Vince Gill
by Geoffrey Himes
It was a bit of a jolt to see Vince Gill, the smiling face of the CMA Awards for so many years, on stage at The Ryman in September for the Americana Music Association Awards Show, a celebration of alternative-country. He was there to give a lifetime achievement award to his old friend Rodney Crowell, and he regaled the crowd with risqué tales of their wild and wooly youth.
It was a welcome reminder that Gill, Music Row’s Mr. Insider for so long, started out as an outsider, a member of The Cherry Bombs, the house band for Crowell, Rosanne Cash and many of the most progressive country acts of the ’80s. Gill returned to those roots this year with These Days, his ambitious four-CD box set of 43 newly recorded original songs grouped into four genres: country-rock, country-pop, trad-country and bluegrass-country. The voters in this year’s critics poll embraced the project by naming These Days as the second-best Album and Gill himself as best songwriter, second-best male vocalist, second-best instrumentalist and third-best overall act. Other than the Dixie Chicks, no one did better in the poll.
“The fact that the album was bold and different helped create interest in it,” Gill acknowledges. “It went against the grain in an industry that has become so single-oriented. In a climate so focused on one song at a time that can be downloaded, here comes Crazy Boy with 43 songs and four CDs. Don’t get me wrong; I’d still like to have hit songs. I’m still trying, but things have changed. Why go after country radio when it hasn’t been receptive to me?
“I’ve never sat in the studio and said, ‘This will be a hit if I do this.’ I’ve always just followed my ears. That’s what I took away from working with Rodney and Rosanne and Emmylou early on. Those people were at all points artist-driven and at all points song-driven. They didn’t chase what was trendy. They taught me what art looks like, and 25 years later, I hope I encourage people to be artists and not just acts. A lot of acts are going to do great, that’s been going on from day one. But there were acts who were as popular as Hank Williams in his time, but that doesn’t mean they were as great an artist as he was. At the end of the day what are you going to remember?
“The Dixie Chicks are part of that movement,” he continues. “They have a really neat way of blending that bluegrass instrumentation with songs and voices that aren’t bluegrass. They found a really neat niche that no one was doing. It was a neat blending of those two worlds with Natalie’s voice sitting on top with that attitude she has. It was fresh and great. Forget all the political stuff; it’s laughable that their career was obliterated by one statement. I miss them. Just because they’re not on the radio doesn’t change my opinion of them.”
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