GRITTY SNAPSHOTS AND SAD BALLADS

An interview with the the king of moving on, songwriter and author Willy Vlautin of The Delines.

By Chris Familton

In the wake of singer Amy Boone’s 2016 accident where she was hit by a car, there were a few years, during her long and painful recovery, where songwriter Willy Vlautin thought The Delines as a touring band might be done. Boone’s strength and determination ultimately got her back to the point where a new album (The Imperial, 2019) was released and she was again able to tour and perform with the band. Then we all know what happened next, the global pandemic effectively crippling touring, particularly internationally. 

Trials and tribulations aside, the good news for fans of The Delines is that the band were able to reconvene and release The Sea Drift early in 2022. That momentum saw them tour Europe last year and now they’re set to return to Australian shores for the first time in nine years. Even better, they’re currently ensconced in an Oregon studio recording album number four.

Vlautin is firmly focused on the new album but a year on from the release of The Sea Drift, he’s still immensely proud of that album. “It’s hard when you finish something because you have to move on, I’m the king of moving on,” he laughs. “The way I look at a record is if I’m in love with it, when I have a couple of drinks and disappear into it it and not be critical of it, then I move on. I do that with books too. I get so immersed in writing it that I hope that it works within the framework of being submerged when I read it, with no ego.”

“I also think it’s our best sounding record,” says Vlautin, and he’s not wrong. The band found the sweet spot at the core of their late-night laments and soulful country sound on The Sea Drift. Vlautin’s vignettes of the downtrodden, from the gritty realism that permeated the songs of his previous band Richmond Fontaine, to his own established literary career, and Amy’s ability to draw you into the lives of the album’s characters via both heartache and heartwarming gravitas, make it yet another beautifully immersive listening experience. 

You really do feel like you’re entering a unique and evocative universe when you listen to The Delines and the natural question is whether Vlautin feels there’s more to explore there musically or if they plans to widen their sonic parameters.

“When we first started we’d only been together a week. The rest of us had rehearsed a bit but we only had a couple of practices before we did Colfax. Pedal steel and Rhodes was the combination I wanted to focus on but we lucked into adding Cory Gray on horns and strings and so that shaped the sound which we explored further on The Imperial,” explains Vlautin. “We’ll keep going dow that road to a degree because it sounds so great and I can’t help but write these big ballad songs right now. We’re doing a little bit of different stuff on the new record but it’s still in that lush Delines world.”

The genesis of The Sea Drift came from a challenge from Boone, who asked Vlautin to write her a song like Tony Joe White’s ‘Rainy Night In Georgia’, saying “can you just write me a love song where no-one dies!” That set the template for the location of the album down on the Gulf Coast, near where Boone spent 25 years living in Texas.  

“As a fan I’ve always loved the way bands take you to a place, like Drive-By Truckers taking you to the South when you listen to them, I love that!” Vlautin enthuses. “Paul Kelly’s Gossip album, when I first hear that when I was 18 and suddenly I’m in Australia and it’s just heaven, it changed my life escaping into records like that. Springsteen’s New Jersey too – when you’re 13, all of a sudden you’re a million miles away living in someone else’s life. I always fall in love with places.”

Richmond Fontaine was the band that first caught the ear of alt-country fans who craved a certain grittiness and realism within the framework of guitars that harkened back to The Replacements, Gram Parsons and R.E.M. Vlautin is still best friends with his Richmond Fontaine bandmates but his heart and soul are firmly with The Delines. “Fontaine was really good to me, I’m still great pals with all those guys after being in a band for 23 years. The camaraderie is the thing I miss but I don’t miss being the front guy, I don’t think I was very good at it. I like writing ballads and Fontaine would have murdered me if I’d written any more ballads!” he laughs. “It’s hard being in a band where the singer is bringing in these seven minute folk songs that aren’t catchy and you know you’re going to be playing them in noisy bars the rest of your life.”

Writing songs and writing books are all part of the same creative process for Vlautin. He describes  them as “all living in the same apartment building,” and over the years there’s been a rich cross-pollination of characters and storylines between the two disciplines. “All my novels except for one started as songs. Motel Life started as a series of songs. I write a lot of songs while I’m thinking about and working on an idea or story over a long period time so I can’t help but write songs from the books.” 

One unique meeting point between Vlautin’s novels and songs has been the instrumental soundtracks that first began with his 2018 novel Don’t Skip Out On Me, which became the swan-song for Richmond Fontaine.

“I wrote the soundtrack to Don’t Skip Out On Me because I was living in that world so much I wrote an instrumental record about it. The band didn’t really wanted to do an instrumental record because no-one really buys them, but because we were calling it a day I called them up and asked if we could one last record and the band were nice enough to indulge me,” he grins. “I wanted one last really good pedal steel record from Fontaine, with Paul Brainard playing on it.”

That musical intersection has also carried through to The Sea Drift when horn player Cory Gray brought in an instrumental track that immediately caught Vlautin’s ear and became ‘Lynett’s Lament’. “I wasn’t really hearing music with my latest novel but then Cory played us this piece of music and I thought ‘that’s Lynett’s song from my novel The Night Always Comes’, which I was finishing at the time. He and I then went back and forth and we put together a soundtrack for the book, just for fun and to keep the band busy.”

On the upcoming tour The Delines also have Jimbo Mathus on the bill but in 2015 they did a run of shows with Nikki Lane and her band. Vlautin laughs as he remembers eavesdropping on the band, talking about partying hard on the road, making him feel like he was their dad as he focused on getting back to the hotel room to rest. Vlautin then suggests that we might get to hear three or four songs from the next album if bandleader Sean Oldham gives them the green light, adding “It’s a lucky break getting to play in Australia, I’m always scared I won’t get to head back down there again.”

Read my review of The Sea Drift