This week, we'll be running a series of essays from the next issue of our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review, in which writers discuss political music that opened their eyes.

Where I grew up in northeast Ohio was so blue-collar, Bruce Springsteen used its shuttered steel mills to illustrate America’s crumbled Rust Belt in The Ghost of Tom Joad’s “Youngstown.” But despite this working-class mentality, which typically makes the area lean blue in presidential elections, it is not exactly a liberal place. In high school, as identities began to gel, the boys in my honors classes emerged as wannabe rednecks with George W. Bush bumper sticks on their Chevys. They seemed to pride themselves on being “fiscally responsible,” but I couldn’t resist arguing with stubborn male peers adopting close-minded logic—that was how those friendships worked.

And so, in the years following 9/11, as America flooded the Middle East with soldiers not much older than me, I spent a lot of time driving around the Midwest in pickup trucks listening to Kenny Chesney. It was on these drives that I tried to explain the virtues of John Kerry and Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief (the ultimate anti-Bush record); my conservative pals countered with the merits of Karl Rove and Toby Keith. Ultimately, I chalked it up as a failed thought experiment, with one measurable result: I will know the words to Keith’s “I Love This Bar” until the day my body leaves this earth.

After that, I avoided country music for a long time. The turning point was probably the 2013 release of Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow,” a do-what-you-want declaration inclusive of gay folks and stoners and straight-up weirdos. But it was Sturgill Simpson’s 2014 LP Metamodern Sounds in Country Music that really brought me back into the fold. This album is pure cosmic trash, and I couldn’t love it more. “Don’t have to do a goddamn thing ’cept sit around and wait to die,” Simpson boasts on the indelible single “Living the Dream.” But by this spring’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, Kentucky’s finest singer-songwriter claimed to know a thing or two about how to live. The record is written from the point of view of a sailor unsure if he’ll come back alive, in the form of a letter to his wife and young son at home. With this concept in mind, Simpson brings something entirely new to a song as ubiquitous as Nirvana’s “In Bloom”: Where Cobain sang about lamestreamer fans who couldn’t understand his band’s gravity, Simpson seems to have a more literal take on the chorus couplet: “And he likes to shoot his gun/But he don’t know what it means.”

Simpson served a couple of years in the Navy right out of high school, and though he never ended up on the frontlines, the experience certainly seems to color his view of the military. Nowhere is this made clearer than on A Sailor’s Guide to Earth’s five-and-a-half-minute closer, “Call to Arms,” where Simpson takes the lingering effects of the War on Terror, compounds them with media noise and the digital age’s narcissism, and sets the whole shebang ablaze with a distinctly punk-rock anti-establishment rage.

Millennials have been (rightly) dubbed the “me me me” generation, but what Simpson underscores is that all that “me” can manifest into dangerous ignorance regarding matters that don’t seem to directly affect us, since they don’t play out on our timelines. The following verse is very likely the best thing Simpson has ever written, and may ever write: