vince bell
“Vince Bell is a writer”, said producer Bob Neuwirth, who together with producers Dave Soldier (Soldier String Quartet) and Patrick Derivaz (engineer/musician) brought 40 years of Vince’s words and the vision of Ojo to life in 2018.In 2024 it was time for the next chapter. But Neuwirth passed away on May 18, 2022, and he had been the guiding light for Vince since they were introduced in 1992. “Bob is the muse,” Vince always said. So he reached out to Paula Batson, a veteran music executive and Neuwirth’s life partner, who had also been instrumental in OJO. Batson stepped up and gathered the band together again – producers Soldier and Derivaz, and the accomplished musicians from across the music spectrum. These albums are a culmination of Bell’s musical influences.
As a young singer-songwriter in Houston in the early 1970s, Vince was a promising performer on the Lone Star music scene. In his hometown of Houston, Texas, Bell performed regularly at the famed Anderson Fair with the crop of artists from that time – Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith, Lucinda Williams, and Lyle Lovett, who was the baby of the group. The history is detailed in the documentary For the Sake of Song: The Story of Anderson Fair, directed by long-time friend Bruce Bryant, which Vince, Lovett, Lucinda and many more appear in. Both Van Zandt and Clark became friends and mentors. Vince said when he first met Townes, “He could do the world with the simplest tools. You wanted to write as well as he did.“ And the feeling was mutual, as the well-loved VanZandt called Vince a poet.
Known as a troubadour and Americana singer songwriter, his divergent path became more apparent when in 1980 he co-composed music for a production of The Bermuda Triangle in Houston for Space Dance Theatre. He also performed the music alongside jazz rock band Passenger (who four years later recorded Hi-Res with Joe Ely). Having amassed an impressive regional reputation, Vince was preparing to record his debut album in Austin, guitar greats Steve Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson, when on December 21, 1982, after leaving the recording studio he was hit by a drunk driver in an accident that nearly took his life. It definitely changed it.
Sustaining a life-long traumatic brain injury (TBI). During his arduous decade-long recovery, Vince had to re-learn how to walk, talk, and play guitar. He documented the aftermath in his 1998 autobiography, One Man’s Music.”
Vince promoted shows at Austin’s Community College, and mounted a two-act play, The Sun And Moon And Stars, featuring 18 of his unrecorded songs. An album of the same title followed in 1989. In 1991, Nanci Griffith included ‘Sun & Moon & Stars’ on her Late Night Grande Hotel album. Her subsequent, Grammy Award-winning “Other Voices” featured Bell’s ‘Woman Of The Phoenix”.
Twelve years later Vince released his debut, Phoenix (1994), produced by Bob Neuwirth. The music was captivating, but it was the words that defined Vince. The Houston Chronicle praised Phoenix noting: “it adroitly mixes elements of folk, blues and country in an acoustic setting. But it’s Bell’s alternatingly oblique and soul-baring lyrics that make the album a captivating listen.”
Neuwirth, known as an “artist unconcerned with any barriers of style or medium” himself, recognized this immediately when they first met in 1992, ‘the lyrics got my attention.’ “ Phoenix was produced in San Francisco with session musicians including Geoff Muldaur, John Cale, Fritz Richmond, David Mansfield, Mickey Raphael, and Lyle Lovett, Victoria Williams on background vocals.Vince’s second album Texas Plates was released by Paladin/Warner in 1999 and in 2001 he independently released Live in Texas; in 2007 he released Recado through SteadyBoy Records. He has toured throughout the US and Europe, has appeared on the PBS television program Austin City Limits, as well as on such NPR broadcasts as Mountain Stage, World Cafe, and Morning Edition. His songs have been performed and recorded by Little Feat, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and Trout Fishing in America, among others.
What was to become WayWords began in the casita of the adobe house in Santa Fe, New Mexico where Vince relocated just over 20 years ago, at a beloved wood table set facing the floor to ceiling windows and the Santa Fe sky.
Vince currently enlists the assistance of his high school friend Dr. William “Bill” Monroe, emeritus Dean of Honors at the University Houston, as his editor.
Vince has toured extensively throughout the US and Europe, and guest speaker-lecturer on a range of topics from sustaining traumatic brain injuries to music and writing. The Woodson Research Center of the Fondren Library at Rice University in Houston, TX, is home to a comprehensive Vince Bell collection in its Houston Folk Music Archive.
Townes Van Zandt said, ‘Vince is a poet’. Bob said I was a writer, my work was charismatic. I owe them both
Bob…no one was better to me. It was a dream for thirty years. There was no authority higher. I learned the business from him…of art.”
Vince Bell – A Songwriter’s Songwriter
Jimmie Dale Gilmore
New Beginning.
Adobe House
Santa Fe for 22 years, the adobe house is tucked in the hills of the eastern outskirts. The casita is where WayWords began.
Music. WayWords. Art.
INSPIRATION
The Music School, home to 50 years of creative history. It was the studio of renowned native american artist T.C. Cannon, who lived in the casita, rented to him by the former owner.
