Vince Gill Cutting New Album

Overpowering singer Vince Gill, country music’s male vocalist of the year for the past five years, is in the recording studio working on a new album for 1996, but he still will be well-represented in the late-‘95 marketplace.

Late November will see the issuance of “Souvenirs,” a Gill greatest hits album whose 15 cuts include a full dozen songs he wrote or co-wrote. The package includes duets with Reba McEntire on “The Heart Won’t Lie” and Dolly Parton on “I Will Always Love You” as well as the all-but-duet with Patty Loveless on his great career-quickening smash, “When I Call Your Name.”

“I’m not afraid to tell the world that other music inspires me, gives me ideas, something to emulate, something to strive toward,” Gill says, and that is obvious in the new collection.

“Liza Jane,” he says, is a “cousin to Eric Clapton’s ‘Lay Down Sally,”’ which influenced it. He says Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” inspired him to record his “I Still Believe in You” (the Country Music Association’s 1993 Song of the Year) as a ballad when people around him at the time “thought I was nuts.” And Mark Knopfler’s way of playing guitar influenced the frantic “One More Last Chance.”

“They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery,” Gill says. “I’ve always tried to play like guys I admired. I’m still working on the (Knopfler) English accent.”

Of Parton, with whom he does the current hit duet, Gill says that singing with her “is awesome because you don’t have to worry about pitch.

“It’s like getting to hang out with a radar, it’s so perfect.”