As the co-founder, lead singer, and principal songwriter behind Enuff Z’Nuff, Donnie Vie is a Grammy-nominated artist. The Blue Island, Illinois-based band known as Enuff Z’Nuff—or “EZN” for short—went on to receive substantial MTV airplay, earn rave reviews from Billboard and Rolling Stone, appear on Late Night With David Letterman and was regularly featured on both The Howard Stern Show and Mancow’s Morning Madhouse.
Donnie Vie parted ways with Enuff Z’Nuff in 2013 and has kept busy as a solo artist. His latest solo effort is this year’s Beautiful Things, which charted upon release in Japan. Between the release of 2014’s The White Album and 2019’s Beautiful Things, Vie underwent a journey of recovery and altogether getting his affairs in order. I spoke about all of this with the Chicago-based musician by phone in July 2019; audio highlights from that chat are embedded below for your listening pleasure—Vie is as honest and as unfiltered as can be—while a few minutes of my interview with Vie are transcribed below.
More on Donnie Vie and Beautiful Things—which includes appearances by Mr. Big guitarist Paul Gilbert, Jellyfish keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr., and Symphony X’s Mike LePond—can be found online by visiting his official website.
On writing Beautiful Things:
Donnie Vie: I actually got fired from Enuff Z’Nuff… It’d been about four years since I’d written anything… I was wondering if the songs were going to come back. I hadn’t had any ideas that whole time. That’s very rare for me. Then right after I thought that, “I Could Save The World” popped into my head and I wrote that and I demoed it. After that “Breaking Me Down,” that’s the third one on there, and that came next. Once “Fly” came, I knew I was back in business. I said, “Alright, the song gods are smiling on me again.”
On where and when his ideas usually come about:
Donnie Vie: They come from a higher energy. It’s hard for me to figure out what or where they are coming from… Even it’s just a few notes, it just comes to me in my head. It beams into my head from somewhere and then my job is to follow this song and it takes me where it wants to go. My job is just to not screw it up, you know? Then I’ve got to write the lyrics and, luckily, I’ve gotten better with lyrics…
The way you figure out is you eliminate the bad parts of the things that didn’t work in any effect, and when you just hit something and it makes magic and you stick with that. You write that out. The closest thing to magic, real magic, I’ve ever seen happen was there in this record… I’m too big of a buffoon to come up with all that stuff.
On preferring to do things on his own within his creative process:
Donnie Vie: It’s a lonely thing, you know? But I also don’t want guys that can’t work in my creativity anymore. So now I can do exactly what I hear and had a vision about without egos… Those people that aren’t necessarily equipped to do that, and that’s my job. Stick to your job. Do that well and let me do this.
More of my chat with Donnie Vie is embedded below, including discussion of his recovery and what else is coming up for him.
Featured Image Credit: Donnie Vie
