VINCE GILL ADVANTAGE TICKETS
ON SALE 05/17/12 at 10 AM Venue Time
05-26-2012 – Atmore, AL @ Wind Creek Hotel & Casino

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If you need to complain, avoid Vince Gill this weekend.

“No whining allowed. That’s my motto,” the country music singer said in a recent phone interview.

He performs Saturday at the Columbus Civic Center.

The local concert is just one item on Gill’s crowded to-do list. He’s recently recorded on albums for artists like Chris Botti, Don Williams, Bonnie Tyler, Rita Wilson and Rodney Crowell. On top of that, he’ll embark on a bluegrass tour in June.

“I like a full plate,” Gill said.

He’s known for hits like “When I Call Your Name,” “I Still Believe in You,” “One More Last Chance” and many more. A member of the Grand Ole Opry, Gill has sold more than 26 million albums.

In addition to what he’s achieved on his own, Gill has attracted attention as a collaborator.

Among the highlights? He shared the stage with Sting for an episode of “CMT Crossroads.” During the evening of music, they collaborated on hits like “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You.”

“This one musically made sense to me,” Gill said of working with Sting. “It was really fun to dive into what he does and learn it.”

His focus on collaboration extends to his family. He recently produced an album for his daughter, Jenny Gill.

What’s the secret to collaborating with a friend or family member without breaking your personal ties?

“You have to understand the role in whatever it is you’re doing,” said Gill, who is married to singer Amy Grant.

Given Gill’s success in the world of collaborations, I couldn’t help asking if he’d ever consider a musical pairing completely outside his genre — say, performing a duet with a rapper.

“I would give anything a whirl,” he said. “I don’t have any kind of prerequisite that I won’t do this or I won’t do that.”

Since releasing his solo debut mini-album in 1984, Gill has witnessed a diverse evolution of country music. He suggested something’s lacking in the genre’s current state.

“I miss traditional country music,” Gill said. “What I miss is a song like ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today.’”

He also acknowledged that country music’s fan base has evolved, and perhaps doesn’t include a wide demand for traditional music. “Maybe that core audience is not there,” he said.

But don’t think Gill is whining.

He’s not one to get bogged down by these discussions. After all, he has stuff to do. Yes, there is music — but there is also his longtime involvement in philanthropic efforts. Not to mention his passion for the Nashville Predators hockey team.

Get on the phone with Gill and you’ll realize why there’s no whining allowed.

“Life’s great,” he said.

For the first time in nearly 30 years, the Country Music Hall of Fame member doesn’t have a record deal. He got signed by a label in 1983 and had been on the MCA Records roster since 1989.

“My contract ran out. I’d been there for 23 years, and I very well may run right back there and take my next record to them,” he said in an interview at rehearsals for Keith Urban’s “We’re All For The Hall” event last month. “There was no disappointment. …It got put out there that I’d ‘left the label,’ and it just was not true.”

His tenth and final album for the label was last year’s “Guitar Slinger,” recorded in his state-of-the-art home studio. It contained the Grammy-nominated song “Threaten Me With Heaven,” but the single didn’t even break the top 40 on the country chart. Despite the lack of radio airplay, the 55-year-old Gill is optimistic about the future.

“I’m inspired by the freedom to do as much as I want,” he said. “I’ve watched Willie Nelson probably record more music in the last 10 or 20 years than he did in the first 30. That’s my goal, is to make 10 times the music that I’ve made to this point. I’m beyond still inspired to be creative, and I see time running out in a sense. At some point it will be hard to draw breath and sing a high note like I can now. I want to continue to do what I’ve done, but in much larger doses.”

Gill is hitting the road in June for a dozen bluegrass shows. It kicks off June 13 in Richmond, Va. Gill has sold more than 26 million albums and is a 20-time Grammy winner. He is known for dozens of country hits including, “One More Last Chance,” “Whenever You Come Around” and “Go Rest High On That Mountain.”

Vince Gill’s earliest memory is of his father singing.

“‘Old Shep,’ and it just used to rip my heart out when my father would sing it,” says Gill in a call from his Nashville-area home that he shares with his wife, singer Amy Grant. “The guy shoots his own dog at the end of it and my father used to sing it to me all the time just to make me cry. It’s one of my very fondest and tenderest memories of my life.”

Gill has had his own share of making listeners teary-eyed with his music. He’s one of country music’s all-time great balladeers, While he’d had some hits in the 1980s, it wasn’t until the 1990 hit “When I Call Your Name” that he cemented himself as the guy who could use his high tenor to rip your heart out. From that point on, Gill was one of country’s most consistent hitmakers and, in concert, his fans could appreciate that he was as adept a guitar player as a vocalist.

Gill is touring in support his latest album, “Guitar Slinger,” which marks the final album of his contract with MCA Records.

“It’s the first time in a long, long time that I haven’t had a record deal,” he says. “But I’m going to make the next record and take it right back to them and see if they want to put it out. There’s not been any kind of unhappy or disgruntled thing at all. It’s just that the time was up.”

Born in Norman, Okla., in 1957, Gill joined bluegrass bands as a teenager and joined the already established Pure Prairie League as lead vocalist in 1979. He later moved to country music both as a performer and a songwriter.

Although he’s sold more than 22 million albums overall, Gill readily says he’s “not exactly burning the charts up anymore.”

“I’m still trying, but I’ve been shown the door, so to speak. There’s great freedom in that.”

In 2006, Gill released a four CD collection called “These Days.” Inspired a stack of his own songs that he hadn’t been able to record on earlier albums, he dedicated each disc to a different style or type of song. It was a critical hit.

“That was six years ago now, in the height of the single-download movement and here this idiot shows up with four records!” Gill laughs. “It was very much against the grain and against logic, but it was creative and that’s all I ever tried to be.”

Gill says that he’s lucky to have a fan base that allows him to have a successful career even though country radio isn’t playing his music.

Gill has had more recent success on television and the Internet. He recently participated in a TV program with trumpeter Chris Botti after singing Randy Newman’s “Losing You” on Botti’s most recent album, “Impressions.” He played guitar and sang back-up to Carrie Underwood’s performance of “How Great Thou Art” for the TV special “ACM’s Girl’s Night Out.” The performance has been viewed nearly 14 million times on YouTube. He says there’s a reason he didn’t sing it as a duet with Underwood. One of his other first memories is hearing his mother play the song on piano.

“I still get a little bit lumpy throated when I hear that song. Everybody fought me. Her manager, TV people … They said, ‘You have to sing it.’ And I said, ‘No, I promise you this will work and it will be special. This will be the one moment that might get to be a little different.’ But deep down I knew I would have a hard time singing it. Every time I’ve tried to sing it, it’s got me.”

In whatever capacity, making music, says Gill, is something he never takes for granted.

“Not once in my life have I thought about doing something else. I can’t imagine living without playing music. I love it too much, regardless of the results. The results have never been the driving force. I would do it no matter what. I would do it working in a cocktail lounge happy hour, a rathole six nights a week playing covers, I’d do it. It’s the best feeling in the world to me, playing music.”

In this exclusive cover story, Vince and Keith talk about the importance of the Hall of Fame and what it takes to put on this all-star show. Plus, catch all the highlights of the big night. more!

Nashville, TN – April 30, 2012 — Vince Gill will take to the road for a dozen bluegrass shows in June. The 20-time Grammy-winner and member of the Country Music Hall of Fame will be backed by a band made up of some of the most acclaimed pickers in contemporary music, specifically fiddler Stuart Duncan, guitarist Jeff White, banjoist Jim Mills and bassist Dennis Crouch. Gill will round out the band on guitar, mandolin and vocals.

“After the passing of Earl Scruggs [on March 28],” Gill says, “it means the world to me to do these dates with this world-class band playing the music that Earl defined. I absolutely adore this music.”

Duncan, a four-time Grammy winner and member of the Nashville Bluegrass Band, has recorded with Alison Krauss, Yo Yo Ma, Elvis Costello, Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, among many others; Jeff White, a regular member of Gill’s band, has also made records with Del McCoury, Lyle Lovett, The Chieftains and Keith Whitley. Mills, who earned five Grammys as a member of Ricky Skaggs’ Kentucky Thunder, appears too on albums by Doyle Lawson, Bruce Hornsby and Garrison Keillor. Crouch, like Gill, is a member of the Nashville cult band, The Time Jumpers, and has recorded with such luminaries as Ralph Stanley, John Fogerty, Steve Earle, Johnny Cash and Elton John.

These are the tour dates and locations: June 13, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, Richmond, VA; June 14, Alabama Theatre, North Myrtle Beach, SC; June 15 and June 16, The Birchmere, Alexandria, VA; June 17, Knight Theater, Charlotte, NC; June 21, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, TN; June 22, Atlanta Botanical Garden, Atlanta, GA; June 23, Anderson Music Hall, Hiawassee, GA; June 24, Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham, NC; June 28, ROMP Bluegrass Roots and Branches Festival, Owensboro Kentucky, Owensboro, KY; June 29, Lexington Opera House, Lexington, KY; and June 30, Honeywell Center, Wabash, IN.

Bluegrass prodigy Sarah Jarosz will open for Gill from June 13 through June 23. A singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Jarosz signed to Sugar Hill Records when she was 16. She has since released the critically celebrated albums Song Up In Her Head (which contains the Grammy-nominated “Mansinneedof” track) and Follow Me Down.

The title character on Vince Gill’s latest album, “Guitar Slinger,” is one of those fast-fingered, heavy-drinking cowboys you hear about in a million country songs. But in the middle of writing the song, Gill realized the title rhymed with something impossible for him to resist. So he threw in this lyric in the third verse: “Oh, I knew I was in trouble the first time I seen her / I went and married that contemporary Christian singer.”

The line, of course, is a reference to the contemporary Christian singer — Amy Grant, whom Gill married in 2000. “I thought, ‘If I can get that in there, this’ll be hysterical,’ ” says Gill, 55, by phone from his Nashville home. “Amy all but doubled over. She said, ‘You’ll say anything, won’t you?’ Yeah, pretty much.”

Gill’s approach these days is, in fact, to toss just about every idea he can think of into a song, then put it on a record. The Norman, Okla., country superstar has sold 26 million albums in his solo career, and, for the first time in years, he’s free. After Nashville label MCA Records signed him in 1989, Gill spent the next few years putting out a string of smash albums with a strict 10 songs apiece, including the No. 1 singles “One More Last Chance,” “The Heart Won’t Lie” and “Tryin’ to Get Over You,” and the Grammy-winning “When I Call Your Name.” All this time, he was feeling a bit repressed, so in 2006, he spewed out four discs’ worth of material called “These Days.”

He’s got the music in him

“Guitar Slinger,” which came out late last year, is his final MCA album — and it contains a revolutionary 15 songs. “I’m trying to catch up!” Gill says. “I read something about Merle Haggard — I think he made 31 albums in a period of seven or eight years. I go, ‘Man, that’s prolific!’ What inspired me about that four-CD record, was The Beatles put out three albums in one year. … I got more music in me, I feel like I need to get it out.”

“I think the next 10 years, I’ll wind up doing two or three times more music than I’ve done to this point,” he continues, in a phone interview before he heads to his 10-year-old daughter’s elementary school, where she’s portraying Randy Jackson in an “American Idol” spoof. “I’m realizing I have only so many years left of being nimble-fingered and of sound mind — and that’s debatable, at this point.”

The friendly, soft-spoken Gill has never been one of country music’s more radical stars. Inspired in part by his father, a judge who dabbled in banjo and guitar, he spent his childhood in Norman trying to master a variety of stringed instruments. He and a friend auditioned for country-rock stars Pure Prairie League in 1979, and, to Gill’s surprise, he became the band’s new lead singer.

When country took off as the new pop music in the early ’90s, the smooth-voiced, easy-listening balladeer Gill was right there on the charts with Garth Brooks and Travis Tritt. But he related more to George Strait and Alan Jackson, who made sure nobody forgot where the music came from. “In my day, the traditional side was still very much a part of it,” says Gill, who plays the NYCB Theatre at Westbury May 3. “I’m all for rock and roll — I love it, and it’s not a knock. I just think that the traditional side is pretty well gone. It’s not very appealing to me to hear somebody tell me how country they are and they’re dirt roads and backwoods and all that, but it sounds like a Metallica record. The real deep, deep stuff is what I love. Not much of that around.”

Heavy on the solos

True to its title, and the cover photo of Gill swinging around his blond Telecaster, “Guitar Slinger” is heavy on the solos. And it jumps around stylistically, from the honky-tonking title track to religious hymns to poignant songs about friends who passed away in recent years. “Billy Paul” is about a friend’s murder-suicide, and contains a haunting chorus: “What made you go crazy, Billy Paul?” The closing “Buttermilk John” is a tribute to Gill’s longtime guitarist and father figure, John Hughey, who died in 2007 at 73. “It was different,” Gill says. “It was just the first record I was going to make without John.”

At the heart of the album is the ballad “True Love,” Gill’s first duet with Grant since they met to record “House of Love,” the title track on her 1994 album. Grant wrote most of the song, Gill contributed the bridge and, over time, he talked her into recording it at their home studio. “She was really, really hesitant,” Gill recalls. “I said, ‘Why are you hesitant?’ She said, ‘You record your songs really, really slow. I can’t sing that slow!’ I talked her into it, and it’s one of the real gems on that record for me.”

On the surface, Gill, the country-music traditionalist, and Grant, the Christian pop singer, seem to have music in common above everything else. But they come from different worlds. “There’s a woman who really put the blueprint together of taking gospel lyrics and putting them in a really pop-contemporary treatment. She really did that first,” Gill says. “But no, she didn’t know the whole history . … One night I played the Grand Ole Opry and I said, ‘Listen on the radio.’ I called her on the way home and she said, ‘Man, that was good — but what was up with that one dobro player?’ I said, ‘Honey, he’s 88 years old.’ She said, ‘Oh, my god.’ She’s welcoming of all things.”

WHO Vince Gill

WHEN | WHERE 8 p.m. May 3, NYCB Theatre

at Westbury

INFO $49.50-$69.50; 800-745-3000, livenation.com

Vince Gill’s top 5 songs

BY STEVE KNOPPER, Special to Newsday

‘WHEN I CALL YOUR NAME’ — Vince Gill would prove no stranger to bland easy-listening hits in his career, but his pretty, regular-guy voice frequently connected with a heartbreak ballad in the saddest possible way. On his MCA debut in 1989, he tells duet partner Patty Loveless that the “lonely sound of my voice calling is driving me insane.”

‘KINDLY KEEP IT COUNTRY’ — “Please play a sad song,” Gill begs in his wisp of a voice. “My heart’s just been stepped on.” It isn’t just the steel guitar that turns this well-written tearjerker into classic country — Buck Owens or Eddy Arnold could have sung it in 1958.

‘I STILL BELIEVE IN YOU’ — Gill’s first No. 1 hit, the title track of his 1992 album, is the love ballad that put him on the country and pop charts for good. It might have sounded schmaltzy in others’ hands, but Gill has a talent for turning cliches into romance.

‘ONE MORE LAST CHANCE’ — Gill’s straight-man voice in this honky-tonker barely covers up one of the best characters in his songs — the long-suffering wife with “a good book in her left hand/And a rollin’ pin in her right,” who hides the tomcat’s glasses so he can’t see to go out.

‘BUTTERMILK JOHN’ — The closing track on Gill’s latest album, “Guitar Slinger,” is a fiddle-heavy tribute to his longtime guitar player, John Hughey, who died in 2007 after a career of backing tons of Nashville stars, from the late Conway Twitty to Gill.