ARTS intheAirpark Phil Vassar, left, will be joined by guitarist Jeff Smith at the MIM. (Photo by Derrek Kupish)
Stripped Down Phil Vassar will showcase his songwriting talents at an intimate show By Alan Sculley
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hil Vassar always considered himself a songwriter first—even though he has a 20-year solo career numbering 10 albums (including compilations and other albums) and countless tours. But this winter, Vassar the artist is doing more to showcase “Vassar the songwriter” than any point since his self-titled debut album arrived in 2000. First, there is an early 2020 tour where Vassar plays in a stripped back format allowing him to freely interact with audiences and share stories about the songs he performs. “I mean, how fun is that?” Vassar says of the tour. “It’s like being a songwriter again, and just get up there and it’s all about the song and not how many video screens and lights, you know what I’m saying. It’s all about the song again. I love it.” In addition, Vassar will soon release a new album, “Stripped Down,” recorded in a fairly minimalist setting. “It’s very underproduced instead of overproduced,” he says of the album. “You know, we tend to get in the studio, and just because we can, (we’ll) have 20 people cutting and doing overdubs and this and
that. This is just flat out, some of the songs are just me and an acoustic guitar or me and some band sounds or something, like a little loop to kind of get the groove going. But I really like it—a lot.” Many a songwriter will say the true test of a song is whether it holds up in a solo acoustic format, which means “Stripped Down” should be as much of a showcase for Vassar’s songwriting as for his singing and piano playing—and a significant departure from his other albums, which have typically featured pretty full arrangements and a good number of up-tempo, feel-good songs. Along with newly written material, “Stripped Down” will include two songs Vassar wrote two decades ago, coming from a stack of unreleased compositions he’s accumulated over the years. “It’s funny, to one of my friends out in California, I said, ‘Listen to this tune’ and it’s one of the songs called ‘I Won’t Forget You,’ and she was weeping, I mean, crying,” Vassar recalls. “She goes ‘This is the best song you’ve ever written.’ And she’s a writer and a friend of mine, and I said, ‘You know, I love this song. It just never made sense to cut it on one of these other records.’
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“And there’s another song called ‘Perfect World’ I wrote,” he elaborated. “It’s really sort of poignant right now. It kind of talks about politics, the world and all of this stuff, but it’s fun. It’s a funny kind of a tonguein-cheek song. So I love it. Those two songs along with the other stuff that’s brand new, I really like it.” “Stripped Down” will arrive at a point where Vassar’s musical life is quite different than it was in the first decade and a half of his career. He came to Nashville in the early 1990s, and found success toward the end of the decade as a songwriter. Artists who had hits with Vassar songs included Collin Raye (“Little Red Rodeo”), Alan Jackson (“Right on the Money”), Tim McGraw (“For a Little While”), Jo Dee Messina (“Bye Bye, Alright”) and Blackhawk (“Postmarked Birmingham”). But Vassar always had his eye on being an artist in his own right, and in 1999 he was signed by Arista Nashville. He had considerable success, beginning with his self-titled debut album, which kicked out four top 10 hits, including the chart-topping “Just Another Day in Paradise.” His follow-up albums, 2002’s “American