Phil Vassar

Phil Vassar has always considered himself a songwriter first even though he has a 20-year solo career numbering 10 albums (including compilations and other albums) and countless tours.

But as he returns to touring this summer, Vassar the artist is doing more to showcase Vassar the songwriter than perhaps at any point since his self-titled debut album arrived in 2000. For his “Piano Bar” tour, he’ll be playing in a stripped back format that will allow him to freely interact with audiences and share stories about the songs he performs.

“I mean, how fun is that?” Vassar said of the tour. “It’s like be a songwriter again, and just get up there and it’s all about the song and not how many video screens and lights, you know what I’m saying. It’s all about the song again. I love it.”

The tour is a nod to a solo piano livestreams he has done during the pandemic, as well as his latest album, Stripped Down, that was recorded in fairly minimalist settings.

 “It’s very under-produced instead of over-produced,” he said of the album. “You know, we tend to get in the studio, and just because we can, we’ll have 20 people cutting and doing overdubs and this and that. This is just flat out, some of the songs are just me and an acoustic guitar or me and some band sounds or something, like a little loop to kind of get the groove going. But I really like it—a lot.”

Many a songwriter will say the true test of a song is whether it holds up in a solo acoustic format, which means Stripped Down should be as much of a showcase for Vassar’s songwriting as for his singing and piano playing—and a significant departure from his other albums, which have typically featured pretty full arrangements and a good number of uptempo, feel-good songs.

Along with newly written material, Stripped Down includes two songs Vassar wrote two decades ago that come from a stack of unreleased compositions he’s accumulated over the years.

“It’s funny, one of my friends out in California, I said ‘Listen to this tune’ and it’s one of the songs called ‘I Won’t Forget You,’ and she was weeping, I mean, crying. She goes ‘This is the best song you’ve ever written,’” Vassar recalled. “I said, ‘You know, I love this song. It just never made sense to cut it on one of these other records.

“And there’s another song called ‘Perfect World’ that I wrote,” he elaborated. “It’s really sort of poignant right now. It kind of talks about politics, the world and all of this stuff, but it’s fun. It’s a funny kind of a tongue-in-cheek song. So I love it. Those two songs along with the other stuff that’s brand new, I really like it.”

Stripped Down arrived at a point where Vassar’s musical life is quite different than it was in the first decade and a half of his career.

He came to Nashville in the early 1990s and found success toward the end of the decade as a songwriter. Artists who had hits with Vassar songs included Collin Raye (“Little Red Rodeo”), Alan Jackson (“Right on the Money”), Tim McGraw (“For a Little While”), Jo Dee Messina (“Bye Bye, Alright”), and Blackhawk (“Postmarked Birmingham”).

But Vassar always had his eye on being an artist in his own right, and in 1999 he was signed by Arista Nashville. He had considerable success, beginning with his self-titled debut album, which kicked out four top 10 hits, including the chart-topping “Just Another Day in Paradise.”

His follow-up albums, 2002’s American Child and 2004’s Shaken Not Stirred, were also successful, adding five more hit singles, including the No. 1 hit, “In A Real Love,” to his catalog. For a time, Vassar looked like he might be able to make the leap into the top ranks of country stars, but it didn’t happen. His 2008 album, “Prayer of a Common Man” and 2009’s “Travelling Circus” still produced hits but didn’t take Vassar to a new level. After that, Vassar stepped back from recording, with 2016’s American Soul being his only other full-length studio album of original material.

Vassar likes his career where it is now as an independent artist with a catalog of hits (10 No. 1 singles and 26 top 40 hits as a songwriter and artist overall) that enable him to remain a reliable concert draw. He doesn’t miss the pressures that came with trying to get chart-topping singles or having to cater to various interests in the industry.

“You know it’s funny, I was listening to that song ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ the other day, the Glen Campbell song, which I love,” Vassar said, before singing a famous couplet from the tune.  “‘There’ll be a load of compromising/On the road to my horizon,’ I’m like holy crap, no truer words have ever been said. And it’s true. But now we can kind of do things at our own pace. 

“Now I can play because I want to, not because I have to,” he said. “You can just go out and play because you love it, and I love it more than I ever have because of that.”