Kurt Vile Talks with Amanda Petrusich

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kurt Vile—that’s his real name—helped found the rock band the War on Drugs. But he left that band shortly after its début to make records of his own. His albums include “Childish Prodigy,” “Smoke Ring for My Halo,” and the recently released “Speed, Sound, Lonely KV (ep.)” Vile’s music has been characterized as “slacker rock,” but he takes songwriting seriously. He’s popular enough to have been honored with Kurt Vile Day in his home town of Philadelphia, but he tells the music critic Amanda Petrusich that he still can’t get a reaction from his hero, Neil Young. He joined Petrusich in the fall of 2018, at the New Yorker Festival, for a conversation and to perform a live version of “Pretty Pimpin.” This segment originally aired April 12, 2019.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:12.7	Kurt Weill was a co-founder of the rock band, The War on Drugs.
0:16.9	But he left the band shortly after its debut to make records all on his own,
0:21.7	and they're sometimes characterized as slacker rock.
0:24.6	His recent EP is called Speed, Sound Lonely KV.
0:29.8	She's deliciously tall, sort of a long girl.
0:40.3	She's delightfully small, sort of a song girl.
0:50.0	She freely admits to the girl.
0:52.8	Kurt Vile, that's V-I-L-E, it's his real name,
0:56.2	has also appeared on the comedy show Portlandia
0:58.4	and on HBO's animated series, Animals,
1:00.9	where he played a singing squirrel.
1:03.9	Vial came to the New Yorker Festival in 2018
1:06.0	to talk with our critic Amanda Petrusich.
1:09.6	You were a clue on Jeopardy last year.
1:12.1	This is one of my favorite Kurt Vile facts.
1:14.8	Well, it's kind of a weird, it's kind of a weird clue.
1:19.5	The clue was the violators assist this pretty pimpin rocker in his foul work.
1:25.0	Yeah.
1:25.8	It was like, it was a real, he's the riddler.
1:30.3	Like, how nobody could even understand, even if they knew the answer, they'd be like, wait, what?
	...

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