Kurt Vile is a traveller. Similar to the record that preceded it, the writing and recording process for new album Bottle It In was spread out over several years and locales – including recording sessions in Vile’s hometown Philadelphia, along with several stops in Los Angeles and Connecticut.
“Honestly, I just travel to play music all the time anyway,” says Vile of the album’s geographically diverse recording.
“A gig will take me somewhere, and I’ll stop somewhere if it’s close. Playing a show gets me in a certain place where I’m more one with music, and my guitar, rather than blocking out the outside world. I’ve found that my favourite sessions for this record are the ones I came from a gig and was just in the studio for a couple days.
“I’m kind of used to traveling. When I’m traveling it’s usually related to music, and it’s like being on an airplane. You’re moving, but your mind goes to all sorts of places. Traveling is its own place for me. One day I’d like to record in my house, and it does feel natural to be at home, but it’s a little harder to get in the zone there.”
While often inaccurately branded with labels like “slacker”, Kurt Vile actually comes across as the sort of person who is constantly staying creatively active. The recording process for Bottle It In, for instance, was interspersed with the recording of his collaborative album with Courtney Barnett, opening for Neil Young in front of 90,000 people in Quebec, and the constant hum of touring for b’lieve I’m goin’ down.
“When I’m moving anyway, playing gigs, that puts me into high gear so I like to capitalise on those times where I’m more confident.”
Watch the track for ‘Loading Zones’ by Kurt Vile below
Lyrically, Bottle It In fixates around geography and place, both in regards to the physical world and the abstract, and the way those two overlap. Opening track ‘Loading Zones’ is situated in Vile’s native Philadelphia but contains such ruminations as “how beautiful to take a bite out of the world”. In ‘Bassackwards’, Vile talks about being at the beach or on the ground, “circa planet earth”, before taking a sojourn to the moon – presented in a way that doesn’t suggest any discrepancy between the reality of these two places.
The kind of tension that comes with that feels apparent too, and Vile acknowledges that he uses music as a conduit for expressing those feelings. Songs like ‘Mutinies’ directly address the anxiety of modern life – “The mutinies in my head keep stayin’ / I take pills and pills try and make them go away / Small computer in my hand exploding / I think things were way easier with a regular telephone.”
Musically, Bottle It In sees Vile returning to his psychedelic roots and experimenting with sound while retaining the melodic elements present in his more recent work. Songs like ‘Bassackwards’, with its nearly 10-minute run time, are a kind of marriage of these styles, a track that at once feels poppy and sprawling – it’s easy to get lost in these songs.
“I get nostalgic about the old times while still trying to move forward with confidence. A good combination of the two is ideal,” explains Vile. Part of that nostalgia is the “weird keyboards” that create the sonic backdrop for tracks like ‘Bottle It In’ and ‘Cold Was The Wind’, harkening back to Vile’s early lo-fi recordings.
Watch the clip for ‘One Trick Ponies’ by Kurt Vile below
“In my earlier records, those weird keyboards and synths were the things to use at home so that your lo-to-mid-fidelity recordings sounded interesting. I like that stuff anyway, and they make it sound cooler. Lately I’ve been surrounded by a lot of my old keyboards. I moved to a new house with my family, and I had room for all that stuff. A lot of those ideas were conceived at home.”
Like much of his work, Vile took a collaborative approach for Bottle It In. “I’ve always been inspired by all kinds of people and I’m lucky to have kind of accumulated them,” he explains. The album’s engineering saw him record with is previous collaborators such as Rob Schnapf – who recorded ‘Pretty Pimpin’ and ‘Wild Imagination’ from b’lieve i’m goin’ down and who Vile describes as kind of like a father figure. Peter Katis also returned, and Shawn Everett – who Vile hadn’t worked with before in the past – was brought on for another professional perspective.
“You gotta get multi-dimensional,” explains Vile about the process. Alongside Vile’s long-time band The Violators, other collaborators included Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa on the title track, and the iconic Kim Gordon contributing guitars to tracks such as ‘Mutinies’.
With the album’s release and the wave of touring that will likely follow it, for the seemingly constantly-productive Kurt Vile, learning to balance all the activity with time to relax is becoming a more and more pivotal aspect of his life. “I like [it] when I’m just chilling at home. I enjoy just watching fucking TV at night, you know? I gotta have it all. I feel like that’s my new philosophy – take it mellow when I can because I know I’m going to have to start running around again.”
Bottle It In is out now.
