"I really wanted to do some piano songs on this record," he explains. "In fact, it was necessary. When I first came to Nashville, I didn't think of myself as a great player, but because of certain necessities -- eating, paying the rent, stuff like that -- I was soon playing it on gigs just about every day of the week, sometimes twice a day. I'm at the point now where I feel confident about bringing the piano out a little bit more. In fact, there are several songs on this album that are just a piano, a microphone, and me; all they needed was one take and the vibe was there."
Shaken Not Stirred, then, is a bridge that stretches from the present back to Lynchburg, Virginia, where Phil grew up pretty much like the young man he sings about now on "In a Real Love" ("I was eighteen making minimum wage … You were cum laude with strawberry lips … I was your daddy's worst fear"). He was mainly into sports when a track scholarship paid his way into James Madison University, but then hopes of making it in music drew him out west to Nashville.
Phil remembers those early days; they weren't, after all, that long ago. "I still think about that time a lot," he says, "when nobody was calling and I was bartending or looking for any work I could possibly do. It seemed like every friend I had was getting record deals -- everybody but me. It took me ten years to get my first song cut."
That was in 1996, when Engelbert Humperdinck recorded "Once in a While," which Phil had written with a fellow bartender. Other artists quickly lined up to record more of his songs: Collin Raye ("Little Red Rodeo"), Alan Jackson ("Right on the Money"), Tim McGraw ("For a Little While"), Jo Dee Messina ("Bye Bye" and "I'm Alright") and BlackHawk ("Postmarked Birmingham"). Almost overnight, Phil's stock as a songwriter skyrocketed in Music City, but his greatest ambition -- to launch his own performing career -- proved more elusive.
"The problem was that I played the piano," he says. "Everyone kept asking me, 'Don't you play guitar? Can you wear a hat?' Then after I started getting hits I began hearing, 'Oh, you're a piano player? Great! Let's try it!'"
When Arista Nashville released his debut, Phil Vassar, in 2000, suddenly country music had no problem accommodating a golden-touch songwriter with a winning vocal style, a crowd-pleasing show, and a grand piano. Four tracks from that album broke into the Top Ten as singles; "Just Another Day in Paradise," peaked at number one while "Carlene" hit #5, "Six-Pack Summer" went to #9 and "That's When I Love You" reached #3. (A few weeks after "Just Another Day in Paradise," Tim McGraw nudged it out of the top spot with his recording of "My Next Thirty Years" -- another Vassar composition.) Two years after that, Phil's sophomore release, American Child, climbed to number four on the Billboard country charts and fired two hit singles -- the title track and "This Is God."
By now the media have acknowledged Vassar as a quadruple-threat, equally strong in writing, playing, singing, and entertaining. Tom Netherland from the Richmond Times-Dispatch hailed: "In terms of talent…you'd be challenged to find a more complete musician today." The local press takes special notice of his commitment to deliver the best possible show for every crowd: Taking stock of his performance at a county fair the night after he had served as a presenter at the Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas, a reviewer for CN&R in Chico, California, noted that he "gave the corndog-eating Silver Dollar fair crowd a high-energy performance that got them clapping, dancing, and singing along to a powerful set that commanded our full attention."
Response should be just as strong once Shaken Not Stirred hits the streets. Already Phil is back on tour, working the new songs into his set, playing with the same guys who joined him on the album, and erasing all doubts about whether there's room for a multitalented piano man in country music. "Each time I try something new, I set the bar a little higher," he says. "I try to do better than I did before. I try to write the best songs I possibly can. The live show is such a big part of what I do, and Shaken Not Stirred is all about that. It shows who I am when my band and I are doing what we do best. And it can't get more real than that."