VINCE GILL: Breathing Room

When you started writing songs, what persuaded you that this was something you could do?

I don’t know that I felt like I was really a writer for a long time, to be honest. I started writing when I moved out to California. I was 19. I’d met Rodney and Guy, some of those folks, so I was thinking, “Shoot, I’m going to try and start making up songs and see what I can come up with.” It was weird because I’d written seven or eight songs, the first ones I’d ever written, and I joined Pure Prairie League…and they liked them and recorded four or five of them. All of a sudden I went, “Oh. You’re a songwriter. You’re not very good, but you’re a songwriter [laughs].” That was the start for me. It was an odd start because I was in this pop/rock band, trying to write those kinds of songs. I go back and listen to them now, and they’re so… I don’t want to say “uninspiring,” but I was so young. You can tell there wasn’t much effort made. I obviously settled for the first thing that came out onto the paper. But I enjoyed writing songs. I knew early on that if I was going to have a solo career, I’d have so much more validity to be a songwriter. Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Willie, Merle, Buck Owens and all the people I admired…they’re great interpreters of songs as well as singer/songwriters. I started my career as a solo artist. I didn’t get too much positive reinforcement about my early songs-rightly so. Maybe they weren’t very good yet. But I told myself, “If I go down in flames, by God, I’m going my way.”

Exactly how did they get better? How did that happen?

It’s the work ethic. It’s working a little harder, digging deeper, whatever you want to call it.

Did you change your method of writing? Even after you thought you’d found an acceptable lyric, you kept looking for something better?

Yeah, it was that, plus it was like playing an instrument; the more you do it, the better you get at it. You realize that songwriting is not this fairy-dust gift of things coming out of the air. You’ve got to work your butt off. You’ve got to get in the habit of writing songs. You do the same thing a musician does. You learn that, “That’s a dead-end road. Don’t go down there. Don’t play that. Don’t sing that. Don’t write that.” I don’t know if that old adage necessarily holds true, that you’ve got to write 10 or 15 songs to get a good one. This [gesturing toward his CDs] may bear that out [laughs]. The other thing is that, like I said earlier, they’re not all “The Boxer” or “Yesterday.” Some things are on there to be fun, to be silly, to have a sense of humor-not be pointed toward trying to get it on the radio. This collection, to me, is all things.

Can you pick a song that if you’d never heard it, you would have come out differently as a writer?

One would be “The Randall Knife,” by Guy Clark. I played on Guy’s original version [from Better Days], and that song just destroyed me. So many things in it reminded me of my life with my father. My dad was a lawyer. My “Randall knife” was a four-iron of my dad’s that I broke. I went and got it fixed and never told him. I told him when I was about 30 years old and he still kicked my ass for it [laughs]. But there was such an interesting parallel in that song. I just wept and wept as we were recording it. I knew I wanted to hear that song at my dad’s funeral someday. The ironic side is that my dad died when I was 40, just like Guy’s did in the song. All these parallels were kind of eerie. That’s when I wrote “Key to Life” for my father, which has a reference to “The Randall Knife” in it. That song goes in all sorts of ways for me.