Kurt Vile opens his eighth album, “Bottle It In,” singing about parking in loading zones instead of feeding the city’s meters, boasting in the chorus, “I park for free!”
“The Philadelphia Parking Authority did tweet at me and said, ‘We love your song, Kurt Vile, but don’t be alarmed if we put you on the boot-and-tow list,'” Vile says. “But it had a winky face.”
If you wished to distill Vile’s music down to one silly emoji, you could do a lot worse than that winking face: He wryly named his first album “Constant Hitmaker,” and a droll and sometimes surreal sense of humor has become a hallmark of his output.
“Bottle It In” finds Philly’s Vile — who will perform with his band The Violators at Brooklyn Steel on Wednesday and Thursday — stretching out. Three songs are more than nine minutes long and he’s playing more guitar solos, building on the tradition of six-string savants like Neil Young, J Mascis and Lou Reed.
“The record before that [‘b’lieve i’m goin down…’] for whatever reason became a stripped-down record,” the 38-year-old Vile — that’s his real name — told The Post by phone from a tour stop in Brussels, Belgium. “This one I was on the road a lot more and I didn’t know I’d be playing a bunch of solos, but certainly coming off [touring], the next thing you know, big solos for songs like ‘Skinny Mini’ were rearing their rippin’ heads or whatever. Solos were coming out. … A lot of guitar solos going on in general in life these days.”
Guests on “Bottle It In” include the vocal duo Lucius, singer-songwriter Cass McCombs and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, a fan and tourmate of Vile’s.
Between 2015’s “b’lieve i’m goin down…” and “Bottle It In,” Vile and Australian vocalist Courtney Barnett jointly released “Lotta Sea Lice”; the simpatico songwriters’ album was a mainstay on 2017 best-of lists from the likes of Rolling Stone, BBC Radio 6 and Noisey, and Vile says he’ll “definitely” collaborate with Barnett again.
Vile, who says he’d like to get back to work on unreleased recordings he had started with Dean Ween of longtime Philly-area alternative band Ween, was also a co-founder of the Grammy-winning band The War on Drugs. Vile left the group shortly after its 2008 debut record; The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel was also a member of Vile’s backing band, The Violators.
“That was so a long time ago that we played together, but I think it would pick up right where it left off,” Vile says. “Honestly he hasn’t played with me since 2011 so it’s been a while. We’re friends, but he’s not in Philly so much.”
Vile — who recorded “Bottle It In” at studios all over the country, including in Greenpoint, Brooklyn — has a theory as to why Philadelphia has been a hotbed of quality musical activity for some time.
“Philly is close enough to New York, and people like me and The War on Drugs — it’s been going on a while since Jack Rose, Meg Baird, all kinds of great acts coming out of Philly — but eventually a few of them get an extended amount of recognition,” he says. “And also everyone is fleeing from New York in general because it’s expensive as f–k so it’s a logical place to go.”
Vile, who still lives in the City of Brotherly Love, fondly remembers his last day job there, working at Philadelphia Brewing Company. “I was working the box room, loaded up pallets onto trucks with the forklift, etc. It was a good last blue-collar job to have for sure.”
“One of my favorite lines that I ever wrote [was while] I was fine-tuning my song ‘Jesus Fever’: ‘In a black hole I found a broken skull.’ I wrote that while cleaning kegs. I was pretty inspired.”