Vance Gilbert came to Boston from his native Philadelphia in the early 90’s, and moved into the folk scene after paying some dues as a jazz pianist and vocalist. He made the most of a great opportunity when Shawn Colvin invited him to tour the country with her.  After three albums on the Philo/Rounder label, and four more albums released independently, Gilbert has established himself as one of the stars of the folk music circuit.

His beautiful, expressive, and textured vocals are tinged with emotion and feeling, and his music carries a trace of the jazz of his early career.  He writes songs with a passion and a sense of conviction that touches everyone in his audiences.  He is also known for his quick wit and his sense of humor;  the manner in which he pulls his audience from the comedy between songs, to the irony within them, often leaves his audiences pleasantly worn out.

I am very grateful to Vance and his management for the opportunity to talk with him on the phone about his recent work opening shows for the comedian George Carlin, the new songs that he is writing for his upcoming CD, and his ability to inhabit the songs he sings at a depth of soul that is amazing to watch and listen to.   The conversation was a lot of fun; Vance is a great guy; full of gratitude for his place in this world, warm and friendly, generous with his time and with his experiences, and very down-to-earth and approachable.

Bob:                            I’ve seen you perform five or six times, and I just have to say that I just love your stuff!

Vance:                            Well thanks so much!  It seems to have found it own niche, and I’m just going to plug away, man! This is my fiftieth year, and I imagine I’m somewhere around halfway through my tenure on this big ball, and this is what I do, I’m telling you.  It’s  a wonderful place to be.  I look a the careers of somebody like Richard Thompson or Greg Brown, and I’m just amazed by their longevity and their energy at being past 50, and I hope to have a piece of that, and I hope to continue improving.  That’s more exciting than anything else; to take a look at something I’m doing, and realizing that it’s actually better than something I did a couple of years ago.

Bob:                            You were up here this past November, at the Merrill Auditorium in Portland; how did that go? How did Portland treat you?

Vance:                            Yeah, it was great, that was me and my boss at the time, George Carlin, and working with him is always a ball.  The Merrill was particularly cool, because that’s kind of home for me, I get to drive home from that show.  They were a real accepting audience and into what I was doing, and you can’t beat that with a stick!  No tomatoes were thrown – no fruit was harmed at that show!

It’s great that someone like George Carlin would take notice and say that this would be really wonderfully ancillary to his show.. I think that’s how they feel – George’s people have been using comics to open for him for the longest time, this was an opportunity to have somebody who was musical, which is different from what they’ve been doing,  but at least funny enough to defend themselves, and that’s pretty much my bill.

Bob:                            I can see where Carlin’s audience would enjoy you; you’re both sort of into this irreverent comedy thing, and fearless in terms of your art; I can see where his audience would appreciate what you do in terms of your attitude on stage and the type of performance that you do.

Vance:                            I think there indeed was a certain amount of cool symbiosis there, they definitely did recognize all of that. There will be more Carlin stuff, probably in the summer and into the fall, but now I’m working on new album, and I really want to concentrate on getting that to happen.

Bob:                            I want to talk to you a little about that, because it sound like a great idea..

Vance:                            Oh, it’s a ball to even think about, and to write around this is just so much fun.  The songs are written, all but I’d say two or three of them.  It’s exciting to be at a point in my music where I can actually brag about the fact that I’m not done writing the song.  It’s very cool, because I tend to be a “song completer”.  I’m one of those people where, I start the song, and I get it in the notebook, and nothing can happen until I finish the song.  And I think that’s in a lot of ways to my detriment.  I feel that I could do myself more good if I let a song sit, or if I let various ideas stew – and that’s what I ended up doing with this project, I ended up with a notebook full of incomplete ideas.   I was running with this idea of, what would it sound like if I wrote a song as if I were Van Morrison, or as if I were Richard Thompson; or how would Patty Griffin write this song.  And be blatant about it, rather than trying to fool an audience into thinking that what I came up with sprung from the brow of Zeus.  This is what I was shooting for, and I ended up with a notebook full of cools stuff by doing it.

Bob:                            Did you take an analytic approach to that, by studying their music, or was it more an intuitional thing?

Vance:               It was wholly intuitional, very intuitional for me;  I couldn’t take a studied approach to that.  Part of it was I would get to a place where I was really into whichever one of these artists that I’d be talking about, I’d be so into what they were doing and listening to a mess of it, that their style, their ideas, their vibe would creep into what I was doing, and then I would just kind of run with it stylistically and say, well, this is how I think this should go.

Bob:                            That sounds like a lot of fun!

Vance:                        I can’t tell you how much immense fun it was!   There will be sacred cows gored… I wrote a tune that I think sounds a little bit like something Dylan might have done.   There’s one that sounds like Al Jarreau hooked up with Lynrd Skynrd; there’s a Van Morrisson thing… There’s another tune that sounds like Patty Griffin got together with Raffi. 

It’s not so much preconceived, like I’m going to try to write a Richard Thompson tune; but I would start writing down the tune, and I’d say, you know, I see where it was going, why deny it, and I just went with it from there, and had a great time.

Bob:                            So, are you performing any of these new songs at your gigs?

Vance:                            Oh, I’m performing almost all of them.  To the point where, some of the new songs I have not memorized yet, so, I’m dragging the notebook up onto the stage, I’m singing the song right out of the notebook.  I’m a slow memorizer, so they’re coming up off the page to the audience.  I hope and pray people don’t think I’m just being dirt lazy, and not having memorized the tunes.

Bob:                            One song that I’ve seen you perform a couple of times, and it’s out on your MySpace site, is “Taking It All to Tennessee”.  That song is just this deeply raw emotional moment of abandonment, and when you perform it you have a total lack of self-consciousness. It just touches people because you are able to do that.  How do you get yourself to that place where you are able to touch that moment where that song was created, and bring that all back to the performance?

Vance:                            Thank you for recognizing that it is as raw and as real as it is, and I think that’s part of the answer. There are so many parts that were real with that friend that was leaving.  I’ll never forget him opening up his wallet and showing me this house that he bought in Tennessee, and you want to be joyous about it, but you realize, there goes Wednesday afternoon Chinese food! You realize that this person’s going to be gone.  The images as they flash in my head are real each time. I very seldom have had to phone that song in, it would be as real if I performed it tomorrow as almost a decade ago when I wrote it.

The recording of that song that’s on my MySpace page is a live performance at the Kerrville Folk Music Festival. I’m particularly proud of it because, you know, it’s one thing to put yourself in a position to be unbridled and free, but you also have to utilize the tools musically in such a way that it’s listenable.  I felt like that performance had both of those qualities going on with it; I felt like I was singing my tail off and I really meant it at the same time.   It was in tune, the time was good, and I’d been singing it out quit a bit.  It was a fairly solid reading of that song, and I was pretty proud of it, and I’m glad it sounds the way that it does on MySpace.

Bob:                            We’re talking about Ellis, here, aren’t we?

Vance:                            Yeah, the song is about my buddy Ellis Paul when he left town; it pretty much, you know, tore me in half.  He had written “Translucent Soul” about our friendship, and then he made it clear that he was going to leave town. I was basically saying, how dare you write about me and then split, dude.

Bob:                            It’s very generous of you to talk about it in this way.

Vance:                            Well, you know, my definition of folk music is pretty immediate: folk music is personal, portable music.  It’s music that tells a story, that you can take with you to the next town and tell that story again.  So, I’m fairly unashamed about the stories that I tell; they’re not always absolutely the truth, but, you know, they’re true for somebody.  And I won’t always tell everybody exactly what the impetus for the song was, because sometimes the names have to be changed to protect the innocent; but by golly, I think a lot of times the stories are worth hearing, if for no other reason than people like to connect to something that has happened to somebody else that they can have some identity with.

Bob:                            Well, I’m going to let you go, I’ve got some really cool stuff here, and I appreciate it very much!  We’ll look forward to seeing you up here at the Maple Room on February 2nd.

Vance:                            I’m glad you see the relevance to the stuff I’m doing, because, you know, gosh, I think I have something to say; I’m sure I do.  Thank you for your time, too, and I’ll see you in a month or so!