November 4th, 2009
Kurt Vile Gets The New York Times Treatment
I missed this when it was published — I guess I was busy interviewing John Oates or something that day — but the New York Times ran a really nice, lengthy piece on Kurt Vile about a week and a half ago. Nothing super revelatory to those around these parts who’ve been following Kurt these past couple of years, but a solid, well-written bit of good exposure nonetheless. An excerpt:
In high school Mr. Vile was a skateboarder who wrote poems (“Kind of twisted and weird, not about girls breaking my heart or anything,” he said) and listened to pop-punk. Soon he drifted toward wrier, artier bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth and eventually toward singer-songwriter titans like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. Appropriately, he often listened to Mr. Springsteen’s blue-collar rock during a stint manning a forklift at an air-freight company in Boston, where he was living with his future wife while she earned a graduate degree in English. Until July he drove a forklift for the Philadelphia Brewing Company.
Mr. Vile’s ambitions for his music are modest and eternal: he wants to make enough money so that he never has to take another day job, operating heavy machinery or otherwise. “I’m not a slacker,” he said. “I’ve worked hard my whole life. But I’m not going to be a total sucker and put all my energy into someone else’s job.”
