Song · Sturgill Simpson
“Turtles all the way Down” by Sturgill Simpson
From the album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (2014)
“Turtles all the way Down” by Sturgill Simpson appears on 10 radio countdowns from 5 stations between 2014 and 2026. It was first released in 2014 on the album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. Its best result is #28 on The Colorado Sound Top 1055 Colorado Sound Songs of All Time. In the combined RockLists rankings it is the #254 indie & aaa song of 2014 and #812 indie & aaa song of all time.
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Leave it to Sturgill Simpson to cut a country ballad about the bottomless pit of existence and make it sound like a back-porch confession. "Turtles All the Way Down" was the second single from his 2014 album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, and he wrote it by himself. The title borrows the old joking phrase for Anavastha, an idea from Indian philosophy which holds that existence has no bottom layer to stand on.
From there it's a trip in every sense: the song wanders through psychedelic experiences brought on by marijuana, LSD, psilocybin and DMT, with run-ins with Jesus, the Devil, Buddha and reptile aliens along the way. Then it lands somewhere unexpectedly tender, on mortality and on love as the thing that pulls a person back from the edge. Country music rarely wanders this far out and comes home this gently.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
RockLists rankings
Indie & Adult Alternative
All Rock Formats
Year-end countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 100 | WXPN Philadelphia, PA | WXPN Year in Review: Top 200 Songs of 2014 | 200 |
All-time and decade countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 385 | WYEP | WYEP 913 Countdown 2016 | 913 |
| 2022 | 28 | The Colorado Sound | The Colorado Sound Top 1055 Colorado Sound Songs of All Time | 1055 |
| 2023 | 158 | 90.9 The Bridge | 90.9 The Bridge Top 909 Songs of All Time | 909 |
| 2024 | 724 | The Colorado Sound | The Colorado Sound Top 1055 Songs of the 21st Century | 1055 |
| 2024 | 372 | WXPN | WXPN The 885 Greatest Songs of the 21st Century (2024) | 885 |
| 2024 | 274 | KEXP | The Best Opening Tracks of All Time | 738 |
| 2025 | 274 | 90.9 The Bridge | 90.9 The Bridge Top 909 Songs of the 21st Century | 909 |
| 2025 | 249 | WYEP | WYEP Best Songs of the 21st Century (So Far) | 714 |
| 2026 | 55 | The Colorado Sound | The Colorado Sound Top 1055 Songs You Discovered on The Colorado Sound | 1055 |
Also listed as: Turtles All The Way Down; Turtles All the Way Down.
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