Israeli tanks penetrate the centre of Rafah and air attacks persist across the city despite global calls to end the carnage.

Singer-songwriter Sturgill Simpson has always done things his way, and his iconoclasm will be in full force in July when he releases an album under the nom de plume “Johnny Blue Skies” — which he’s indicating will be the name that all his future albums will come out under.

But for the purposes of touring, he will remain Sturgill Simpson. Whether splitting that difference is by preference, or because major venue operators are unlikely to book shows for a major artist under a pseudonym, is unknown. But he will be hitting the road under the name Sturgill Simpson this fall, with 28 show over the course of two and a half months of shows in arenas, theaters and amphitheaters, starting with a date at L.A.’s Greek Theatre on Sept.

14.Simpson’s first album under the name is Johnny Blue Skies is the eight-track “Passage du Desir,” due out July 12 on his own independent label, High Top Mountain Records. A press release notes that “after promising to release only five studio albums under his own name,” Simpson is marking “the beginning of a new era” with the name change to Johnny Blue Skies. He did not release any statements about why he’s making the switch. But in a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone, Simpson did indeed vow that the album he was putting out at the time, “The Ballad of Dood and Juanita,” would be his last as Sturgill Simpson. “I always said there would be five, and I wondered if I’d go back on that. But it really has cemented every step of the way how much I don’t want to carry all that weight,” he told the magazine at the time. “Not having to stand up there behind my name would allow me to be even more vulnerable, in a way.”