Romance and Struggle: The Delines' Willy Vlautin on 'Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom'
Wednesday, 19 March 2025
Written by Jeremy Blackmore
Photo: Jason Quigley
Much like his acclaimed novels, the songs Willy Vlautin writes for his beloved country-soul band The Delines are populated by ordinary people left behind, often itinerant and struggling in America’s backwaters. “I've always been drawn to people who have been a bit beat up and rattled,” he explains. “That was the world I knew.”
But it was a challenge laid down by singer Amy Boone backstage after a gig in Dublin that led Vlautin to tell a more romantic tale, one with a happy ending, on the title track of the group’s sixth studio album ‘Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom’. “She grabbed me by the arm, like she was my aunt, kind of like a schoolteacher would,” he says. “She says, ‘Listen man, I’m a normal girl. Sometimes I just need a straight-up love song where nothing goes wrong. If you don’t write me one of those, I might lose my mind.’
“She has to sing such sad songs so much of the time. That’s why she's such a great singer — she’s not just singing, she inhabits the world these songs are in. A lot of the time, she’s a narrator. She holds your hand into this world and it’s amazing. So, it takes a lot out of her. I forget, because I live inside that world mentally and she doesn’t. I have to be careful of it.”
Duly, Vlautin wrote a handful of love songs but the only one he thought met the mark was the album’s title track. Even so, the story is not entirely happy. It tells of a depressive house cleaner who falls in love with a bumbling criminal, but somehow, they make it work. “Amy was happy with me after that — I tried other ones,” he says. “Like Her Pony Boy is probably the most romantic song on the record, but it’s tragic. Then it started falling apart from there. So, I did fall apart in the romantic department, but I got her one.”
Musically, The Delines are rooted in the tradition of big, emotional southern soul-folk ballads, notably those of Tony Joe White, whose original recording of Rainy Night In Georgia is a major touchstone for the band. JP and Me, in particular, leans into that sound with a romantic but tragic tale of a grifter couple on the run.
It was the first song written for the album that felt to Vlautin like a “big desert ballad”. He insists he is a romantic at heart, despite the often bleak nature of his works both in print and on record, with The Delines and his former band Richmond Fontaine. “I love romantic songs,” he says. “I’m always wanting to disappear into some old movie with some beautiful old starlet, for sure.”
“It’s always been in me, but I don't think I’ve ever felt comfortable writing those kinds of tunes for myself,” he continues. “They just haven’t made sense. But, with Amy, it was something I had to figure out inside my head, of how true romance and those straight-up love songs could work for me. She’ll say stuff like, ‘Why can’t a woman get the money and run? Why can't she get away? Why can’t a middle-aged woman make good?’ Well, that’s a good point. Amy will give me those kinds of cues, and then I just have to figure it out for myself how to get there.”
This led to songs on the new album about women he calls the ‘saints’. Maureen, Nancy and Lorraine have “been through the wringer” but have survived, or are still trying, or warning other women what to watch out for. Vlautin’s work has drawn comparisons with John Steinbeck for his literary realism, his direct prose and focus on the American working class. Talking from his home near Portland, it’s clear Steinbeck is his hero and an inspiration that has bled into his songwriting.
I ask why he is drawn to the author’s work, why he writes about the broken and dispossessed and about his own deep compassion for his characters. Pointing to pictures of Steinbeck on the walls around him, he says: “I grew up in a time when Steinbeck, the American socialist, working class writer, was king in my school. At an impressionable age, I read his major works and loved him. I mean, I adored him.”
“I think the reason I like him so much is because I was raised by a single mother who struggled,” he adds. “She struggled mentally, and she struggled because she got paid less than men. She worked with all men, so she was sexually harassed. I knew from a very, very early age the hardships of that in my own way. She also worked with a lot of guys that were on the edge.
“Her boss would hire guys off the river and try to rehabilitate them. Reno, where I grew up, was a town where a lot of drifters went through. A lot of guys might end up in Reno after their wife left them, or whatever went wrong. I felt like one of those guys, even when I was a kid. I’ve always been drawn to people that had been a bit beat up and rattled for all those reasons, and me personally feeling like I was going to end up a bum. That was the world I knew. I was scared but I was also kind of in love with it.”
He talks about sneaking into a bar at 16 and drinking next to a much older man with tattoos, fresh out of prison, with failed marriages behind him, and finding it really romantic. But he adds: “Then, when you're about his age, you’re sitting there, and you realise, ‘Oh, man, that means you haven’t done anything if you’re sitting in a bar your whole life. Then you spend the rest of your life trying to run as far away from that bar as you can. But then the bar’s got its hooks in you, like the booze has got its hooks in you, or that way of life, or giving up has its hooks in you. So that struggle’s been a struggle of mine for most of my life.”
While songwriting affords a much shorter space in which to tell a story, Vlautin’s songs, like his prize-winning novels, are character driven. He reveals a unique relationship between the two disciplines, one taking the pressure off the other. “Writing novels takes a long, long time,” he says. “It’s years of work and years of rebuilding and tearing stuff down.
“If you’re thinking about a set of ideas for anywhere from two to four years, a lot of songs set in that world pop up, even if you don't want them to. It just leaks into the fabric of your songs. So, they’re related in that way. And writing, if you get frustrated or stuck, or tired, I always have a guitar near me, so I’ll just start tinkering.”
He also inds ways to express his empathy for the characters in his novels through music. Allison, the protagonist in 2008’s Northline, inspired 25 instrumentals because he felt so bad for her. Meanwhile, a character in 2018’s Don’t Skip Out On Me “broke my heart in a thousand pieces”, prompting an album’s worth of material by Richmond Fontaine.
Although his novels are highly evocative of the American west, set in and around Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico, the horizons on The Delines’ new album are even broader, taking in Florida, Louisiana and other parts of the American south. Music’s power of escapism, the idea you could put on a record and be instantly in another world, was what first drew Vlautin into playing in a band.
He gravitated particularly towards songwriters like Tom Waits, whose works are also rooted in the American working class, and Paul Weller’s songs with The Jam about suburban England. “I try to do the same thing in my own way about the places I'm in love with, or the places I know,” he says. “This record takes place all over the southwest, and south. Part of that is Amy was based out of Texas for 30 years. Her voice feels like Texas to me sometimes. Then she lived in New Mexico. I try to write songs set in the areas I think she understands and likes, and I love them too.”
Vlautin and Boone first met when Richmond Fontaine supported The Damnations, the alt-country band started by Amy and her sister Deborah. Amy later toured with Richmond Fontaine and Vlautin recalls the moment he fell in love with her lush, world-weary voice. “We were doing a radio show,” he says. “She was in the music room on the piano. There was a live mic and I was in the control room. She didn’t know I was listening, and I heard her just sing a ballad to herself. I was like, ‘Man, I want to grow old being in a band where she sings all the songs.’
“I went home for about a year and wrote her tunes without telling her. Then I wrote her a little thesis on why she should join up with me and she said yes. Sean Oldham, the drummer of Richmond Fontaine, and I put a band together, and we cut ‘Colfax’ [the first Delines album] in a week.”
‘Colfax’ resonated instantly with UK audiences, where The Delines have a dedicated following. Vlautin admits the record was an experiment, but one that worked. It saw the band team up with producer John Morgan Askew, who has helmed all their records since. “He writes scores for a living, so he’s really interested in big cinematic records,” Vlautin says. “Those are my favourites as well.”
The Delines have increasingly tapped into keyboard player Cory Gray’s talents as a trumpet player and as a horn and string arranger on recent albums. His input is even more evident on ‘Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom’, with Vlautin citing his “Cadillac of a horn section”. The ever-present Oldham, a “top-notch jazz drummer and the soulful Freddy Trujillo, “the bass player everybody in Portland wants in their band” round out the line-up who will tour the UK from March 24, beginning with an in-store at London’s Rough Trade East.
‘Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom’ is out now on Bella Union.
The Delines Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Tue March 25 2025 - BRIGHTON Old Market
Wed March 26 2025 - MANCHESTER Band on the Wall
Thu March 27 2025 - LEEDS City Varieties
Fri March 28 2025 - GLASGOW St Lukes
Sat March 29 2025 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE Gosforth Civic
Sun March 30 2025 - NOTTINGHAM Metronome
Mon March 31 2025 - BIRMINGHAM Glee Club
Tue April 01 2025 - BRISTOL Bristol Beacon - Lantern Hall
Wed April 02 2025 - SOUTHAMPTON 1865
Thu April 03 2025 - LONDON Union Chapel
Thu March 26 2026 - LONDON Union Chapel
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