Kurt Vile Hit the Storage Limit on His Looper Pedal and Wrote a Song About It

Kurt Vile ran into a wall recently. His red looper pedal, the one he uses like an old four-track recorder to write and archive ideas, tops out at 99 stored recordings. Hit that ceiling and you have to start deleting things. Vile decided instead to write a song about the predicament.

“99th Song” opens his new album, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me, and it stretches past the nine-minute mark. The length isn’t accidental. The track unfolds as a reclined, trance-like groove where boxy electric guitars trade space with half-serious theories about memory storage and creative dead ends. “The last track that’s possible before the software explodes,” Vile drawls at one point. “The mainframe of my memory / from my brain, but also my pedal.”

He shrugs when talking about it. “You got to get another loop pedal once you’ve filled up 99,” he explains. “Until there’s the ability to get three-digit amounts of loops. I mean, 999, I could live with that. Even last night, I was messing with a couple pedals, and they’re both in the upper 90s. It’s time to go grocery shopping.”

The song works because it doesn’t try to sell you on its depth. What starts as a gearhead’s minor annoyance becomes something closer to a quiet confrontation with endings, with the fear that the music might actually stop someday. This has always been Vile’s trick: smuggling weighty ideas inside casual, nowhere-to-be-sounding rock songs.

Across the album, he does it repeatedly. On “You don’t know cuz it’s my life,” he nudges old friends to come back to Philadelphia while poking at Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen for writing about a city they don’t live in anymore. It’s affectionate more than bitter. The record also carries passing references to his late bandmate Rob Laakso, though Vile keeps those mentions brief. “It kind of cheapens it if I keep talking about it,” he says.

At 46, with two decades of shape-shifting behind him, Vile sounds like someone who has decided to stay put and keep the tape rolling. Even if the pedal’s storage limit keeps pushing back.