{"id":468131,"date":"2026-05-26T17:26:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T17:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/468131\/"},"modified":"2026-05-26T17:26:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T17:26:15","slug":"kurt-vile-is-chasing-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/468131\/","title":{"rendered":"Kurt Vile Is Chasing Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young have in common? Long-running legends, co-employers of guitarist Nils Lofgren, writers of songs called \u201cBorn to Run,\u201d \u201cLong Walk Home,\u201d and \u201cWrecking Ball.\u201d But on Kurt Vile<\/a>\u2019s latest album, the only thing the 46-year-old songwriter cares about is that Bruce and Neil have both written music about his hometown.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m from Philadelphia,\u201d Vile sings in \u201cYou don\u2019t know cuz it\u2019s my life.\u201d \u201cA couple heroes wrote songs but that ain\u2019t where they\u2019re from\u2026 So, hey, you don\u2019t know!\u201d Since the undercurrent to Vile\u2019s sunny, hypnotic music has long been a sense of universal benevolence, he quickly ensures us he\u2019s not trying to start any regional beef: \u201cBut I still love ya,\u201d he affirms before a heartfelt incantation he repeats in the place of a chorus: \u201cNeil and the Boss.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s frank dismissal of farewell tours and lets out a hearty laugh (\u201cWhen I retire, you\u2019ll know\u2026 because I\u2019ll be dead\u201d), 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. \u201cI\u2019m more emotional,\u201d he says. \u201cI like when music takes me back.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a quality he\u2019s been able to achieve in his own songwriting. Philadelphia\u2019s Been Good to Me<\/a> is Vile\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Amid all his usual lyrical ticks\u2014the cin\u00e9ma-verit\u00e9 musings on his own creative process, the proud dismissal of actual drugs on his still-pretty-druggy music\u2014Vile offers moving odes to his wife and kids like \u201cEvery time I look at you\u201d and, in \u201c99 BPM,\u201d reflections on his late collaborator, Rob Laakso<\/a>, 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\u2019s basement studio in the leafy neighborhood of Mount Airy, a space he refers to as OKV Central (or \u201cOvernight Kurt Vile,\u201d named for his preferred working hours).<\/p>\n

\u201cI had this acoustic guitar that was like a beater I hadn\u2019t played in a while,\u201d Vile says. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cBobby Jean\u201d 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\u2019s the Night mourned his fallen comrades in a ragged roll call of rock\u2019n\u2019roll 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 \u201cIt was 2012 but it felt like 2014\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What do Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young have in common? Long-running legends, co-employers of guitarist Nils Lofgren, writers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468132,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[90124,321,93,61,1635,60,202317,1904,11514,514],"class_list":["post-468131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-_opinion","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-interview","tag-ireland","tag-kurt-vile","tag-onecolumn","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleed","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}