A few minutes into his new record, Bottle It In, Kurt Vile casually dispenses some wisdom: “Boy, the devil’s in the details.” It’s a sentiment that might not initially track, because for the past decade, shrouded behind his unkempt mane of wavy black hair, Vile has churned out album after album of unhurried, mildly psychedelic indie rock one could loosely describe as “stoner-y.” His seventh LP is his longest by a substantial margin; with multiple songs hovering around the 10-minute mark, it’s easy to imagine the rocker hitting record, jamming for a while, and calling it a day.
That come-what-may sentiment even peppers Vile's discourse on his own art. "The kind of music I want to make is some form of organic, country-influenced..." Vile stops mid-sentence, as he often does, to adjust course. "Just music that's as live as possible. [I don't want to] sit around and nitpick every little fucking nuance."
The mythos is tempting to buy into, if not entirely accurate. When I meet Vile at his label's Manhattan office on a cloudy September afternoon, it doesn't matter that he's just returned from an "epic" trip to the Catskills, where he "totally drank a thousand million beers," or that he's headed back home to his native Philadelphia this evening. Relaxation remains far from his mind as he stares at a vinyl copy of Bottle It In on the table in front of him, still obsessing over it.
"It takes lots of listening and losing your mind," he says, recalling its completion. "And then a deadline. I'm always past deadline and people are freaking out. You let things go and you get used to ’em. I kinda wish—there were a couple final changes that I made at the end that... I just took it a little far. Some minute details." Vile exhales and shakes his head slightly. "But whatever."
Vile had already started Bottle It In last fall when he released Lotta Sea Lice with fellow no-frills rocker Courtney Barnett and embarked on a tour to support the project. But he kept recording, finding studios from Los Angeles to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to construct the follow-up to 2015’s B’lieve I’m Goin Down piece by piece.
"It's just become an extreme version of what I've always done," he says. "I bounce around studios; [otherwise] you get stuck in a box. I think it would sound weirder if it all sounded the same. I like to go all over the place."
While Vile recorded much of Bottle It In with the Violators—"They're definitely like my Crazy Horse,” he says, comparing his trusted backing band to Neil Young's longtime sidemen—his travels connected him with other marquee artists. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon contributes “some really cool feedback” to the end of “Mutinies,” and Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock helped engineer the sessions for “Hysteria” at his Ice Cream Party Studios in Portland, Oregon. Additional polish came from behind-the-scenes pros including Peter Katis (Interpol, The National) and Shawn Everett, the studio whiz who worked with Vile's old band, The War on Drugs, on their Grammy-winning 2017 record A Deeper Understanding.
Bottle It In captures the sessions’ disjointed nature. Some songs are gloriously kooky, like "Check Baby," where Vile juxtaposes a swaggering, eight-minute instrumental with lyrics that revolve around rubbing butter on a graying roadie's belly. Others capitalize on his spaced-out image: On "Cold Was the Wind," Vile crafts a trippy scene about spending Christmas in Siberia, sipping the Belgian ale Delirium Tremens, thinking of baseball stars of his youth like Roger Clemens and Mike Schmidt.
While Vile actually "never got the Delirium Tremens"—the popular brew or the alcohol-induced ailment from which it takes its name—he says he has leaned on drinking in the past. "I go through phases of relying on alcohol to calm my nerves or be on a plane when I think I'm going to die," he explains. "I'm working on that."
He's cut back on the booze—prior to his Catskills trip, Vile says he hadn't had a drink in a month—but Bottle It In has glimmers of the type of uneasy worldview that could spark self-medication, including references to technology addiction on the hypnotic "Mutinies." "Obviously, [phones are] convenient," says Vile, "but yeah, especially in times of high stress, I'll go into overload. The electromagnetic [energy], it's like a TV or whatever. It makes you stay on it. It's pretty weird that everybody, me included, [is] hanging out but everybody's really looking at their phones."
To illustrate the point, Vile unzips his brimming fuchsia Jansport to reveal stacks of CD jewel cases and a couple books. Sure, he uses Spotify, but physical media is irreplaceable. Today, Vile has short-fiction collections by Amy Hempel and Sam Lipsyte in tow; he's "trying to get back into" fiction after diving deep on country-music history while recording Bottle It In. Reading autobiographies by legends including George Jones, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson—alongside Nick Tosches' definitive books about the genre—gave Vile some perspective about his chosen idiom: "It makes rock ’n’ roll just seem like a bunch of poseurs."
"The true rock ’n’ rollers...you have to worship the country players," he says. "Rock ’n’ roll without the roots of country and rockabilly, it's a bunch of bullshit."
While Vile might project indifference with his music and persona, it's clear that a fiery drive rests beneath that amiable, unassuming facade. "I used to say in the credits exactly what was played," he reflects. Then he gestures to his copy of Bottle It In. "Now I just say 'keyboards' and stuff like that, because I don't want to give away all my secrets.... Somebody could easily figure it out, but I'm not going to just say it out loud for some of these young poseur kids to take my sound!"
With that, Vile cracks a joke about "the Instagram rock stars of youth," unleashing an infectious cackle. But more serious vibes soon prevail. After a decade spent amassing a deep, acclaimed catalog, Vile thinks he's hit it out of the park with the new record: "I like to take the world and wipe the floor with it," he says with a sheepish smirk, almost startled by his own ambition.
