(watch my moves)

“I always get deep into a record, but now I’m 100% fully operational,” Kurt Vile tells Apple Music. “I got a fully armed battle station.” The Philly singer-songwriter is referring to Overnight KV, or OKV, the new home studio he finished building just before the pandemic hit in 2020. It’s afforded Vile a level of creative independence he’s not felt since he started recording in his bedroom years ago. “Why do I always have to go to some producer's studio?” he asks. “It's on their terms. I'm grateful for it, we got a lot of stuff done. But you could say nothing's been 100% my personality since my early, more lo-fi records. I was 100% guard down, just doing my thing, man.” His ninth LP (and first for Verve, the legendary jazz imprint) combines the experimental purity of those early recordings with the sort of “completely high-fidelity” feel that he says his studio can provide, though he did, to be clear, collaborate again with producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck) both at home and in LA. The result, Vile says, is “kind of like some American folk version of shoegaze music”—a set of sidewinding pop (see: “Flyin [like a fast train]”, originally written for Kesha) and classic rock (“Fo Sho”) that includes contributions from Cate Le Bon and Chastity Belt, as well as drumming from Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint) and Sarah Jones (Hot Chip, Harry Styles). “It’s just lived in, really, the whole record,” he says. “There's multiple records that were left behind. But that's the way it should be. That's like somebody who's a carpenter or something, always working in their shop. I feel like you're not meant to put everything out. Just the way I live my life.” Here, Vile tells the story behind a number of songs on the album. “Goin on a Plane Today” “I got a piano at my house—it's very meditative and I can go to it every day. I remember I'd be touring [2018’s] Bottle It In, and I'd be thinking up these records that I was going to make from home, and then when I was home I'd go over to