What do Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young have in common? Long-running legends, co-employers of guitarist Nils Lofgren, writers of songs called “Born to Run,” “Long Walk Home,” and “Wrecking Ball.” But on Kurt Vile’s latest album, the only thing the 46-year-old songwriter cares about is that Bruce and Neil have both written music about his hometown.
“I’m from Philadelphia,” Vile sings in “You don’t know cuz it’s my life.” “A couple heroes wrote songs but that ain’t where they’re from… So, hey, you don’t know!” Since the undercurrent to Vile’s sunny, hypnotic music has long been a sense of universal benevolence, he quickly ensures us he’s not trying to start any regional beef: “But I still love ya,” he affirms before a heartfelt incantation he repeats in the place of a chorus: “Neil and the Boss.”
In a phone call with Vile just before he and his family head out for vacation, Neil and the Boss come up a lot. Vile paraphrases Neil’s frank dismissal of farewell tours and lets out a hearty laugh (“When I retire, you’ll know… because I’ll be dead”), then discusses his relationship with the goldmines of Bruce recordings that have been steadily receiving official releases in recent years. While Vile is stoked about the new material, lately he finds himself returning to the tried and true. “I’m more emotional,” he says. “I like when music takes me back.”
It’s a quality he’s been able to achieve in his own songwriting. Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me is Vile’s most emotionally candid record. As a married father of two daughters, he lets the ideas of stability and devotion inform his perspective on his bustling hometown, which, he assures me, does not provide a hard concept for the record, despite its title. Still, a sense of place informs even just the sound of his guitar solos at this point. Largely self-produced and entirely home-recorded, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me is a record that could come from no other artist, at no other point in their career, and, of course, from no other city.
Amid all his usual lyrical ticks—the cinéma-verité musings on his own creative process, the proud dismissal of actual drugs on his still-pretty-druggy music—Vile offers moving odes to his wife and kids like “Every time I look at you” and, in “99 BPM,” reflections on his late collaborator, Rob Laakso, who died from cancer in 2023. In typical Kurt form, this elegiac subject was not a conscious decision; the way he tells it, Laakso was one of many spirits summoned deep inside Vile’s basement studio in the leafy neighborhood of Mount Airy, a space he refers to as OKV Central (or “Overnight Kurt Vile,” named for his preferred working hours).
“I had this acoustic guitar that was like a beater I hadn’t played in a while,” Vile says. “It was a piece of crap, almost. But when I picked it up, I played that riff you hear. I turned it into a loop. I slowed it down. And then it made me think, first of all, this sounds awesome; it's got me in the zone. It also got me thinking up lyrics. And then I looked down at the guitar, and was just thinking about a session with Rob.”
In this anecdote lies an elemental Kurtness that can be hard to describe. For all his reverence for the classic-rock era, Vile is a lot less interested in linear pathways through emotion or traditional storytelling. Where the Bruce of “Bobby Jean” bid adieu to an old friend with an archetypical earnestness that made us all imagine the tenderness and precarity of our own friendships, and the Neil of Tonight’s the Night mourned his fallen comrades in a ragged roll call of rock’n’roll ghosts, Vile tells a looser story, using a cosmic shorthand better suited for mumbling to oneself. In baring his soul, what other songwriter could land on a line like “It was 2012 but it felt like 2014”?
Vile happily explains this lyric to me: It refers to an approach he and Laakso developed while recording 2013’s Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze that they dove into more intensely while making its follow-up, 2015’s b’lieve i’m goin down. But the second you start analyzing his lyrics this way, you’re probably missing the point, knocked out of the Zen-like flow that has become intrinsic to his art.
This obsession with the moment can become problematic for Vile when it’s time to bring the music beyond the confines of OKV. He doesn’t meditate, but he’s hoping to get back into yoga, considering he’s felt like a “wreck” on the run-up to this album release. When we talk on the phone, he seems relieved about how smooth early rehearsals have been with his band, the Violators. “I was stressed about learning a whole new record. And then once I got together with the boys, I realized, oh, every song is bonehead simple. It’s not a big deal.”
As Vile discusses Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me, he thinks fondly of its cozy, communal genesis: all his friends hanging in the basement, his family upstairs, a sense of feeling “100% being stoked with my crew.” To illustrate this energy, he tells me about the opening song, “Zoom 97,” which started life as a simple jam on mandolin and synth. When he heard the instrumental blasting from the speakers, he started improvising some lines about a street he drives down every day to get into the city.
“And it’s not even, like, bullshit lyrics,” Vile says proudly. “It’s about life. It’s about my orbit.” Soon the whole song started constellating around him while his bandmates stood back and watched. “I could see it happening, and I seized the moment. That’s sort of the fun. And that’s sort of what I’m put here to do.”
Kurt Vile: You kind of nailed it when you said it’s the “moment.” It’s the moment that excites you: When you’re writing a song, you feel it, you have chills, you know? Or when there’s a magic moment on stage and you’re all locked in... I live for that kind of thing. I love not fixing things, making them feel fucked up, or just leaving them fucked up. If you listen to the old Stones records or the Velvet Underground, the reason they’re so unique is because there’s a million, trillion imperfections in there.
Absolutely. The thing is, a lot of that music is, like, instrumental and in-the-moment and psychedelic. It’s true bedroom music, and I'm always trying to get back there. I think that's definitely one of the directions I'm headed: to compile all of that stuff. I love it.
I'm really connecting to the oldest stuff more than the middle stuff that was extra-produced. Don't get me wrong, I know that Smoke Ring for My Halo, that's my only classic songwriter record. And then Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze, I know that was epic, and I like it. But in other ways, it was somewhat polished, you know? These days, I'm definitely more into “the Ditch.” You could tell it’s live, and it’s got all the emotion. I feel like my earliest recordings have that. A lot of them, anyway. The only difference with the earlier records is you can’t get back that young energy. It’s also funny because I didn't know what the hell was going on in life in general [then], and I was not taking care of me.
Yeah, I guess I’m stuck in some weird hybrid chasing both. But I will also say, my voice was different then. And in the moment now, I'm proud of my voice. If I'm really feeling it, my voice can sound good in a more classic way. At the end of the day, if you were to ask if I sang or I talked, you know, I’d have to pick “talk,” like Lou Reed or something. Sometimes I stumble upon some good singing. But it's very low key… lowbrow… low timbre… low everything.
I'm aware that people think of me that way. My best self is chill. I like to be crazy, too. I like to be funny and make jokes constantly. But in that moment of delivering the music, I'm aware. It’s sort of in the way I sing and the chords I play that are dreamy and pretty. I gravitate toward that, and I know the power in that. In some ways, that is my meditation: when I tap into something on the guitar.
But for instance, I guess what I'm talking about is now when there’s so much demanded of me. I was just in this radio show playing songs like “Chance to Bleed” for the first time. And I couldn’t even, like… You’ve got to find it again. Ultimately that's where I'd love to always live, in that chilled-out place, but the reality is... Life isn't always chilled-out now, is it?
Well, I’ve been calling out Philly my whole life. A song from the last EP that came out not that long ago is called “hit of the highlife.” I really like that song. It says:
“Philadelph-I-A is where I'm from
Guess we're comin’ for a shot at glamour
Not that I don’t love where I live
In fact, I know that it’s better
By the trees, but less people, though
And sometimes, a man gets lonely
And needs a hit of the high life”
It's funny, too, because my Philly—my neighborhood at least—has lots of trees and forests and stuff. Once I came out [to Mount Airy] in 2016, I felt like I was in the Ewok Village—but it’s still Philly. So that was just the final enchantment. I still see the world and come back and feel like Philly just has its own charm, you know? I'm biased. It’s like a family member or something. But it's also a real thing, because I know people are flocking here all the time.
Right, and that makes me proud because I love New York and I still go to New York all the time.
Yeah, me! [laughs]