Vince Gill Songs

Vince Gill To Receive Star On Hollywood Walk of Fame

Next year, country music superstar Vince Gill will add a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to his list of honors that includes inductions into the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

The Walk of Fame honorees for 2012 include actors Jennifer Aniston, Richard Burton, Kate Winslet, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lopez and Adam West, music legends Barry White, Hal David, David Foster and the band Heart and cartoonist Matt Groening.

This will be his family’s second star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His wife, singer/songwriter/author Amy Grant, received a star in 2006.

Gill moved to Los Angeles when he was 19 and lived there from 1976 until 1983. “It was one of the best times in my life,” he says. “I have a great fondness for it.

“When I lived out there, I was such a young person that I hadn’t really accomplished much of anything,” he says. “So even the thought of one day having a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was preposterous. It was silly. It wasn’t even in the realm of my thinking.

“I walked up and down Hollywood Boulevard and said, ‘There is so-and-so.’ I never thought for one second, ‘I will have one of these one day.’

“Amy has one out there, which is really neat. I got to go out there and experience that with her. When I found out that I would be getting one too, I said, ‘If you could just put it next to Amy’s that would be awesome.’” When Gill moved to Los Angeles, he quickly discovered that he was surrounded by many of the musicians he had admired while growing up in Oklahoma City, Okla. “The most amazing thing was that it seemed to me that everybody I was really nuts about was out there,” he says. “It was mind-numbing to me who I could go hear play. Those guys I had seen on the back of record jackets were playing in the clubs.”

The first time he performed in Los Angeles was at the Troubadour. He played in Sundance, a bluegrass group fronted by Byron Berline that opened for Guy Clark. “It turns out Emmylou Harris was there, and Rodney Crowell and Guy Clark,” he says, “all of these people that I had no idea how they would shape my future. There they were right off the bat, and we hit it off. I don’t think I could have found a better place to go at that age. It would have been a much better situation for me than coming to Nashville at that time. It was really an amazing place to be.”

Gill first began writing songs while living in Los Angeles. “I was a seriously struggling musician, so I was also out there playing on the Redondo Beach for tips and borrowing cars to get around in and first getting my feet under me,” he says. “The scale of that place was so much bigger than anything I could have ever imagined – miles and miles of people and freeways and oceans and mountains. It was insane. I had never been to a place that big.

Vince Gill News - VINCE GILL TAPS INTO DARKER SIDE ON UPCOMING ALBUM

By Cameron Matthews - The Boot

Prolific country music star Vince Gill is prepping for the release of his first album in five years, 'Guitar Slinger,' which features some of the darkest songs of his career. One of those is 'Threaten Me With Heaven,' the CD's first single that Vince wrote with wife Amy Grant, Dillon O'Brian and the late Will Owsley. The song was inspired by the story of a devout Christian who received some bad news after visiting the doctor but joked, "Well, what are they going to do? Threaten me with heaven?" Vince was so moved by the story that he was compelled to write about it. But then the song took on a whole new meaning before it was even released.

"Since the song was recorded, my friend Will Owsley took his own life, so the song has a profound impact on me now," the singer explains. "In my lifetime, 'Go Rest High on That Mountain' has been the song that helped a lot of people through their grief. I think this one will in turn hopefully do the same thing. It's a powerful, powerful song. I feel like it's the crown jewel of the new record."

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Suicide was the inspiration behind another tearjerking track on the record, 'Billy Paul,' which features Vince and Amy's 9-year-old daughter Corrina on vocals. "It's a song about a friend of mine who took his life after he took someone else's life," Vince explains. "It's very, very dark, but I love that in music. I was always drawn to music with those kinds of things."

Vince admits that he has more sad songs than love songs but also balances it out with uptempo tunes on 'Guitar Slinger' that show his lighter side and his legendary guitar skills. He wrote or co-wrote every track on the project, which was recorded in his home studio.

'Guitar Slinger' is set for release later this year and is the follow-up to his Grammy-winning mash 'These Days.' "I feel like the emphasis has been on the songs and the songs have gotten better," Vince says. "They really run the gamut of what they are about, how they feel, how they sound. It's not an all-traditional record, it's not an all-contemporary record; it's all over the map, like I kind of have always been. But it doesn't feel out of step with anything I've done previously.

Vince Gill Songs, I Will Always Love You, Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing, House of Love, Building Bridges

Jet

All music guide to country, the experts' guide to the best recordings in country music

Worlds Apart (Vince Gill Song)

Billboard