Vince Gill Reveals the Intuitive Process He Uses to Choose Songs for His Albums

Vince Gill has a great voice and is one of the best guitar players in the business today. However, that’s not where his talent stops. He’s also an accomplished and prolific songwriter. He has written many of his biggest hits and has had his songs covered by a number of other artists. More than that, he has a way of knowing if a song needs to be recorded or scrapped and left behind.

In 2002, The Today Show published a crowd-sourced interview with Gill. The questions all came from members of his fan club and touched on topics ranging from his career to his family life and nearly everything in between. One fan named Sherrie wanted to know how he decided which songs to record and which songs to pass over.

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Vince Gill on His Song Selection Process

“Well, it’s pretty simple—you try not to record the bad ones,” Vince Gill said, laughing. After all, no songwriter only writes hit songs. Everyone is going to pen a dud or two every now and then, no matter how skilled they are.

“That’s the interesting thing about writing a lot of songs over the years, hopefully, the process of deciding what to record is really more about what you think is a better song,” he explained. “For the last 13 years, Tony [Brown] and I have just put all the songs together and said, ‘We like this one, don’t like this one quite so much, this one feels good, this one doesn’t feel good,’” he added. “To make an album you need a lot of different things.”

Then, Gill discussed the possibility of putting together an album of songs that didn’t make the cut in the past. Fans shouldn’t get their hopes up. “I don’t anticipate someday making a record of all the songs I didn’t record,” he revealed, “Deep down, there’s probably a good reason why they didn’t end up on the records,” he added with a laugh.

Since 2002, Gill has released six solo studio albums and it seems that his process continues to work.

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