In Conversation With Colin: The Delines

Over the span of his life and career, Willy Vlautin has been many things; a singer, a songwriter, a novelist, a musician and an actor. Those roles have taken on many forms and have taken Vlautin onto many places, yet he still remains self-deprecating and profoundly modest about his own multi-faceted talents.

Willy was the frontman of the twangy alt-country outfit Richmond Fontaine, they first caught the ear of music fans who wanted a grittiness and realism within the framework of guitars that harkened back to The Replacements, True Believers and R.E.M.

He disbanded the group in 2014 after 20 years, and formed The Delines creating a mellower feel especially since joining forces with singer Amy Boone whose vocals bring a seductiveness and innocence but also at the same time a weariness to the songs, all composed by Willy.

The country-soul band return with their new album Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, it’s a record of romantic misfits and small time grifters who live out of suitcases and cars, who can’t seem to settle down but hope that in the next town will be the score that saves them. The album features the stalwart Delines line up: Amy Boone on vocals, Cory Gray on horns and keyboards, Sean Oldham on drums, Freddy Trujillo on bass, and Willy Vlautin on guitar.

Speaking from the band’s small office in the St. Johns neighbourhood of Portland Oregon where he works on writing novels as well as his songs, Willy Vlautin and Amy Boone chatted to Newport City Radio’s Colin Palmer.

Around a dozen of the fictional song titles in Willy’s last novel The Horse developed into actual songs, some of which feature on the new album. Willy insists it’s the group’s most cinematic record, and includes some upbeat material at the continued demands of singer Amy Boone. “Amy will grab me, and she’ll say, ‘Can you just write me a romantic song where no one gets decapitated?’ she likes the romance, so it has a few of those.”

The Delines latest release again showcases Vlautin’s masterful vignettes of the downtrodden, and Amy’s ability to draw you into the lives of the album’s characters via both heartache and heart-warming dignity that make it yet another hauntingly immersive listening experience.

“I just like doing it,” explains Willy about his prolific writing. “It’s been a crutch for most of my life. It seems like I’ve done a lot of stuff but I’ve been doing this a long time. I don’t feel as if I’m very fast at it but I work at it really hard. As Willy Nelson once said ‘a professional songwriter can write songs all day, they’re just not going to be any good’, how you write a good song is the ultimate mystery. When I write a song I think of them as stories, I’ll think of an idea for a story and then I think what kind of music would fit with that and then I start building it and tearing it down and re-building it but I think it’s from being a novelist that I edit a lot both in songs and stories.”

Amy is sitting next to Willy quietly listening but interjects with a sideways glance aimed straight towards him and declares with admiration “He’s a prolific writer, I can’t keep up with this man”, she insists. “He’s got a new song and we’re already thinking about albums down the road.”

There’s a theme running through the latest collection of songs just released on Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom – women on the skids who are trying to make good. ‘Maureen’s Gone Missing’ – a woman robs a drug operation and skips town, ‘Don’t Miss Your Bus Lorraine’ – a woman recently released from prison on drug convictions comes back to a society where marijuana is legal while she is now a convicted criminal and can’t find a decent job, and the Bobbie Gentry influenced ‘Nancy & The Pensacola Pimp’ – the story of a woman who gets revenge on the pimp who has an obsession with only three things: money, Nancy, and driving endlessly back and forth across the United States.

To give the songs credence Amy admits she must feel empathy with each character, creating a theatrical side to the arrangements that are cinematic and take on another dimension in their live shows. “Oh absolutely, I’ve got to be an actress,” she laughs. “I have to find a way into these songs where I can identify with them, there’s always something in Willy’s writing that I can identify with, not directly always but I can find a way in.”

As if to emphasise the point Willy explains further about two central characters on the album, “Maureen is about a woman that does good on robbing, and she gets away with a large amount of cash and then Nancy gets her revenge on the pimp and gets all his money”.

Amy continues, “If I’m going to do any kind of interpretation or deconstruction I have to learn Willy’s version of the song at the beginning. To listen to his version first and then listen to my version they are pretty close.”

Blessed with a voice that stirs the soul and diverts the mind, Amy leads the listener to a welcome state of mental being akin to a loosening of the ties that bind our daily lives. To fully appreciate what enters the ears involves lapsing into a period of other-worldliness.

The song ‘Left Hook Like Frazier’ is a cautionary tale of how brokenhearted women sometimes get into relationships that break them even more, ‘The Haunting Thoughts’ is about a woman who can’t shake the fear that the world she’s in is going to collapse around her, and ‘There’s Nothing Down The Highway’ tells the brooding tale of a woman who runs from her life only to find that she can escape the place but not herself.

“I wrote a few others in that luck and doom vein, happily ever after songs, but they didn’t quite work and my poor old dark heart couldn’t take it,” Vlautin laughs. “So I brought Amy in some other songs, drifter couples in love, romantic songs albeit a bit more tragic. Luckily she liked those too.”

Part of the record started out to be promisingly romantic with the song ‘Mr Luck & Ms Doom’ but rapidly went off the rails with ‘Her Ponyboy’. Willy explains further, “Another thread came up which was beat-up women that are trying to make good for themselves. So I always call them the saints – Lorraine, Maureen and Nancy, because they are survivors. I guess ‘Don’t Miss Your Bus Lorraine’ is the most political song on the record. In America we imprison so many people that are on drug charges and some of them are long term sentences for not that big a deal and then all of a sudden in Oregon for example there’s weed and marijuana stores on almost every block just like there used to be bars, and so I was interested in that idea of a woman just getting out of prison and she’s handcuffed by being a felon, and she struggles with what kind of jobs she can get and who will hire her.”

‘Mr Luck & Ms Doom’ is a dark and deeply enveloping dive into the human condition from one of America’s finest storytellers and songwriters.

COLIN PALMER