Good news for American Willie Nile fans, his acclaimed album, The Innocent Ones, is finally coming to America. "This is as good a record as I've ever made," Willie Nile says of The Innocent Ones. That's saying a lot, considering the amount of indispensable music that the tenacious New Yorker has produced over his long and eventful career.
The CD, which long eluded the American market except as an import and the odd merch table, has a U.S. brick-and-mortar street date of November 22, 2011.
In that time, Nile has survived life as a Next Big Thing, walked away from the major-label world twice, and reinvented himself as a scrappy DIY artist. Along the way, he's built a deeply impressive body of recordings, earned the loyalty of a devoted worldwide fan base, and amassed an extensive backlog of effusive critical acclaim.
Willie Nile is both a songwriter's songwriter and an impassioned performer whose stirring, personally charged rock 'n' roll marks him as a true believer. His compositions are as impassioned as they are infectious, and he performs them with a fervor that matches their melodic craft and lyrical insight.
The ranks of Willie Nile's fans include Bruce Springsteen, who has invited him to perform with the E Street Band on multiple occasions, including a pair of historic shows at New York's Shea Stadium and Giant Stadium, and Pete Townshend, who personally requested him as the opening act on The Who's 1980 U.S. tour. Other avowed Nile admirers include Bono, Lou Reed, Graham Parker, Ian Hunter, Jim Jarmusch, Adam Duritz, Little Steven and Lucinda Williams, who once remarked, "Willie Nile is a great artist. If there was any justice in this world, I'd be opening up for him instead of him for me."
The Innocent Ones decisively demonstrates that, more than 30 years into his recording career, Willie Nile is at the top of his game, making music that's as powerful as anything in his esteemed catalog. The album, recorded in New York and Hoboken with such longtime cohorts as songwriting collaborator Frankie Lee, noted producer Stewart Lerman and Eagles/Rosanne Cash guitarist Steuart Smith, has already won considerable praise from critics and fans overseas, where BBC Radio Scotland recently named it Album of the Week, calling it "stunning . . . THE rock 'n' roll album of 2011!," and JAM magazine proclaimed it to be "full of timeless songs . . . passionate . . . romantic . . . stupendous," and called Nile "one of the best American singer-songwriters of our time."
