Vince Gill released ‘Eighteen Summers’ song
By Steven Brodsky
… Enjoy:
From a just-issued news release:
NASHVILLE, TN – August 4, 2026 – The theme of Eighteen Summers, the ninth volume of Vince Gill’s 50 Years From Home EP series, is established early on, when he sings, I’m old school country ever since I was young.
Wide-ranging master instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and producer that he is, Gill never gets too far from country, of course. Since his first solo album in 1985, he’s put more than five dozen singles on the Billboard country music charts, including seven No. 1 hits of his own and in collaboration with others. His 22 Grammy Awards are the most of any country artist, and last year he received the Country Music Association’s Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award.
So, rightfully, Eighteen Summers “is kind of steeped in that,” according to Gill, whose father played in country bands around Norman, Oklahoma. “I got to listen to everything, growing up,” Gill recalls. “Bluegrass kinda got ahold of me in my teenage years, then I found my way into wanting to be a country artist—and that kind of worked out,” he adds with a laugh.
Those familial musical roots are also celebrated on the guitar featured on the cover of Eighteen Summers. It’s been around Gill his whole life, though he doesn’t know where it came from initially. “It’s a tiny little thing I used to drag around with me everywhere and bang and beat on it,” he remembers. “My mom has a picture of me sleeping face down on the couch when I was about a year and a half, maybe two years old, with my arm around that guitar.”
The upbeat, slightly Cajun-flavored “Eighteen Summers” kicks the EP off as a duet with co-writer Cyndi Thomson, a fellow country singer who had one album and some hits during the early 2000s but had stepped away from the business. “I saw her at my breakfast haunt, so I introduced myself and said, ‘Man, you should be making records. You’re too good not to do this!’” Gill remembers. “She decided to make her way back in, so this made a perfect song for us to do together,” adding “It’s a story for everybody having to watch their kids take off, from the perspective of both parents, as a duet.”
Gill wrote the smooth, swinging “I’m All the Mississippi You’ll Ever Need” with Belle Frantz, but credits Steve Earle with inspiring the title. “Steve had this bass player named Dennis Crouch, who has played with everybody—a world-class musician. Steve used to introduce him and would say, ‘This cat over here is all the Arkansas you’ll ever need.’ That always stuck with me, and when Belle and I were writing I asked her where she was from and she said Mississippi, so I said, ‘OK, maybe this is the time.’ Some songs just show up a whole lot later than you ever anticipated.”
The two-stepping, twangy and slightly sinister “I’ll Haunt Your Memory”— “Everybody wants to get even when they’re pissed off, don’t they?” Gill quips—marks his first co-write with Carter Faith, whose 2025 debut album Cherry Valley was nominated for Album of the Year at this year’s Academy of Country Music Awards, along with Ashley Monroe of Pistol Annies. Gill was producer for two of Monroe’s studio albums, Like A Rose and The Blade. Featured on harmony vocals is John Meador from Gill’s touring band.
Gill wrote the mellow, lovelorn “Gone Like Yesterday” himself, wallowing in how Misery keeps me company. “It’s just another broken-hearted song,” he says. “I really love the chord changes in it; chords you don’t normally associate with a country song. It’s really musical, and Gordon Mote’s piano solo is just fantastic.”
The tone is decidedly happier on “Dancing In Texas,” a collaboration with Catie Offerman whose three-quarter time sway invites listeners to leave all your troubles and worries behind. “I’ve lived in a waltz tempo.” Gill notes. “Waltzes built my house— ‘When I Call Your Name,’ ‘Pocket Full of Gold,’ those kinds of songs. I’ve always been drawn to waltzes because when I was a little boy my mom taught me how to do it, and the only kind of dancing I still do is an occasional waltz.”
It’s another mood shift for “Last Night at Closing Time,” penned with Brad Warren, Brett Warren, (The Warren Brothers) and Preston Cooper. The mid-tempo paean to loneliness, featuring a soul-piercing pedal steel solo by Paul Franklin, introduces a protagonist who passes away in the last verse. “I don’t mind sad songs. Everybody knows that—the sadder the better. The guy dies on his bar stool; it doesn’t get more country than that!”
For the EP’s previously released single Gill chose “What the Cowgirls Do,” his hit from 1994’s When Love Finds You album. “It fit the theme, and it mentions Texas in it and other parts of the country, Mississippi and whatnot. It felt like the right song to follow the others.”
Like the other 50 Years From Home EPs, Eighteen Summers was produced and recorded by Gill at his home studio near Nashville, with engineers Justin Niebank and Matt Rausch and a core group of musicians that includes Franklin, Meador and Mote, as well as guitarists Jedd Hughes, Jack Schneider, and Tom Bukovac, Jim “Moose” Brown and John Jarvis on keyboards, bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, and drummer Fred Eltringham. Commemorating his departure from Oklahoma to begin his music career in earnest, Gill has been releasing a new EP each month, drawing from songs he’s written mostly over the past few years.
Posted 8-4-26
On Paul Anka’s birthday
By Steven Brodsky
… Paul Anka was born on July 30, 1941.
Happy 85th birthday wishes go out to Paul Anka!
Posted 7-30-26
Dion (Dion DiMucci) turned 87 years old today
By Steven Brodsky
… Dion was born on July 18, 1939.
Happy birthday wishes go out to Dion!
Some of this column’s readers will be singing the lyrics of “Runaround Sue” when they listen to this audio embed (as will I):
Posted 7-18-26
Personal independence
By Steven Brodsky
… is the theme of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Independence Day.”
The song was performed by Bruce Springsteen in Paris, fittingly on July Fourth (in 2012).
Independence Day 2026 draws very nigh, especially opportune to watch this video of that performance:
Have a happy Independence Day.
See Galatians 5:1. You’ll find this verse at: https://www.blueletterbible.org/nasb20/gal/5/1/s_1096001.
Posted 7-1-26
Which legendary songwriter, recording artist, and performer turned 83 years old today?
By Steven Brodsky
… Anticipation arising from this question ends now.
It’s Carly Simon, who was born on June 25, 1943.
Happy birthday wishes go out to Carly Simon!
Posted 6-25-26
I could tell you about my old man
By Steven Brodsky
… In advance of Father’s Day (which will arrive on June 21, 2026), though, I’ll let Steve Goodman’s autobiographical song “My Old Man” tell us about Goodman’s dad.
Steve Goodman was more vulnerable than most of us want to be.
I’m grateful that he was.
A 2017 interview that I did with Clay Eals, author of Steve Goodman: Facing the Music, includes discussion about Goodman’s “My Old Man.” That interview is posted at: Conversations With Clay Eals, author of ‘Steve Goodman: Facing the Music’ – delcoculturevultures.com.
Posted 6-10-26
On Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday
By Steven Brodsky
… Happy birthday wishes go out to Bob Dylan!
Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941.
The meaningfulness of this song hasn’t aged out at all for many longtime Dylan fans:
May Bob Dylan be forever blessed!
Posted 5-24-26
‘Gotta Serve Somebody’
By Steven Brodsky
… penned by Bob Dylan, was recorded by Dylan on May 4, 1979.
That recording appears on the opening track of Dylan’s 1979 album Slow Train Coming. It garnered Dylan the 1980 Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Male.
In commemoration of the 47th anniversary of Dylan recording “Gotta Serve Somebody,” enjoy:
Posted 5-4-26
Haunted by that summer feeling?
By Steven Brodsky
… Yes, it’s spring in the Northern Hemisphere, but no matter the season where readers are located, that summer feeling has a way of haunting people.
Perennially enjoyable for many of us, Jonathan Richman’s “That Summer Feeling”:
Posted 4-11-26
Prime spring picnic weather is coming to many regions in North America in the coming weeks
By Steven Brodsky
… Hopefully, a song character that we last visited here in spring 2023, the self-referenced “sad sack Sir Galahad” from Harry Chapin’s “If My Mary Were Here,” will be able to truly enjoy “cheddar cheese and wine” or another picnic food and non-alcoholic beverage with the woman he spoke of as “my Mary,” and if not with that Mary, with someone whose presence will help ensure that a picnic will be mutually enjoyable during spring 2026. His unenviable situation was no picnic.
Happy picnicking.
Posted 3-22-26
Leonard Cohen and Billy Joe Shaver drew upon the same Bible verse
By Steven Brodsky
Note to readers: This article appeared at: https://delcoculturevultures.com/2025/03/10/conversations-about-faith/. Does Isaiah 64:6 raise questions for you? You may find answers to those questions at: https://www.gotquestions.org/imputed-righteousness.html.
… The verse is Isaiah 64:6. As translated in the King James Version, the verse reads: “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”
I’m writing about Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will” and Billy Joe Shaver’s “If You Don’t Love Jesus.”
Most people who’ve heard the songs haven’t encountered the verse directly (and most of this column’s readers haven’t heard the Billy Joe Shaver song).
In the Leonard Cohen song, Isaiah 64:6 is alluded to in the line: “In our rags of light, all dressed to kill.”
In the Billy Joe Shaver song, an allusion to the verse appears as: “Take your rotten rags of righteousness and stuff ’em up your self.”
“If It Be Your Will”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXoqQAvkLfQ&ab_channel=LeonardCohen-Topic.
“If You Don’t Love Jesus”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MbF0bc7iEs&ab_channel=Boofitts. The song is “strident,” as I described it during a radio interview that I did with Billy Joe Shaver a number of years ago.
Posted 8-2-21, Reposted and Revised 3-11-25