Fast Track

From inside his home studio, Kurt Vile reveals his working methods. Writing songs, playing guitar - it's all about capturing a "perfect moment."

- By Jonathan Horsley

One of the cruelest misfortunes to befall musicians of any stripe is when memory fails just as their inspiration and abilities converge at the summit of their creative Kilimanjaro. Our best ideas are often the most perishable, the first to evaporate if we fail to document them, get them down on tape.

Kurt Vile is alive to the danger. He takes every precaution, booby-trapping his home studio with recording devices to ensure those song ideas get committed to something more reliable than his grey matter. The ideas might not seem like much in the moment, but that’s okay, because sometimes there’s gold right there, just waiting to be extracted.

“You just lay stuff down really fast with some keys, guitar, or whatever you have, and you’d be surprised,” he explains, speaking from his home studio, OKV Central. “Because what you are trying to do when you are writing a song with vocals, lyrics and guitar is to not think at all. Just lay it down fast. Like Sun Ra — he recorded everything, rehearsals and whatnot. That’s what a looper is there for, just for laying something down fast. And you will be surprised that, just because you were walking by, playing music, it captures it, and you have this whole song you didn’t otherwise have.”