Kurt Vile Talks New Album, Philadelphia, Neil Young, and More

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fter Kurt Vile finished his new album, he was nervous to play it for his wife. It was the first time she hadn’t heard much of the album as it was being made — hardly any, in fact — so Vile was extra curious to know what she would think. So he left her listening to his new record with headphones at their home in Philadelphia, but sat in an adjacent room.

“I didn’t know what to think,” Vile, 46, says, recounting the anxious experience of sitting within earshot as his spouse listened to his new record for the first time. “But then I heard her laugh at something, and I knew it was good.”

Family, home, and laughter are all recurring themes on Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me, his latest record. It’s an easygoing document of mid-life contentment and creativity, but it’s also full of Vile’s trademark goofball stream of consciousness, certain to elicit laughter from loved ones and fans alike. The album juxtaposes tender writing about home and family with rambling tangents about the convenience of kicking off tours in Baltimore, hearing bar bands cover “96 Tears,” and Vile’s ambivalence when heroes like “Neil and the Boss” write songs about Philadelphia despite not being from there. 

It’s that balance of serious and silly, of immaculately crafted guitar-based music that feels tossed-off, that’s helped catapult Vile into the rarified position of one of the only mainstream-adjacent acts who came up firmly in the world of 2000s indie rock. Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me is the second full-length album that Vile has released for a major label. After achieving his teenage dreams of recording for an esteemed indie label like Matador while still in his twenties, Vile says he set his sights even higher. 

“I remember I said, ‘I gotta be like Neil Young and just focus on the music, because I got nothing else,” he tells Rolling Stone. “The Pavements and Sonic Youths and Neil Youngs, that’s where I strive. And I landed somewhere between them. I’m like the blue-collar, working man’s Neil Young or something.”

For Vile, Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me represents his clearest-ever declaration of his identity as a fortysomething rocker, family man, dad, and Philly native. The record sounds like a distilled version of the contained yet meandering melodicism that has defined Vile’s best work for years. “I lean pretty,” he says. He sums it up even more succinctly mid-way through the concluding jam in “99 Bpm.” “Yeah!” Vile shouts. “Twang-pop!”

 But even if the record making process “took a lot out of” Vile, as he says, and even if a song like “Holiday OKV” touches on dark topics like “fast-acting” medication and the 2023 death from cancer of his longtime bandmate Rob Laakso, Vile much prefers to focus on the concluding lyric of the first verse: “Man, it feels so good to be alive.”

“I get the stress and the psychedelia and all those things you gotta deal with in life in general, as a musician or just as a sensitive person, and then I turn it around, crank it out on the other end as some form of positivity,” he says.

During a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Vile was eager to chat about some things (the recording process, his musical heroes) and less keen to do much self-probing. Asked if there’s a single song he’s most proud of having written, he quickly diverts into discussing how rad Neil Young is. Asked about those heavy lyrics in “Holiday OKV,” Vile’s initial response is to divert: “What’s cool about that song,” he says, “is that Steve Gunn plays on it.”

In conversation, Vile is much like you might assume he’d be from his songs: relaxed, down to earth, quick to make himself laugh, prone to using words like “epic” and “bonehead simple,” the latter a phrase he uses, with pride, to describe the structure of his new songs. 

Vile’s shaggy-dog spirituality reaches new heights of beautiful, boneheaded simplicity on his latest. Several songs (“Zoom 97,” “99th Song,” “99 BPM”) are at least partially about how rad it felt for Kurt Vile to play around with the various gear and instruments used to record said song. (The refrain of “Zoom 97,” a song Vile recorded on a Gold Tone mandolin, goes like this: “Check out my hands, my chimin’ chords/On a Gold Tone mandolin guitar.”)

But the foundation of Vile’s latest record might be the way it contains his most heartfelt declarations. Several people close to Vile have told him that the album sounds, to them, like the most upbeat they’ve ever heard from him. When I suggest that underneath these funny songs about how sweet Philly is, I hear a middle-aged artist singing about family, stability, safety and security, Vile nods his head. “I love that you see all that,” he says. “It is true. I’m singing about my family a lot, too, my surroundings, everything that’s me.”

He continues in a philosophical vein: “Whatever I’ve been doing, I’m still fucking doing it. I’ll do it again. This is where I’m at, this is where I live now.”

This is where I’m at. This is where I live now. Doesn’t that sound like a neat summary of Vile’s whole new album?

“It’s true,” Vile says, returning to one of his favorite topics of discussion, Philadelphia. “That’s interesting, and it is where I live.”