Sound Advice: It's Another Good Year for Kurt Vile

Kurt Vile is a busy guy. The 44-year-old Philadelphia-bred singer/songwriter has released nine full-length albums and a torrent of EPs over the last 16 years, an evolving body of work marked by his laconic voice, searching guitar and fertile mind. As if Vile’s most recent album — 2022’s stellar 15-song, 70-minute (watch my moves) — wasn’t enough, he followed it in 2023 with Back to Moon Beach , a nine-song, 52-minute EP that Apple Music dubbed a “set of bottomless non-album material.” Or, as his record label Verve called it, “an EP by no one’s definition but Kurt Vile’s.” It’s populated by the kind of zonked-out, sun-baked guitar jams that has been his bread and butter over the last decade. There are covers, reworked versions of previous material and entirely new creations, all worthy if slightly elusive.

“When I was younger, I wrote more conventionally and I thought that there were rules,” Vile said in a recent interview with LEO Weekly . “The longer I do it, the more I realize that there are no rules, and the possibilities are endless. It’s usually a culmination of a bunch of factors and a deadline. Often it comes down to deciding if the things that are mostly ready will make it onto an album or not. The recording is really just a snapshot of where a song is at that moment because songs will always look a little different each time you play them live and sometimes in that context the more cosmic ones start to feel like they could evolve forever.”

With its recurring piano line and spacy, guitar-fuzz outro, “Another good year for the roses” is the perfect soundtrack to a lazy summer weekend, the sonic equivalent to lounging in a hammock, margarita in hand. “Tom Petty’s gone (but tell him i asked for him),” driven by its interweaving acoustic and electric guitars, is a languid, eight-minute lament about the fact that Vile was never able to meet one of his biggest influences. A cover of “Must Be Santa” is the oddest offering of the bunch, a keyboard-driven effort featuring vocal assistance from Vile’s daughters. It’s not likely to make Vile’s live setlist anytime soon, yet it’s another sign this guy is willing to move in unexpected directions.

Kurt Vile plays at Taft Theatre on June 23 at 8 p.m. More info: tafttheatre.org .

This story was published in CityBeat's June 12 issue.