Kurt Vile Reveals His Biggest Moment to Date

Slacker singer-songwriter Kurt Vile – his actual surname, incidentally - has garnered a lot of new fans in a lot of new places in recent times, but his biggest admirers remain his two young daughters at home in his native Philadelphia.
“Yeah totally, it’s cool,” the 36-year-old musician laughs. “My oldest, she’s obsessed with lyrics. My youngest likes them too, but she’s more of feeler. She just feels it. I’m always playing other people’s music or playing my guitar. They listen to my music when I’m away, which is cute.”
Speaking of being away from home, Vile is talking to Hot Press from his hotel room in Manchester on the morning of the very first date of his European tour, which will see him and his band The Violators stopping off in Ireland to play Longitude.
“We got to Manchester yesterday from Philly, and today we have a warm-up gig and then tomorrow we’re playing Glastonbury,” he explains. “We’re over here for a month and we’re not going to go back to Europe until probably the next record.”
The record he’s currently promoting is his sixth studio album, b’lieve I’m goin down, a banjo-heavy, indie-folk affair released late last year on Matador Records. The follow-up to 2013’s Wakin’ On a Pretty Daze, it took him almost a year to make and was recorded in ten different locations including Athens, Brooklyn and Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree.
“It was just the way it worked out. I was working up to that for the last few albums. On 2011’s Smoke Ring For My Halo, basically I picked a couple of studios in New York, but then you just run out of time so you gotta play wherever is available. So I did some in Philly, did some up in Northampton, you know in Jay Mascis’ house.
“And then for Wakin On A Pretty Daze, I kind of extended that,” he continues. “I went over to LA to play with a friend Stella [Mozgawa] from Warpaint on drums and Farmer Dave, both who live in California. I like to go where other people live and soak up their vibe. So for the last record, I fine tuned the art of bouncing around. It’s not like just ‘throw a dart at the wall or at the map or something and see where it goes’, there’s a plan behind it. That said, I think I’m going to stay relatively local for my next album because I think I took that bouncing around thing to the limit for now.”
Before his solo career began to seriously take off, Vile was a member of his close friend Adam Granduciel’s band The War On Drugs. So what does he make of the recent legalisation of marijuana in a number of US states?
“That has nothing to do with me having played with The War On Drugs when I was younger, but it’s cool!” he laughs. “I never thought that that should be something that someone should go to jail forever for. I’m not really into it myself, but I used to be. If people want to smoke weed, they can… and should!”
Vile left The War On Drugs in 2008, having already self-released a number of obscure lo-fi albums. He didn’t really start to make a serious name for himself until the release of the aforementioned Smoke Ring for My Halo. Was he always confident that he’d breakthrough or did he ever consider jacking it all in?
“Most of the time in my music, at least when I deliver the goods, I feel confident, like I’m on a roll,” he explains. “From when I was 14 until I was 27, I was putting out my own music, self-releasing. Back then, sure, I had a confidence and a cockiness. Then I would also sometimes be like, ‘Oh crap, is it ever really gonna happen for me?’ Once I started putting out my own records, that was a relief but still just because a small label puts you out doesn’t mean you’ll get to a bigger label. I signed to Matador and, even though that was huge, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily making a living off of music yet. There’s so many levels of building up, puffing your ego and then deflating all the time. But isn’t that just life in general?”
What has been his biggest moment to date?
“Oh man… every record gets a little bigger for me and hopefully it will continue to do so. My fans become a little more obsessive or a little more wider of a demographic all the time. ‘Pretty Pimpin’ the first single off the last record, went to number one on different radio charts in America. So that was a pretty big moment.”
Will Vile miss his two greatest fans while he’s out on this European tour?
“Yeah, of course,” he sighs. “That does get rough and it’s sad to leave my girls, but it’s high traffic time and you gotta take advantage of it.”

Kurt Vile & The Violators play Longitude on the Sunday