Kurt Vile’s perfect album isn’t by Neil Young or Dylan or Dinosaur Jr. or Pavement or any other similarly scraggly artist on his familiar roll call of influences. For his recent Pitchfork Perfect 10, he picked the 2021 Czarface/MF DOOM collab Super What?—an unexpected choice that makes perfect sense if you look at Vile less as a classic-rock torchbearer and more as the world’s drowsiest rapper, one whose sing-spiel unfurls over zoned-out guitar instrumentals instead of looped beats. Like so much hip-hop, Vile’s songs are so self-referential, so steeped in his own peculiar POV and singular slang, that they seem almost impossible for another artist to cover. And like any proud MC, he never forgets to remind you where he’s from.
As we hear on his 10th album, Philadelphia’s been good to me, Vile’s hometown pride runs so deep, he’s not afraid to spark a beef with his favorite artists for encroaching on his turf. Over the glassy guitar shimmer and laid-back backbeat of “You don’t know cuz it’s my life,” he sings: “I’m from Philadelphia/A couple of my heroes wrote a song/But that ain’t where they’re from/So, hey—you don’t know.” This beef is of the tenderest variety: “I still love ya,” Vile assures them (before adding “Neil and the Boss,” just to make sure there’s zero confusion). For Vile, the jab is less a provocation than an affectionate noogie—after all, he doesn’t seem to be enough of an Elton John fan to give him shit for “Philadelphia Freedom.” But as the song saunters past the five-minute mark, the tone of “You don’t know cuz it’s my life” gradually drifts from playful to poignant, and Vile’s focus turns from the outsiders peering into his city to the locals who had to leave town. “Come back when you can,” he repeats, his voice double-tracked with an aching higher-pitched harmony that wrenches tears from the sentiment. Philly’s been good to him, but he recognizes that’s not the case for everyone.
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Those sorts of unexpected shifts are what make Vile’s brand of self-absorption so uniquely absorbing after all these years, even as Philadelphia leans into his familiar formula of ’70s-Neil ditch-digging filtered through ’80s-Springsteen production and stretched across ’90s-CD sprawl. What seems so straightforward on the surface eventually reveals deeper meanings and truths. Lines that seem artlessly off-the-cuff on first pass accrue an unexpected weight and purpose the fourth time through; the countrified guitar lick that sounds so chipper at the start of a song is dripping with melancholy by the end.
At this point, Vile seems less like a confessional singer-songwriter than a cartographer of the mind, mapping the ways that our thoughts can wander from prosaic to profound and back again. Appearing in a foggy swirl of Twin Peaks synths, the almost-title track “Philly’s been good to me” starts out with Vile saluting his city, polluted river and all. But from his vantage, one of Philly’s most salient features is actually its close proximity to Baltimore, where he likes to kick off his tours and hang out with his pals in Beach House; by the third verse, he’s dreaming of L.A. In moments like these, it becomes clear that Philadelphia’s been good to me isn’t really about living in Philly per se; it’s about the constant tension between being a working musician and a family man, between laying down roots and playing in a traveling band—and how even the vagabond lifestyle of touring can start to feel like its own restrictive routine.
