Willie Nile, The Bottom Line Archive 1980-2000, is two disc set, separated by a 20 year gap, and is a great example of Nile's long term staying power, and the loyalty that Bottom Line owner/curator, Allan Pepper (booker, or talent buyer does not suffice) extends to the artists that he really believes in. Exhibit a is this double-disc affair, highlighting two distinct eras in Nile's 35-year career. It is worth noting that one of the primary reasons we can enjoy the temporal contrasts contained in this collection is simply because, when Willie was ready to come back, Allan Pepper was just as ready to welcome him back to The Bottom Line. It was a second home for me, gushes Nile. Allan and the whole vibe of the club was so musician-friendly and warm. It was just the best place to play for that reason.
American Ride is the ninth studio album from American musician Willie Nile. It was released in June 2013 under Loud & Proud Records. A hell of a lot has been written about rock & roll singer/songwriter Willie Nile since he made his Arista debut in 1981. Musicians and press alike have sung his praises across the globe, yet mainstream success has always proved elusive. It hasn't deterred him, however; he's continued to issue new recordings – albeit sporadically – that have been lyrically consistent, and contain enough deft, melodic hooks, to justify his unrepentant swagger. The recording of American Ride, the follow-up to his killer Innocent Ones from 2011, was funded by a successful Pledge Music campaign; it was to be issued independently. Loud & Proud's Tom Lipsky intervened after hearing it, and made Nile the signature signing for the label's new distribution deal with Sony's RED.
"There's a lot going on in this world between the good, the bad and the in-between, and this album attempts to ride some of those horses," Willie Nile says of his memorably-titled new album World War Willie. The dozen-song set lives up to Nile's reputation as a world-class songwriter, a singularly energetic performer and a true rock 'n' roll believer. Currently in the fourth decade of a recording career that's yielded a panoply of musical riches, the New York-bred artist is currently experiencing an exciting renaissance at a time when many of his contemporaries are winding down or giving up. World War Willie lives up to that standard with some of the most resonant songwriting and performances of Nile's career.
Willie Nile's style has never been monochromatic, either as a songwriter or a performer, but over the course of a recording career that was launched in 1980, two things have been consistent – the guy clearly loves rock & roll, and he sure likes guitars (Nile even released an album called House of a Thousand Guitars). So was anyone out there expecting Nile to make an entire album of contemplative, midtempo acoustic numbers built around the guy playing piano? In many respects, If I Were a River upends the average fan's expectations about a Willie Nile album (especially after 2013's decisively rockin' American Ride), although the dramatic force of Nile's songwriting and the passion of his vocals should be more than familiar to anyone who has been listening to his music over the years.
For a few years in the early '80s, Willie Nile had "next big thing" written all over him; at a time when the music biz was moving from its search for the "new Dylan" to the "new Springsteen," Nile had the look and the smart wordplay of the former along with the rocker's instincts and blazing passion of the latter, and he seemed destined for the big time. Nile made three albums before (two for Arista, one for Columbia) before the major-league recording industry decided they didn't know what to do with him after all, which seems to have been a matter of poor marketing rather than the quality of his work. Nile's three major-label albums have all been out of print since the late '90s, but the British Acadia label has given them a new lease on life with The Arista Columbia Recordings 1980-1991, a two-CD set that features the 32 songs from 1980's Willie Nile, 1981's Golden Down, and 1991's Places I Have Never Been, all in their original sequence.
For nearly 40 years, New York songwriter Willie Nile has given his global cult of fans albums unapologetically romantic in their streetwise rock & roll poetics and poignant in their keen, sweeping observations of everyday life's yearning, brokenness, disappointment, and optimism. Children of Paradise is a return to original material after 2017's Positively Bob: Willie Nile Sings Bob Dylan. Nile's sound, equally steeped in roots rock, hooky garage pop, vintage punk, and urban folk music, is readily on offer on this unabashedly political album. Co-produced with Stewart Lerman and performed by Nile's road band, this set is assembled from 12 unreleased songs old and new, soldered together in the urgency of the era. Cristina Arrigoni's iconic black-and-white sleeve images of street denizens are riveting, drenched in layers of meaning.
While many of us have struggled to salvage a sense of purpose from a year's worth of isolation, veteran New York rocker Willie Nile has tapped into his own lockdown experience as a source of inspiration for the set of haunting new songs that comprise his emotion-charged new release, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Although the veteran singer-songwriter borrowed its title from the beloved 1951 science-fiction movie classic, the album was actually inspired by the sight of Nile's beloved hometown temporarily turned into a desolate ghost town. "It came from seeing the deserted streets of downtown Manhattan, with all the shops and stores boarded up and all these beautiful buildings looking down on everything," Nile recalls, "But one Friday night last June, crossing Varick Street, I realized that there wasn't a car in sight, and that I could have laid down in the middle of the street without anyone noticing.