Living up to the name

NEW YORK - Hunched against a brick wall on the Lower East Side stands baby-faced Kurt Vile. While compulsively tucking back shoulder-length hair, he bums cigarettes off the clientele of the nearby music bar, Cake Shop.

Among the people he greets, several seem unaware that it's his name on the marquee, that he's the one they've come to hear. But this lack of acknowledgment isn't what's bothering Vile.

"While I was backstage I wrote this really pretty song on the banjo," he grumbles. "Now I can't remember how it goes."

Minor setbacks aside, Vile is in good spirits, as evidenced by a squinting, satisfied grin. His August headlining performance at Cake Shop is part of a mini-tour in support of Vile's forthcoming album, Childish Prodigy. Though his two prior records, Constant Hitmaker and God Is Saying This to You . . . are burgeoning cult favorites, it's the release of Childish Prodigy next Tuesday that will mark his debut on the prestigious indie label Matador Records and, quite possibly, end his days of pre-show anonymity.

Later, in the Cake Shop basement, Kurt turns from the red Solo cup he's been sipping, his lips curling into a mischievous smirk.

"I just remembered that banjo song. And this song," says Vile, 29, barely able to contain his glee, "this song is going to break your little heart."

Somehow, that comes across as not smug but disarmingly sincere - even from a man who calls himself "Philly's Constant Hitmaker."

"It's just a moniker," he says. "But I think it's important to come on serious. There's humor in there but it's a little serious. I definitely write songs in my mind that are hits."

Not only in his mind. Vile's blend of experimental lo-fi and classic rock has caught the ear of tastemakers across the alternative music industry. "Kurt's genius," says Nils Bernstein, the artist liaison for Matador, "is being able to take such a wide range of familiar influences and turn it into something you've never heard, but which feels like you've been listening to it for decades. . . . It's really affecting and kind of disorienting."

Brian Turner, music director of WFMU (91.1 FM) in Jersey City, N.J., says Vile is "writing exceptional songs, employing a lot of really vintage musical ideas and making them sound very modern and very immediate."

In light of all this praise, the sense of destiny that Vile occasionally projects (and not so subtly alludes to in his album titles) seems somewhat plausible. "I always wanted to open for Sonic Youth, and I got to," he points out. "I definitely wanted to be on Matador, and I got to."

While the role of providence may be up for debate, Vile's success is no accident. "I did feel sort of destined all my life," he says. "But that doesn't mean I didn't have doubts. I had a plan - I just didn't necessarily know how it was going to happen."

His backstory reads like the lyrics to a Bob Seger song: Oldest son of 10 children, Vile (his real name) grew up in Lansdowne, where he played trumpet in the Penn Wood High marching band.

At home, "it was close quarters," he says. "There were definitely some brawls. We were all allowed to be in our own worlds because there's so many people you can't all get the same attention, you can be introspective."

Vile's dad, Charles, bought him a used banjo from a fellow SEPTA conductor when Vile was 12.

"I was amazed because in a couple of weeks he was playing songs," his father says. "I remember hearing them and thinking, 'Hey, that's pretty good.' "

Very much in the classic rock tradition, Vile's songs unapologetically refer to his roots.

"Philadelphia's a real working-class city, that's where he's from, and I do think you hear that in his music," says Reynold Jaffe, Vile's manager and friend. "He's a great songwriter who is very much in the vein of blue-collar songwriters. He references things people grew up on listening to 93.3, WMMR."

Although he eschews the allegorical lyricism of classic-rock greats like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, it's the underlying earnestness of off-kilter car jams like Constant Hitmaker's "Freeway" that keeps Vile anchored to Americana. A seeming imperviousness to cynicism is also at the core of his music's appeal.

"It's almost like with punk rock: You've got to see why it's great," says Vile. "They're so loud and they can't play, necessarily, but there's a feeling there that's so sincere."

"Kurt ties a number of disparate elements together," Matador copresident Gerard Cosloy says in an e-mail. "On one hand, he's every bit the accomplished classic rock songwriter he's made out to be. On the other . . . he's the sort of guy who approaches recording (home or otherwise) as its own art form. Being a pretty sick guitarist doesn't hurt, either."

WFMU's Turner adds: "Especially when it comes to invoking classic rock, it's normally done with a lot of irony and a lot of cut-and-paste, copycat riffs. With him it's right down to the core of what's good about it. It's very evocative of traveling and experiencing things, but he never straps on that guitar like a pretentious bard."

After considering art school and doing a brief stint at community college, Vile moved to Philadelphia. In 2003, he met his friend and sometime-bandmate Adam Granduciel. For a time, Vile played guitar in Granduciel's alt-rock band The War on Drugs, leading some to the impression that Vile's involvement with the band was responsible for his "start" - an inaccuracy that remains a thorn in Vile's side.

Because the War on Drugs signed with Secretly Canadian Records last year, Granduciel "sort of got the bigger deal first," Vile says, "so that made a certain pressure. I basically just don't like to be thought of as Kurt Vile of The War on Drugs. I just want to be known for my own thing."

(Granduciel, who plays alongside Mike Zeng and Jesse Turbovitch in Vile's raucous backing band, the Violators, contributed to the making of Vile's first two albums.)

"Don't Get Cute," whose title comes from a Bob Dylan lyric, is an outsider's slap at the music industry, while "My Best Friends (Don't Even Pass This)," brims with "that paranoia - when you think your friends don't come around anymore."

While he was more than pleased by signing with Matador in May, Vile took it in stride. "I knew Childish Prodigy was super good and I wanted the best deal for it," he says, deadpan.

Even so, he remains fairly unassuming.

"I always said if I ever make it big I'll never move out of Philly, I just want a house in Northern Liberties," he says. That wish recently came true, too: Vile lives in a maturely furnished trinity with his wife (and high school girlfriend), Suzanne Lang. It's here, filing records and rifling through the fridge to the sounds of Neil Young's "Transformer Man," that Vile seems most at ease, even as his BlackBerry constantly chimes with calls from his label and the press.

"It's kind of a relief," Lang says of the attention, "because even though I totally always believed in Kurt, you always wonder, 'What if it doesn't work out?' You know, it's kind of a depressing thing to live with for the rest of your life."

Fortunately, for Vile, this doesn't seem to be a threat. Early music-blog buzz about Childish Prodigy has been very positive. Too Cool to Die calls it "beguiling" and "brilliant," while the British blog Allgigs calls it "a melange of trippy-tambourine-psychedelia-mountain-shack-delta-folk-fuzziness that is rather warming and very hypnotic in places . . . "

Which hardly comes as a surprise to Vile. "I figured out how to make things," he says. "I know the music within it is good, and I know people are gonna like it. . . .

"To date - this is my statement at this point - I just know that I have it down. Not to say that the next one won't be even better."