Ask Kurt Vile about his favorite singer-songwriters working today, and there’s a good chance he’ll tell you to check out Luke Roberts, an East Nashville-raised peer whose music he’s been tuned into for upwards of 15 years. “His songwriting, his delivery, his recording — they’re just classic songs,” says the Philly rocker. “It’s sort of in the Nashville tradition, except he’s his own unique weirdo.”
If there’s one thing Vile knows, it’s unique weirdos, and over the years, he’s done what he can to help introduce more people to Roberts’ music. This week, he’s giving his longtime pal the biggest co-sign available, releasing a new EP centered on Roberts’ song “Classic Love,” a bittersweet, slow-rolling ballad that he’s wanted to do something with for years.
“We always knew it was just extra special,” Vile says. “It’s so great. Great enough that I built a whole EP around it.”
Vile encountered Roberts’ music around 2009 on the recommendation of his manager, Rennie Jaffe. Listening to the early single “Unspotted Clothes,” which would eventually become the centerpiece of Roberts’ well-received 2011 debut, Big Bells and Dime Songs, Vile sensed a kinship right away. “My music is often written when I’m down, but I also make sure eventually I turn it around with a joke or something like that. And he does things like that a lot,” he says. “He can get you in the chest with a melancholy thing, but he can also make you laugh. It could be within one line.”
He reached out to Roberts online, and the two became friends. Not long after that, drummer Kyle Spence, who’s one of Roberts’ closest collaborators, joined Vile’s backing band, the Violators. Vile was beginning to win a wider audience for his own music at the time; in 2015, when he reached a new career peak with his album B’lieve I’m Goin Down… and the adult alternative smash “Pretty Pimpin,” he invited Roberts out on the road as one of two opening acts, along with Waxahatchee.
Editor’s picks
Vile recalls that tour as a somewhat hectic one for himself. “We had our one and only Number One hit, and I was struggling with technology,” he says. “I had in-ear monitors for the first time. Our shows were kind of a clusterfuck at best.”
But he looks back fondly on Roberts’ opening sets, where he’d frequently come out for a cameo. “I’d walk onstage and sing along to ‘Unspotted Clothes,’” he says. “It was a wild ride and it was beautiful…. I’ve believed in him ever since.”
Vile first heard “Classic Love” as part of a still-unreleased album that Roberts was making with Spence some years back. “I was like, ‘Man, this could go on our record,’” he says. He ended up with the two distinct takes on the song that anchor the Classic Love EP. It opens with Roberts’ original recording, completed in the studio with some added vocals from Vile. “I just sang along with it,” he says.
The second version of “Classic Love” on the EP is a “folky, trancey” cover that Vile recorded this summer with the Violators, including some “really good, jangly, ‘There She Goes’-esque guitar” from longtime sideman Jesse Trbovich and jazzy drumming by Mikel Patrick Avery of Natural Information Society. “That’s my cover of Luke’s song with all my boys involved,” Vile says. “It’s just my nod to him.”
The EP also features a second Vile/Roberts collab on “Hit of the Highlife,” featuring a cool, spacey arrangement full of wah-wah guitar and “all kinds of loops and synths.” “It’s sort of a hypnotic thing about both of us being in our respective hometowns and traveling to get a shot of inspiration, only to go back home,” Vile says. “That one turned out awesome.”
Related Content
He rounded out the EP with a pair of remakes that are sure to delight KV fans. One of them, “Slow Talkers ’22,” revisits a finger-picking highlight from his 2008 debut, Constant Hitmaker. “I just love that I have these folk songs in my repertoire that I can return to,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for, I don’t know, 20-something years, and now kids are coming to the shows that their parents played my music. I’m moving forward, but sticking to my roots at the same time.”
Finally, there’s a cover of Beach House’s 2015 song “Wildflower,” which he recorded a couple of years ago after taking his two daughters, Awilda and Delphine, to see a Beach House show in Philadelphia. (At that same show, Vile sat in on his friend Mary Lattimore’s opening set.) Depression Cherry, the album on which “Wildflower” originally appeared, is a favorite of his. “I remember that album came out as I was doing promo for B’lieve I’m Goin Down…, and I would just listen to it over and over in the airplane,” he says. “It’s such a good album. But I love them all…. Their songs hit you right in the feelings. They make you want to cry, but they’re so beautiful.”
Classic Love is Vile’s latest release for Verve Records, where he signed in 2021 after more than a decade on independent labels. He recorded his tracks at Spence’s studio in Athens, Georgia, and at a studio operated in Philly by Violators bassist Adam Langellotti. “I just love being able to do this on Verve,” he says. “And I like that we can crank them out ourselves. Sort of back to the way I used to do it, except we got better equipment now.”
Trending Stories
Vile is calling from the road, in between some summer nights opening for Pixies (“really fun”) and a few headline dates of his own. He mentions that he’s been listening to a lot of hip-hop lately, and he’s feeling inspired after reading a biography of the late underground legend MF DOOM. “I love MF DOOM so much,” he says. “He talked about making multiple albums at once, which I would do back in the old days, using similar Roland digital eight-tracks that I used. So that really re-galvanized me.”
When he gets back home to Philadelphia, he’s looking forward to finishing up his first new full-length since 2022’s Watch My Moves. “I’m definitely turning that in at some point, and it’ll come out sometime next year,” he says. “I got more than enough songs.”