Wakin on a Pretty Day

Kurt Vile opens his fifth album with nine and a half minutes of a song about nothing in particular that turns out to be about everything — the specific quality of a morning when you don’t have anywhere to be, the way a guitar line can repeat for eight bars without getting boring if the musician means it, the fact that life is mostly this and not the big moments.

The guitar figure loops and loops and Vile’s voice drifts over it like smoke from a cigarette he forgot he was holding. It’s the rare long song that doesn’t build to anything and doesn’t need to. The point is the loop. The point is that the morning keeps happening. Put it on and let the drive become the drive.