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Friday, April 11, 2003

By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

In a business that sometimes seems buried to the brim in hat acts who don't write or play what they sing on the radio, Phil Vassar is one of the good guys.

	Phil Vassar: "I always thought the songwriters were more authentic, you know?" Phil Vassar WHERE: Pepsi-Cola Roadhouse, Burgettstown WHEN: 7 p.m. dinner, 8 p.m. show, tonight TICKETS: $45-$65 with dinner. 412-323-1919 ARTIST'S SITE: www.philvassar.com

He's no tight-panted heartthrob -- he's a piano-playing songwriter, which may be why it took the guy some 10 years to break out of the Nashville bars. After leaving Virginia in 1987 and gigging at every open stage, honky-tonk and showcase anywhere near Music Row, Vassar bought a restaurant in Nashville just so he could have a place to headline on weekends.

With his everyman looks and a voice that is solid but not stellar, Vassar was ultimately noticed for the quality of his songs. There's not a moon-and-June, country cookie-cutter knockoff in the bunch. Vassar has a smart, observational songwriting style that breaks the mold with catchy and creative tunes that always find the glass half full.

There are a lot of good songwriters out there. What's surprising about Vassar is that commercial radio plays him, despite his refusal to pander to the FM dial. Before he broke through in 2000 with a self-titled disc that spawned five Top 10 hits, Vassar was just a name on the CD inserts of a half-dozen country stars. Tim McGraw cashed in on Vassar's "For a Little While" and "My Next Thirty Years." Jo Dee Messina scored hits with "Bye Bye" and "I'm Alright," and Colin Raye recorded "Little Red Rodeo." Alan Jackson, a songwriter whose music will be remembered for generations, thought enough of Vassar to cut a version of his "Right on the Money."

"It's kind of weird that most country guys don't write," says Vassar, in a recent phone interview. "I guess a good song is a good song, and there have always been cover songs in country. But I always thought the songwriters were more authentic, you know? I mean, their songs are about something they actually believe -- they lived them. I was always totally enamored by guys in every genre who write. I always wanted to produce my own records, write songs and sing them."

In its narcissistic zeal for self-promotion, the country industry offers an award for every niche, style and overlapping genre of performing, and has given its new star Vassar a bunch of them. He accepts them politely and just keeps cranking out songs. He says he's recording 18 new tunes next week.

"Every once in a while I have a pretty introspective song," he says. " 'Rose Bouquet' [a hit from his debut album] is one. I was going through a divorce [and] it was pretty cathartic to write it. But most of the time I'm a pretty happy guy. I like to have fun and that's what I write about. It's harder for me to write a sad song."

Last year, Vassar's second album had already gone to print when he had an inspiration that may accelerate the pace of his career.

"I was on a plane," he says, "reading -- I don't know -- Newsweek or Time, and I was thinking God must shake his head and say 'What's wrong with you idiots?' I started looking at things from the perspective of what he must think and wrote it down in my notebook. When I got back to Nashville, I recorded it and somehow, really quickly, the song got to my record label president. He said, 'You need to put that out.' "

So Arista Nashville paid to reissue a 14-song version of "American Child" that includes "This is God," a song that breaks several country-radio rules about what might move listeners to change the channel. Yet even before the promotional single had arrived in the mail, radio programmers were enthusiastically passing bootleg copies among themselves and breaking their own rules by daring to "test" it on appreciative audiences. Locally, WDSY and the Froggies jumped on the song.

"I was kind of totally shocked," says Vassar. "I never thought in a million years it would be on the radio. It was just, you know, something I needed to write. Maybe it's something people need to hear."

Ironically, the other tune tagged onto "American Child" is a mindless rocker, the only song in Vassar's repertoire that he didn't write or co-write. He says he had a lot of fun crunching through "Working for a Living" with one of its writers, Huey Lewis.