It takes about eight tries of the doorbell before Kurt Vile comes to the door. He apologizes—he forgot what his new doorbell sounded like, and besides, he was trying out a new banjo. His skilled picking could be heard from outside his cozy Philadelphia bungalow, but Vile’s not sure he’ll keep it. He bought the banjo in the Catskills after a few days of haggling, but the experience “left a weird taste in my mouth,” he said. “So, instead, I asked my brother if he wanted to buy it. He said he does, but then I just played it. Now I’m stalling because I want to play it once more.” He adds, “It’s like mind games, always.”
He was in the Catskills to celebrate his new record, Bottle It In, out today on Matador. With the release of his eighth full-length album—“I think I heard eight,” he said, like a true prolific musician—Vile establishes himself as a rare species in the rock world, a guitarist who loves to tour and stay up late, but shares his comfortable home with his wife, Suzanne Lang, two daughters, and no TV in sight. Fifteen years into his professional music career, 38-year-old Vile—a millennial, just barely—is sharing stages with the rock idols of his youth, like Willie Nelson and Neil Young. In a time when Blink-182 classifies as classic rock, and modern rock may not exist at all, Vile has carved an unusual path, one filled with tours, press junkets, and on-the-street sightings, but also all the trappings of a surprisingly sane life.
There are books in every room of Vile’s house, the musical instruments at a level where his daughters—Awilda, eight, and Delphine, six—can reach them. Lang went to Dartmouth before getting an M.F.A. in poetry and becoming a professor; Vile, on the other hand, had his only formal musical education while playing trumpet in his high-school marching band.
His kids, however, have become part of his musical process. “I did this long Bob Dylan song, from [one of] his last record[s], Tempest, called ‘Roll on John.’ It’s got, like, 10 verses, and I was writing them down. Then Awilda was proofreading them—reading them out to me. And once they were all written, she was reading it over and over again, while I was sound-checking. And then they just watch me sing it.”
Awilda was born while he was writing 2011’s Smoke Ring for My Halo, which Vile says was his first hi-fi album. “People said, ‘Pretty soon you’re going to be writing all these dad songs—songs about your kid.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not. That’s bullshit,’” he says. “And then she came, and immediately I started writing reflective songs. Because it’s, like, a magic experience.”
Bottle It In is no exception; the song “Cold Was the Wind” crescendos with a plaintive, “I’m gonna miss my girls.”
The album is the result of several different sessions in studios around the country, with multiple producers. He recorded with two producers well known for their work on indie-rock records in the 90s, Rob Schnapf and Peter Katis. “It was very convenient to have different people working with me. If it was only Peter or Rob, it would be too one-dimensional,” he says. “Peter’s the kind of guy who will show up noon or earlier, if you let him. Rob, he rarely has his hands on the controls when you’re recording, and then he mixes later. He’ll edit and tweak and add things. He’ll stay up late with you, and drink beers until you’re done. It’s good that everybody wasn’t doing that. It’s the perfect balance.”
For a guy whose mind can wander in conversation, Vile has an almost unmatched skill for writing songs that stretch on, shifting and building, and the new record adds more instrumentation. “You could say it’s more lush, a little more epic,” he says. “I was waiting long enough for this record to come out—I even pushed it back a little, because I was so burned out. So I knew I wanted to make some kind of epic record.”
Vile likes to read music biographies and fiction—he has short-story collections stacked on the floor in his sunroom—and says he keeps on coming back to Flannery O’Connor’s humorous grotesqueries of the South. It makes sense, because he’s about as funny and perceptive as a rock lyricist gets in the 21st century. The song he’s best known for, “Pretty Pimpin,” is a ride in between the serious emotion of not recognizing where your life has gone, and admiring your outfit. For Bottle It In, he wrote a homage to Philadelphia that points out how to tell when a person really knows their city: “I park for free,” he says on “Loading Zones.”
His career has benefited by the fact that he’s been willing to tour nearly nonstop, becoming a fixture on the festival circuit over the last decade, with appearances at Coachella, Bonnaroo, Pitchfork, and Governors Ball, among others. “The first time I was getting a lot of offers to play shows, I knew I had to take all of them,” he says. “So I was gone a lot. Suzanne was still working as a professor, so it was a crazy, hard learning curve. I had to grow in my career and my music, and we had to get to a point where I could come in and out of [family life] and not feel guilty about it.”
In his breaks from family life, he’s picked up some classic itinerant rock-star stories, like the time he met George Harrison’s son, Dhani, at a show. (“It’s really trippy. I really like him, and he’s really nice, but he looks a lot like his dad.”) Or the time David Berman of the Silver Jews, gave him a bunch of books, only for Vile to leave one of them on a plane. He’s getting ready to head out on another international tour, but there are signs he might be ready to slow down. He’s not sure, though.
“It’s hard to go away, but it’s also beautiful to come back. Eventually, if I just bust my ass like I’ve been doing, maybe one more time, I can disappear [from the stage] for a while,” he says. “And then, of course, I’m going to come back and do it again for a while.”
