Banjos, Superman, and life with nine siblings: The moment Kurt Vile knew he would become a musician
Intergenerational relationships were at their strongest when Kurt Vile‘s 2015 record B’lieve I’m Goin Down came out.
I handed a copy to the elder statesman of my family, in a bid to prove that music wasn’t in fact dead. It took just an hour of its runtime to prove my point, and rather smugly, I watched as my inbox filled up with messages that drew references to Neil Young, Tom Petty and even shades of Bob Dylan.
Because, packed in with all the quirks and idiosyncrasies of Vile’s behaviour and musical delivery, is a sense of musical familiarity that brings warmth with it. At its essence, this is a storyteller trusting in the walls of his guitar and letting us in on the conversation. Stream of consciousness lyrics and raw guitar playing harken to a primitive era gone by, when the budding sounds of Americana rose through the hills via the humble banjo.
It makes sense then that that’s how it all started for Vile. Growing up a stone’s throw from the home of American music, the Appalachian mountains, he grew up in Pennsylvania, alongside nine other siblings, of which he was the third oldest. Time and attention were preciously fought over, as were toys and, more importantly, musical instruments.
With little at their disposal and ten minds to keep occupied, the Vile family stumped up for a banjo, which, while underwhelming for Vile at the time, ultimately served as the cornerstone of his career.
“I kind of wished [it] was a guitar, so I’d kind of just play it like a guitar anyway,” he remembered, “I was really into writing pretty primitive tunes, and really into recording. I pretty much knew I was going to do music [with my life] then.”
While the banjo wasn’t exactly the instrument he had dreamed of, he continued on and used the idiosyncratic tone of it to help form his artistic voice. He may not have realised it at the time, but the quirks, humour and imagination of his songwriting all came from the sound of the banjo, which led him into bizarre worlds of storytelling.
So Vile began writing songs, describing his first self-penned track as “a joke song. It was a good instrumental; I knew all these chords, but then I was quoting a cartoon as the lyrics on top of it. I had seen this cartoon about Superman and Lex Luthor; it was like the back history of why Lex Luthor hated Superman. They used to be friends, and then some giant stone of kryptonite fell, and it made Lex Luthor’s hair fall out, and he was like, ‘You made all my hair fall out!’ It was a really stupid cartoon, but that was my song, ‘You Made All My Hair Fall Out’.”
While Lex Luthor was left behind by the time he got his record deal, Vile still continued to lace esoterica into his musical world, and fans loved him for it. ‘Bassackwards’ was a ten-minute headfuck and ‘That’s Life, Tho (Almost Hate To Say)’ a dry, hysterical take on the Philadelphia drawl, and both tracks cemented his modern legacy. But it’s hard to imagine they would have ever existed without the banjo.
