Vince Gill Drops Soulful New EP ‘Nobody Held Her Like Me’
Vince Gill embraces his love for the blues on his latest EP, Nobody Held Her Like Me, the seventh volume in his monthly 50 Years From Home EP series.
“I love soul music,” Gill explains. “I’ve loved the soulful side of music forever, whether it’s Ray Charles or Bruno Mars. George Jones was as soulful a singer as anybody who ever lived. I heard a lot of blues music from my big brother. I would hear Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, people like that. To me, in some ways, it’s all blues. I’m just drawn to it.”
Nobody Held Her Like Me kicks off with a melodic title track in the vein of the Eagles’ “I Can’t Tell You Why,” which Gill co-wrote with Joe Glaser and Jimmy Nalls. It’s another love song in his vast repertoire.
“Joe is the guy in Nashville who fixes everyone’s guitars. He asked me if he could bring Jimmy, a ‘great guitarist,’ over to the house,” recalls Gill. “He mentioned that Jimmy was struggling with Parkinson’s. The three of us spent the day together and talked about what Jimmy missed about being a musician. It inspired a guitar lick that I came up with. Eventually Jimmy passed away and I wanted to give both Jimmy and Joe credit for the lick they’d inspired that day.”
Gill penned the laid-back broken-heart track “Back When My World Was Blue” with Ernest and Chandler Walters. “Goin’ To Tampa” takes it to the honky-tonk with the help of co-writers “Big Al” Anderson and McKinley James. Anderson plays acoustic guitar on the track, which features a hot piano ride by John Jarvis. Tearjerker “I Cried All the Way to Memphis,” a first-time collaboration with Patrick Droney, features backing vocals from Maggie Rose.
Just in time for Mother’s Day, “Mama’s Gone to Heaven” cranks up the tempo in a hand-clapping direction marked by piano by Gordon Mote and a stinging guitar solo by Gill. The song was inspired by a conversation with John Parks, who works in the clubhouse at Gill’s regular golf course. “I’m On To You” brings things back to mellow and more heartbreak as Gill heads back into that lane with co-writer Harper O’Neill. It also features America’s Got Talent finalist Lamont Landers, a blue-eyed soul singer from Alabama Gill discovered from online performance posts.
Gill caps Nobody Held Her Like Me with one of his previous hits, “Whenever You Come Around,” which hit No. 2 on the Billboard Country charts as the first single from his When Love Finds You album in 1994. The cover art for Nobody Held Her Like Me features two Fender Stratocasters owned by Gill: one is a 1959 Gill bought from the son of Duane Eddy, who originally purchased the guitar, and the other is refinished 1965 model he bought for $200 and a pair of boots from his late best friend and longtime guitar tech, Benny Garcia.
Commemorating his departure from his native Oklahoma to begin his music career, Gill has been releasing a new EP each month, drawing from songs he has accumulated during the past few years, with each collection built around a unifying theme. During this time he continues to play with the Eagles, including a run of stadium shows as part of its “The Long Goodbye, Act III Tour,” as well as solo dates that resume in June and run through August.
