Willie Nile released his self-titled debut in 1980. A singer-songwriter with a rock’n’roll heart, he became the toast of NYC. After weathering more than a little record company drama and leaving the business for a decade, Nile returned. His new album, The Great Yellow Light, is a 10-track collection that includes anthemic rockers, passionate ballads and even an Irish singalong. It ranks with his debut, his 2006 masterpiece Streets Of New York and 2013’s American Ride as one of his best records.
It’s been almost four years since your last studio album. For you, that’s a long time. Tell us about the past few years.
I put out nine albums in 12 years – from 2009 to 2021. New York At Night came out at the very beginning of Covid, so that was [early] 2020. Then the next year I put out The Day The Earth Stood Still. It came out in the summer of 2021. Then in ’22 I told the director [of his upcoming documentary]: “I won’t make a record this year.” I purposely didn’t make a record in 2022 or ’23 because I wanted to spend the time working on the documentary and be available for that.
What inspired the title track?
The title, The Great Yellow Light, is a reference to painter Vincent Van Gogh and some of the letters that he wrote to his brother Theo. For him, the great yellow light was inspiration. For me, the great yellow light represents awe and wonder. Whether it’s sitting under an awning in the middle of a rainstorm, a child [being born], the ocean crashing – those moments of awe and wonder, whatever they may be.
Tell us a little about An Irish Goodbye.
An Irish goodbye, for those who don’t know, is when you leave some event without saying goodbye – you kind of slip out the door. It’s not meant to be offensive in any way, you just kind of leave early.
I wrote it about the big Irish goodbye: mortality. I have four children, and it was inspired by my daughter Mary. Last March she took her two children and her husband to Ireland. They had a great time. When she came back she was telling me about it on the phone. Later that evening, I was in my apartment and the phrase ‘an Irish goodbye’ came into my head. It stopped me in my tracks and I thought: “That’s a song.” A week later I got to sing it for my father, who was a hundred and six at the time.
A couple of songs on the album were co-written with Frankie Lee, a talented guy who most people know nothing about.
Frankie Lee is one of the greatest songwriters alive. He’s up there with Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan. I’ve been on and off with Frankie since 1992 and he’s absolutely brilliant. He’s very shy, very humble. He’s retired now, he lives in New York, and I owe him a phone call.
For those of us who weren’t in New York in the seventies, tell us a bit about what it was like. You weren’t a punk rocker, but you were part of that scene.
Oh yeah. When I moved here, in the early seventies I always had the feeling there were holdover ghosts from the sixties. I like all kinds of music, but I’m a rocker at heart. I had one foot in CBGB and one foot in Folk City. I would tell my friends in the folk scene: “You gotta go to CBGB! There’s these bands playin’ original music! It’s great!” Not one of them went.
The Great Yellow Light is out on now via River House Records.
