Album: Break My Heart

Vince Bell has been working toward this record for his entire career. A Texan by birth, Bell came up through the Lone Star State’s vivid and storied troubadour culture, playing the clubs of Houston and Austin in the 1970s alongside legends such as Townes Van Zandt and Eric Taylor while influencing a new generation of rising stars such as Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith (both of whom would eventually record Bell’s songs).

He lost most of the 1980s to a devastating car crash in which he suffered extensive injuries that forced his mind and body to relearn almost everything. Fittingly, he titled his long-delayed 1994 debut album Phoenix, as he rose from near-death to deliver a beautiful collection of songs that producer Bob Neuwirth adorned with masterful supporting musicians and just the right amount of air to let the songs breathe deeply.

Stints in Nashville and the Texas hill country preceded a defining move to Santa Fe. The art-centered New Mexico town’s high-desert sestting helped inspire Bell to push the boundaries of his music toward broader soundscapes. Poetry and jazz increasingly became a dominant part of his artistic palette. He pioneered an improvisational writing technique he dubbed WayWords. Meanwhile, Neuwirth and partner Paula Batson, along with producers Dave Soldier and Patrick Derivaz, helped recruit a top-shelf cast of New York jazz and Americana musicians to bring these new visions to life.

The first step was Ojo, a fascinating 2018 album that the Houston Chronicle’s Andrew Dansby called “a sphere of jazz-minded folk music that offers few reference points.” Neuwirth, a legendary Bob Dylan cohort who became a beloved champion of Bell’s work, died in 2022, but Batson, Soldier and Derivaz, along with Bell’s lifelong Texas friend Bill Browder, helped Bell to keep moving forward.

The album is dedicated to Neuwirth, about whom Vince says, “No one was better to me. If I ever grow up, I want to be just like him. Long before this album began, he inspired me to make that poetry happen. Bob is the muse. He said, ‘y’don’t wanna just write three verses and a refrain forever, do you?’ Let the dance begin.”

And now we have Break My Heart, which perfectly melds Bell’s singer-songwriter early years with his latter-day explorations into jazz-inflected poetry. Some songs here are spoken, some are sung, some are a little of both. Throughout, Vince’s words focus on pushing listeners toward an expansion of the mind’s horizons. As he puts it in the album’s final track, “Create more time and you’ve made room for tomorrow. Create a fresh perspective and you can change the world.”

A dozen musicians helped Bell make the album, including acclaimed singer Laura Cantrell, well-travelled guitarist Mark Spencer, innovative bassist Ratzo Harris and Saturday Night Live Band percussionist Valerie Naranjo. They gathered at Brooklyn’s Big Orange Sheep studio to bring this music and these words to life. The album package includes artwork from Bell’s friend and WayWords collaborator Vince Pawless.

From lively folk-pop tunes with instantly memorable melodies such as the title track and “All Through My Days,” to thought-provoking tone-poems with adventurous jazz accompaniment such as “Worldliness” and “Desperate For A Laugh,” to the impressionistic mysticism of the Neuwirth-penned “Four Famous French Photographs,” to an enlightening new take on his 1970s classic “Woman of the Phoenix,” Break My Heart distills everything that makes Vince Bell’s art so magical into thirteen tracks across thirty-eight minutes. He’s always growing, always learning, always creating something new. Cue up the music and follow along on this journey to parts unknown.

–  Peter Blackstock, November 2025