Unruffled singer-songwriter KURT VILE describes the creation of his latest record, Wakin’ On A Pretty Daze, as a simple piece of cake. Ringing out a newly ambitious classic rock sound, we speak to him just as he scores the winning goal.
Vile is more laid-back and more confident than ever before. ‘There are certain double records that people always regard, you know. There’s Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, there’s Bruce Springsteen’s The River, there’s the Stones’ Exile On Main Street, there’s Blonde On Blonde… there are all these records you can compare Wakin’ On A Pretty Daze to in one way or another. Sure, this is a fair amount different, but not really that different’.
Poised to win over even more fans with his fifth full-length, a 69-minute double album of unhurried, laissez-faire psych rock songs, Vile has clearly harboured a penchant for the grandiose since we last crossed paths.
Initially ‘lumped into that DIY, lo-fi, psychedelic kinda scene’, it was his last album, 2011’s Smoke Ring For My Halo, which broke him free of that tag and ushered him straight into the public eye. With a cleaner, more direct sound, these were songs of sun-kissed, lackadaisical excellence, and the critics had come screaming.
Building upon everything that came before it, his new hazy, trancelike record is just as stunning as the rest of his work, but ten times as ambitious.
‘It’s a proper epic’, he tells me over the phone from his Philadelphia home. ‘I now have more control with it, so it can get pretty trippy but it’s still like I had a classic rock control switch on it or something. You know, it’s more solid where in the past it would be more, like, freaky style, like psychedelic pop with a lot of echo on the vocals. Now it’s more about making this really solid, epic thing’.
Working once again with prolific producer John Agnello (Springsteen, Sonic Youth), a man who describes Kurt as ‘the son he never wanted’, he was certainly offered the right tutelage, and the result is eleven songs of gauzy, effortless perfection.
A case in point: meandering opener ‘Wakin On A Pretty Day’, the standout and tone-setter for the entire record. ‘I was really into familiar kind of chord progressions, putting my own stamp on them, by playing them all the time so every little guitar hammer-on is my own, but it’s still, like, very familiar. That came about from touring and just being at one with my guitar and music in general, just like I’ve always been. But it was more of slow process, and less urgent. I wasn’t like suffocatingly trying to get a song.’
In spite of having to juggle professional and family life (he now has two kids, a situation he describes as a ‘lucky kinda busy’), the song-writing still comes freely. ‘It’s not like I just sat there and did a prog thing, like King Crimson or Captain Beefheart, where I’d be forcing myself to rehearse these parts eight hours a day, or something. It’s more like the complete opposite, where you just come back to them whenever you want. It’s just crazy because all of a sudden you’ll just know. Months and months later I wrote the end part of ‘Wakin On A Pretty Day’ when I was on vacation in Puerto Rico and it’s not like I’m sitting there purposefully composing this master thing, it’s just like whenever it feels right, all these others riffs suddenly come out. And you just know they belong.’
As ever, his lyrics deal with the quotidian. ‘I write about living my life. I just write about walking down the street, or daydreaming about my family or about being in transport, in transit, in a sort of daydreaming state of flux, one way or another. Just kind of like, sitting here, looking out of the window’.
Sometimes, though, he also riffs on the metaphorical, and this happens most often when he’s feeling ‘kinda low’. There’s a song called ‘Shame Chamber’ whose chorus (another day in the shame chamber / living life to the lowest power / feeling bad in the best way a man can) ‘applies to everyone in that psychological doghouse of complete shame. Everyone’s been there at one point or another’. And another one called ‘Goldtone’, which is ‘basically about concentrating your pain, whether it’s a lot or a little, whatever it is. Alone, late at night, or whatever, just concentrating it into something, making a sweet chord out of it’.
The artwork is an eye-catching commission by world-renowned Philly graffiti artist Steve Power, who got in touch with Vile. ‘He was just serendipitous and it was just synchronous to the work on the record I guess. It just totally fell into place. I told my manager, ‘you know this guy?’ He had sounded familiar to me already, and my manager had some of his art books, so I got really excited because I’ve always wanted to have a connection with artists of our time.’
‘He did an amazing job with the mural. He basically had total creative control. He was making drawings of the lyrics, interpreting the lyrics through drawing. Once in a while he’d misquote a lyric, but it didn’t matter, you know, it’s just his interpretation. I just let him do his thing, for sure. I suggested drawing some pink sunglasses on there, but that’s it.’
Wrapping up, I ask Vile whether the boastful quip which closes album track ‘Was All Talk’ (‘making music is easy / watch me’) was a sincere statement or not. ‘Oh, yeah, making music comes totally natural to me’, he confirms. ‘That was me in the moment, writing that line, feeling it really good, feeling it easy’.
