On Friday, Vince Gill announced plans to release a new album called Okie on August 23. In anticipation of the release, the Nashville icon has released a new single called “A Letter To My Mama,” which you can hear below.
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“I thought this was going to be a songwriter record, not a concept album,” Gill says, who wrote or co-wrote all 12 tracks on the album. “It wound up being more information than I’d envisioned. A friend sent me an email saying, ‘You could have only written this record after living a 60-year-plus life.’ He said, ‘There’s no struggle in these songs, just truth and your experience.’”
This will be Gill’s first solo album since 2016’s Down To My Last Bad Habit. Since 2017, the Oklahoma native has been playing guitar and singing with the Eagles.
In our cover story for the January/February 2019 issue, Gill elaborated on the writing of the album.
“I don’t have that many years left to be creative, so I want to cover as much ground as I can,” he said. “This record is very different from anything else I’ve done. It’s very acoustic-minded. There’s no soloing. It’s very song-minded, too, and these are age-appropriate songs that a 61-year-old man should be writing. It’s about real life and the things that really matter. I’ve got a song on there that I wrote for Guy Clark after his passing. A song I wrote for Merle Haggard after his passing. Two songs about Amy. A song about abuse. A song about teenage pregnancy. It’s a lot of subjects that some people are gonna completely run from.”
Read the full cover story here.
