days in a haze / floatin’ round in the Marais…. Melody washes over but can’t make out a word they say,” Simpson sings of his new neighbors.

It’s a turn away from lyrics and toward “melody” that Simpson seems to have brought to his music from his sojourn in Paris. At the Salt Shed, Simpson talked precious little. He played for nearly an hour—pivoting from “One for the Road” into “Some Days” and fan favorite “Turtles All the Way Down”—before ever setting down his guitar. Even then, he didn’t take a moment to welcome Chicago to his concert. He merely conferred with his band and picked up the next song.

Simpson worships at the shrine of the guitar. Whole songs slipped by without a single verse sung. Reportedly, Simpson only agreed to tour his latest album after he was invited to play guitar alongside Bob Weir and Mickey Hart—former members of The Dead—at a tribute concert. It’s melodies, not words, that have brought Simpson back on stage. “You and me, we don’t need words to say anything, / they just get in the way,” Simpson sings on “If the Sun Never Rises Again.”

It’s hard not to hear the fear of an old injury lurking behind those words. At some level, Simpson has every reason to avoid singing. But it’s more than that. Live, Simpson pares down the highly produced tracks on Passage—featuring strings, organ, even a brass band—so that his guitar can tell the story. The strings whine on “If the Sun Never Rises Again” and mourn on “Jupiter’s Faerie.” That’s Simpson’s magic. Perhaps it was only with his vocal injury that he could open up these new passions.

Even in “Mint Tea,” which turns on Simpson’s good-old-boy charm rather than pushing into the introspection found on the rest of the album, the heel-tapping hook still exalts in the sort of joy that Simpson digs up in the worst moments of injury and tragedy: “Put another Band-Aid on my bullet wound, / and pour us both another cup of that mint tea.”

As he himself sings: “Sometimes beginnings can come from an end.”