Kurt Vile’s love of Philly — and Philadelphia’s affection for Kurt Vile — has never been in question.
For the cover of Constant Hitmaker, the 2008 album that announced his arrival, Vile posed in front of a blown out wall “that looks like a Rauschenberg painting” at the corner of Frankford and Norris, he recalls. “That stuff’s beautiful, you know?”
Since 2012, a Steve “ESPO” Powers mural that doubles as the cover for Vile’s 2013 album Wakin On A Pretty Daze has adorned a wall at Front and Master Streets in Northern Liberties, visible to travelers headed north on the Market-Frankford El.
With his signature mane and quizzical expression, Vile, who grew up in Lansdowne in Delaware County, has been the face of Philly’s reign as the capital city of 21st century indie rock.
The city is embedded in Vile’s music at every turn, from the “I park for free!” boast on the 2018 song “Loading Zones” to the cover of 2022’s Watch My Moves, which pictures the Dad rock king wearing a crocodile mask in Wissahickon Valley Park, flanked by daughters Awilda and Delphine.
But Vile has never repped his hometown so hard as on his new album, Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me, released in May. It includes shout-outs to Lincoln Drive, the Schuylkill, and Sun Ra, and an infectious single “Chance to Bleed” that features Philadelphia gangsta rap pioneer Schoolly D in a video shot at Kung Fu Necktie.
Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me even includes a playful taunt at two of Vile’s classic rock favorites who dared to record songs with the word Philadelphia in the title.
“A couple of my heroes wrote a song,” Vile talk-sings in “You Don’t Know Cuz It’s My Life.” “But that ain’t where they’re from, so hey you don’t know / But I still love you, Neil and the Boss.”
Working in the wee hours in his basement OKV studio — which stands for “Overnight Kurt Vile” — in his fieldstone house in Mount Airy, Vile recalls, “I was singing along to this keyboard track I had laid down, and that thought came to me.”
Vile, who had (legally) parked his Prius in a nearby loading zone, was talking at the Silk City Diner on the Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend where he would realize a long-held ambition: sitting in with centenarian saxophonist Marshall Allen and members of the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Vile — who was wearing a Tammy Wynette T-shirt and MF Doom trucker’s hat, with his 1965 Fender Jazzmaster Sunburst in the booth beside him (without a case) — explained his unique position in Philadelphia music history while dining on an Impossible Burger and Korean fried cauliflower.
“Springsteen wrote the song ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ and Neil wrote ‘Philadelphia,’ and they’re both on the soundtrack to Philadelphia, right?” he says, referring to Jonathan Demme’s 1993 AIDS drama.
“I get where they’re coming from, but it’s still an assignment. They’re singing about a city they don’t know that well. I’m proud of the city that I’m from, and I’m also lucky that I’m from here.
“It’s like my friend Mary Lattimore, who plays the harp.” (And has given lessons to Vile’s daughters, who also both play guitar.) “She’s not from Philly, but she lived here forever, so it feels like home to her, even though she’s in LA now.”
Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs, with whom Vile frequently teamed up when both were aspiring artists in the 2000s, also grew up elsewhere and now lives in Los Angeles.
“They’re two of my oldest friends that were in the Philly scene forever, but they don’t have the extended history that I do.”
The Philly fixture
Vile — who is the oldest boy among the 10 children of his SEPTA train operator father Charlie and stay-at-home mother Donna — is Philly-area born and bred.
“I’m the OG,” he says. “That’s what I’m proud about. It’s like Questlove, or something,” though for all the Philly repping the Roots drummer does, he doesn’t live here either.
Vile, by contrast, is a Philadelphia fixture. When artists like country rebel Margo Price, Australian rocker Courtney Barnett, and North African desert blues band Tinariwen have come to town, there was one way to know for sure they were in Philadelphia: Kurt Vile was standing next to them onstage.
In 2024, MJ Lenderman covered Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” at Union Transfer and paid homage with an altered lyric: “I saw Kurt Vile walkin’ in a pretty haze / His hair was perfect!”
Vile plays the Dell Music Center with his band the Violators on July 25 as part of Connor Barwin’s Make The World Better Concert Weekend. He played Barwin’s first MTWB Foundation benefit in 2014, which raised money to build playgrounds and rec centers throughout the city.
“I don’t follow football and I didn’t know who he was,” Vile says, recalling meeting Barwin at a show. “He walked in and he looked amazing. He was so tall, like a [expletive] Eagle. He was just a genuine fan. I love reconnecting with Connor and watching him do his thing.”
Vile’s July 25 show is the second of two MTWB nights at the Dell. The first-night headliners are 1990s alt-rock heroes Pavement.
“Pavement was my gateway drug to indie rock,” Vile says. “Stephen Malkmus was my hero. I got my first job as a busboy at the Blue Comet on Baltimore Pike and I would spend all my money on Pavement CDs.”
Now, Vile is friends with Malkmus, and was stoked when he found out they were both playing the MTWB weekend — until he realized that he has a gig in Boston the night Pavement is playing. “I’m missing Pavement by a day,” he says. “Which I’m not happy about.”
Vile, 46, has spent his entire life living in the Philly area, save for 2002-03 when he followed his wife Suzanne Lang to Boston while she got a master’s degree at Emerson College.
He worked as a forklift operator for an air freight company. “The most ball bustin’ blue-collar job there is,” he says. Before he mastered the machinery, “I got made fun of a lot my first year. But then I got really good at it.”
Returning to Philly and moving to Northern Liberties, he went to work for Philadelphia Brewing Company, where he was hired by future pizza sensei Joe Beddia who was roommates with Granduciel. “They were all blown away by my forklift skills,” recalls Vile. “And that’s how I met Adam.”
At PBC, Vile met Jack Rose, the late Philadelphia guitarist who, like Vile, was a fan of influential American Primitive guitarist John Fahey.
Asked to name his top five Philadelphia artists, Vile starts with Rose. He then adds Purling Hiss guitarist Mike Polizze, and psychedelic folk singer Meg Baird, Petty Bunco label head and singer Richie Charles, along with Schoolly D.
“Is that five?” It is, but Vile has a couple more: Marshall Allen-slash-Sun Ra, and rockin’ country band Florry. “They’re so fun and excitable and young,” Vile says.
‘Mount Airy really saved my life’
Vile moved to Mount Airy with Lang and Awilda and Delphine — who are now 16 and 13 — in 2016. “I need a driveway,” he said at the time.
“I love Mount Airy and Germantown,” he says. “There’s still so much old-school Philly in Germantown. And Mount Airy really saved my life. I love that there’s forest, and I have room to think.
“But I can still go to the city any time, and it’s so quick,” driving his Prius down Lincoln and Kelly Drives. “You go in through the Art Museum, and it’s a classy way to go in, you know?”
Over 10 albums, Vile has continued to develop a raw, unhurried signature sound. He often seems to be talking to himself in a bemused drawl over patient jams that turn out to be transfixing.
What country star Keith Urban once said of Vile’s 2015 hit “Pretty Pimpin’” in naming it as one of five songs he wished he’d written applies to Vile’s songwriting in general: “I don’t know how he wrote it, but it sounds like pure stream of consciousness.”
‘Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me’
On Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me — whose cover features a photo by Memphis photographer William Eggleston — that deft, uncanny approach is evident on tracks like “99th Song,” an ode to a loop pedal that turns out to be a paean to domestic bliss.
“Stoned on music, well, the best kind of high,” he sings. “Got love in my life, and three girls by my side.” Later, the album includes a more straightforward love song: “Every Time I Look At You,” which begins: “Every time I look at you, sparks fly from my eyes.”
At Allen’s birthday party, Vile took a seat next to guitarist DM Hotep at the rear of the stage. “I was playing spacey, bendy Sonic Youth-hybrid leads,” he said afterward. “I felt really calm up there.”
A few days after that party, Vile celebrated the release of Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me at the Triangle Tavern in South Philly, where 200-plus fans lined up to purchase the album and receive a free vegan cheesesteak as a bonus.
Vile headed out with the Violators in June, and checked in before a sold-out show at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre this month.
“I’m a little discombobulated today,” he says, ordering a late afternoon large coffee and glazed doughnut. “It was a late night.”
The night before, Vile enjoyed a day off at Festa, a beloved San Fran karaoke bar closing this year he wanted to visit one last time. “I’m shy at first, but then everybody sings and I get up, too.” His go-to is “Stand Back” by Stevie Nicks.
The tour, Vile says, “is going good, man.” This trek has made him rethink the streaming era. He’s a fan of physical media, and feels “the past was more simple and honest.”
“But now the way people can consume your catalog from streaming, the younger people can binge my catalog like Netflix, and I can tell that they know all of my music. I just feel that people are connected.
“This is my 10th record, and I’ve accumulated all these songs that have emotional qualities combined with a dreamy, pretty, hypnotic thing, and then it rocks live with my electric guitar. It just keeps evolving. The songs are simple enough, but the possibilities are endless.”
On the bus, Vile has been keeping Philly — and Delco — close to his heart.
“I’m watching Mare of Easttown,” he says. “I never saw it, and now I’m obsessed, just watching all the Delaware County locations and hearing Kate Winslet say a sentence half-Delco, half-British.” He slips into a Winslet impression: “I’m hoping for an an-swer,” and chuckles to himself.
“But it’s my favorite show in a long time,” says Vile, who has Task cued up next. “And it’s got Mannequin Pussy in it. Does the director not know who I am?” he wonders. “I guess I’ve got to get in touch.”
“The timing is interesting, ‘cause I’ve been spending a lot of time in Delco lately,” says Vile, who’s been hanging with his parents and recently dropped in at his old haunt Paul Revere Pizza in Lansdowne. “Now I’m traveling, and I’m touring my Philly record, and I’m loving it. I’m loving being somewhere else and not in Philly every night. But I’m watching Mare of Easttown. And I know I’m gonna love it when I come home.”
Kurt Vile & the Violators with They Are Gutting A Body of Water and Twisted Teens at the Dell Music Center, 2400 Strawberry Mansion Dr. at 7:30 p.m. July 25th, dellmusiccenter.com.
