Why Kurt Vile got a banjo instead of a guitar as a kid
Only a few individuals have made country music acceptable for the indie rock generation. Jeff Tweedy certainly did his part with Wilco and Uncle Tupelo, as did Jenny Lewis with Rilo Kiley. But if there’s one person who made the languid, yearning tones of country music sound completely at home with a slacker/stoner indie rock aesthetic, it has to be Kurt Vile.
Threading the needle between John Prine, Neil Young, and J Mascis, Vile had been fusing fuzzy offset Fender riffs with gentle country and folk influences for over 20 years. He was probably always destined to be a little twangier than his peers in the indie rock scene – his father was such a fan of country and bluegrass music that when Vile asked for a guitar as a kid, his dad gave him a banjo instead.
“I think I wanted to play guitar first because it’s cool to do, and I was definitely into music at a young age. But my dad actually got me a banjo first, which I sort of played like a guitar.” Vile explained to Matt Sweeney in the D’Addario video series ‘Guitar Power’. “So that was my in. I would play it all the time, and then a neighbour across the street gave me a guitar like a year later. I wanted to play guitar to be cool, like whatever bands I was listening to. It’s definitely like the coolest thing you could possibly do in the world.”
“My dad was always playing records. He was a bluegrass aficionado, so it was a lot of country music,” Vile told About Entertainment in 2009. “When I was 14, he bought me a banjo, which I kind of wished was a guitar. So I’d kind of just play it like a guitar anyway. 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.”
Although there was only roughly a year between Vile’s start on the banjo and his eventual acquisition of a guitar, that period of time saw Vile begin his prolific songwriting career. Still a kid, Vile took in the inspirations that were around him, most of which were either cartoons or comic books.
“The first song I wrote was, like, 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,” Vile told The Village Voice in 2011. “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’.”
“The things I wrote after that — I don’t even want to tell you the names of the songs, because then somebody might try to — I have close friends, with my stuff, and it’s a good memory, but I don’t really want anybody to dig out my old songs, you know?” Vile admitted. “I am proud of a lot of them. But they’re all written on banjo.”
Once he began playing the guitar, Vile largely stopped focusing on banjo. But there are still some traces of the instrument throughout his discography. Vile incorporated some banjo into his first albums, with the most notable inclusion being ‘Heart Attack’ on Childish Prodigy. Vile also played the banjo on a few tracks for B’lieve I’m Goin Down… and picked it back up for ‘Come Again’ on Bottle It In. There wasn’t any banjo on Vile’s most recent album, Watch My Moves, but there’s probably a decent chance that Vile will return to his first instrument soon.
Check out ‘Heart Attack’ down below.
