EIGHTEEN SUMMERS EP by Vince Gill Out Now in 50 Years From Home Series

Vince Gill has released EIGHTEEN SUMMERS, the ninth installment in his year-long 50 YEARS FROM HOME EP series. The project continues Gill's exploration of his country music roots, with the title track presented as a duet featuring Cyndi Thomson.

Wide-ranging master instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and producer that he is, Gill never gets too far from country, of course. Since his first solo album in 1985, he's put more than five dozen singles on the Billboard country music charts, including seven No. 1 hits of his own and in collaboration with others. His 22 Grammy Awards are the most of any country artist, and last year he received the Country Music Association's Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award.

So, rightfully, Eighteen Summers 'is kind of steeped in that,' according to Gill, whose father played in country bands around Norman, Oklahoma. 'I got to listen to everything, growing up,' Gill recalls. 'Bluegrass kinda got ahold of me in my teenage years, then I found my way into wanting to be a country artist—and that kind of worked out,' he adds with a laugh.

Those familial musical roots are also celebrated on the guitar featured on the cover of Eighteen Summers. It's been around Gill his whole life, though he doesn't know where it came from initially. 'It's a tiny little thing I used to drag around with me everywhere and bang and beat on it,' he remembers. 'My mom has a picture of me sleeping face down on the couch when I was about a year and a half, maybe two years old, with my arm around that guitar.'

The upbeat, slightly Cajun-flavored 'Eighteen Summers' kicks the EP off as a duet with co-writer Cyndi Thomson, a fellow country singer who had one album and some hits during the early 2000s but had stepped away from the business. 'I saw her at my breakfast haunt, so I introduced myself and said, 'Man, you should be making records. You're too good not to do this!'' Gill remembers. 'She decided to make her way back in, so this made a perfect song for us to do together,' adding 'It's a story for everybody having to watch their kids take off, from the perspective of both parents, as a duet.'

Gill wrote the smooth, swinging 'I'm All the Mississippi You'll Ever Need' with Belle Frantz, but credits Steve Earle with inspiring the title. 'Steve had this bass player named Dennis Crouch, who has played with everybody—a world-class musician. Steve used to introduce him and would say, 'This cat over here is all the Arkansas you'll ever need.' That always stuck with me, and when Belle and I were writing I asked her where she was from and she said Mississippi, so I said, 'OK, maybe this is the time.' Some songs just show up a whole lot later than you ever anticipated.'

The two-stepping, twangy and slightly sinister 'I'll Haunt Your Memory'— 'Everybody wants to get even when they're pissed off, don't they?' Gill quips—marks his first co-write with Carter Faith, whose 2025 debut album Cherry Valley was nominated for Album of the Year at this year's Academy of Country Music Awards, along with Ashley Monroe of Pistol Annies. Gill was producer for two of Monroe's studio albums, Like A Rose and The Blade. Featured on harmony vocals is John Meador from Gill's touring band.

Gill wrote the mellow, lovelorn 'Gone Like Yesterday' himself, wallowing in how Misery keeps me company. 'It's just another broken-hearted song,' he says. 'I really love the chord changes in it; chords you don't normally associate with a country song. It's really musical, and Gordon Mote's piano solo is just fantastic.'

The tone is decidedly happier on 'Dancing In Texas,' a collaboration with Catie Offerman whose three-quarter time sway invites listeners to leave all your troubles and worries behind. 'I've lived in a waltz tempo.' Gill notes. 'Waltzes built my house— 'When I Call Your Name,' 'Pocket Full of Gold,' those kinds of songs. I've always been drawn to waltzes because when I was a little boy my mom taught me how to do it, and the only kind of dancing I still do is an occasional waltz.'

It's another mood shift for 'Last Night at Closing Time,' penned with Brad Warren, Brett Warren, (The Warren Brothers) and Preston Cooper. The mid-tempo paean to loneliness, featuring a soul-piercing pedal steel solo by Paul Franklin, introduces a protagonist who passes away in the last verse. 'I don't mind sad songs. Everybody knows that—the sadder the better. The guy dies on his bar stool; it doesn't get more country than that!'

For the EP's previously released single Gill chose 'What the Cowgirls Do,' his hit from 1994's When Love Finds You album. 'It fit the theme, and it mentions Texas in it and other parts of the country, Mississippi and whatnot. It felt like the right song to follow the others.'

Like the other 50 Years From Home EPs, Eighteen Summers was produced and recorded by Gill at his home studio near Nashville, with engineers Justin Niebank and Matt Rausch and a core group of musicians that includes Franklin, Meador and Mote, as well as guitarists Jedd Hughes, Jack Schneider, and Tom Bukovac, Jim 'Moose' Brown and John Jarvis on keyboards, bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, and drummer Fred Eltringham. Commemorating his departure from Oklahoma to begin his music career in earnest, Gill has been releasing a new EP each month, drawing from songs he's written mostly over the past few years.

Episode 9 of 50 Years From Home with Vince Gill and Charlie Worsham provides a deeper dive into the recording of Eighteen Summers.

Gill wrote the EIGHTEEN SUMMERS title track with Thomson, a country singer who released an album and had hits in the early 2000s before stepping away from the music business. Gill has said he encouraged her to return to recording after a chance encounter.

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