ON an ordinary day not so long ago, Willy Vlautin is strolling to his office in Portland, Oregon.
The songwriter catches the familiar sight of “an old lady with her shopping and a mother pushing a baby carriage”.
But then he encounters “a 30-year-old guy and his buddies living in tents on the street”.
On a more recent occasion, he walks past a parking lot and notices “a stolen car still running, and a guy nodding out in the driver’s seat”.
As he approaches his office that day, “there, in a little alcove, is a 25-year-old girl passed out on heroin”.
Anyone familiar with Vlautin’s work — first with Richmond Fontaine, now with The Delines and as an acclaimed novelist — will know how affected he is by the people who fall through the cracks in society.
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For him, it is hard for such harrowing and sobering scenes in his “amazing” adopted hometown “not to sink into a song”.
This explains how the bleak but beautifully realised Walking With His Sleeves Down started the ball rolling for The Delines’ latest album, The Set Up.
In the song, Vlautin describes a man so wasted that he doesn’t notice the girl of his dreams as he passes her by.
“He looked pale and weak/Like he ain’t seen the sun in weeks/Like a breeze could just take him away/Once again he’s done himself in.” Along with other songs on The Set Up such as Dilaudid Diane and The Reckless Life, Walking With His Sleeves Down is, says Vlautin, a direct response to the opioid epidemic that has swept the States.
“Watching it take Portland was horrific,” he affirms, before adding, “But it’s gotten a lot better since they stopped handing out OxyContin like candy.”
He calls The Set Up “the wayward, misguided and lonely sister” of last year’s Mr Luck & Ms Doom, which he says focused on “romantics adrift on the road”.
It is one of those long, dark nights of the soul type records — slow-burning, richly atmospheric and graced with Amy Boone’s smoky seductive vocals, Cory Gray’s spellbinding trumpet, Sean Oldham’s jazzy drumming and Freddy Trujillo’s Mexican- influenced bass playing.
In his position as songwriter and guitarist, Vlautin is talking to me via video call from his rural home outside Portland this week, just prior to setting off for a UK tour with The Delines.
His vivid tales of drug-ravaged dropouts remind him how he too may have fallen victim to the powerful prescription painkillers known as “hillbilly heroin”.
“In 2008, I broke my arm riding a horse,” he says. “After I had surgery, they gave me 75 OxyContin with two free refills.
“That’s 225 pills for a broken arm. It just shows how real the problem was.
“Obviously they don’t do that anymore and Purdue Pharma got hammered — but a new generation of addicts was created who transferred to heroin or fentanyl.”
Vlautin employs an opioid brand name, Dilaudid, for one of The Set Up’s most captivating songs,
Dilaudid Diane tells of a girl who “ran cross country, played clarinet in the marching band” and “loved French movies” before she “got caught letting herself come undone”.
“Everybody’s got great things in them,” says Vlautin. “I think that’s what really gets me, what breaks my heart. So many people are on the edge between trying and giving up.
“But people need help to keep trying — and they don’t need a bad break like becoming a junkie.”
He borrowed the name Dilaudid Diane from his seventh novel, The Horse, published in 2024.
The central character, Al Ward, is an ageing, alcoholic songwriter who lives in isolation and befriends a blind horse.
“In the book, Dilaudid Diane is one of the songs he’d written so I had the title — and it got me thinking,” says Vlautin, who confesses that elements of the book are semi-autobiographical.
“One day, I was having lunch with Dan Eccles, guitar player in Richmond Fontaine, and this woman, aged 30 maybe, walked up to us.
“She was wearing a shirt but was naked from the waist down, just babbling. Both Dan and I were stopped in our tracks.”
It inspired Vlautin to write Dilaudid Diane in the knowledge that a life spiralling down because of addiction “can grab just about anybody”.
He says: “She is a really cool girl whose only crime had been to break into the city pool just to feel what it was like to swim alone.”
As you may have gathered, Vlautin is an engaging character, a natural storyteller — and he has his own fascinating history.
Born and raised in the gritty gambling mecca of Reno, Nevada, he says: “For such a small city, I saw a huge amount of drifters, aged anywhere from 40 to 70, living on their own in cheap motels.
“My mom worked with those sorts of guys, and given the way my life was, I always assumed I would end up like them.”
Vlautin credits his mother with urging him to keep on the straight and narrow, even if she strongly disapproved of him attempting a career in the arts.
“She was a tough, tough person,” he says. “We had a small family and she just said, ‘Look, in America, you’re two bad moves from living in your car.”
But, as a teenager in Reno, Vlautin was still drawn to the city’s seedy underbelly.
He says: “By the time I was 15, I had a romantic curiosity about this scene I thought I’d end up in. I started hanging out in old man bars.
“There were a lot of reasons why I was so dark — a rocky home life would be one. But as I got older, I started running away from the idea of giving up. That’s been my battle my whole life.”
Vlautin found consistent work, eventually settling for a job with a trucking company in Reno.
He says: “My mom told me, ‘If you want to stay home from school, that’s OK, but if you call in sick at work, you could lose your job.’”
He remembers the time he did call in: “I was 26. I had to go to a pay phone because I felt so ashamed.
“It made me feel like I was robbing an old lady, so I went home and paced my little apartment, feeling horrible about myself.”
Around this time, the trucking company moved Vlautin to Portland and that’s when a career in music and, later, writing novels beckoned.
He says: “From the age of 20 to 35, I wrote books just for fun.
“I was trying to fix my own wounds more than anything — and writing songs and stories always eased my mind.”
In 1994, he became the somewhat reluctant frontman of Richmond Fontaine, a role he would occupy for two decades.
“I went to a big city where I could try to be in a real band,” says Vlautin.
“There’s nothing worse than being a failed musician in a conservative town where everybody thinks you’re a weirdo and your mom’s horrified by you.
“I always say it’s best to fail in private — and easy to fail in a city where you don’t know anybody.”
Today, Vlautin is content with writing songs, playing guitar and being a backing singer in The Delines, as well as juggling that role with being a successful novelist.
Three of his books, The Motel Life, Lean On Pete and The Night Always Comes have been made into films.
“I’m inherently shy,” he admits. “And I struggle with being the front guy in a band — I always did.
“In Richmond Fontaine, I wrote a lot of songs, I had the work ethic so I carried that role on my back for a lot of years.
“The guys are still my favourite people but I could tell the band was getting tired.
“Because of the craziness and darkness of my songs, I always knew we wouldn’t make a lot of money.”
But Vlautin insists: “After all those years of sleeping in one motel room together, it was important to me that we left as friends.
“They had been so good to me and I wanted to make sure we pulled over on our own terms.”
Vlautin recalls the lightbulb moment when Amy Boone gave him the chance to try something a bit different.
Richmond Fontaine were touring their 2011 album The High Country, which he calls a “really wild record”.
He explains: “Amy was with us as our keyboard player. One day, I was in a control room at a radio station and she was in the studio at a piano.
“She didn’t know the mic was live and I heard her sing a ballad to herself.
“I said to Dan (Eccles), ‘I want to grow old in a band with a woman who sings like that. I don’t want to play songs I wrote 25 years ago and I’ve always loved women singers.’”
When asked which ones he loves, Vlautin decides that the late country artist Sammi Smith is “probably the closest to Amy Boone”.
“And when Candi Staton or Bobbie Gentry sing a ballad, that kind of stuff always kills me.”
He continues: “With Amy, I didn’t even tell her my idea of starting a band with her. I just went home and, for a year, wrote Delines songs for her.
“Finally, I gave her the five best. I sent a letter asking her to take a chance on me and try this band. That’s how we started.”
For Vlautin, it proved a refreshing and liberating experience.
“It was heaven for me because I got to write the kind of songs I always liked — big soul ballads.” He also fancied playing soul licks on his guitar “like Steve Cropper”, known as The Colonel for his contributions to records by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave and many more greats.
“I’m the juvenile delinquent, bad version of him,” says Vlautin with a wry smile. “I’m the janitor at his school.” Another hugely important component of The Delines’ sound is the horn playing of Cory Gray.
He had taken over on piano after Jenny Conlee of The Decemberists had played on the band’s first album, Colfax (2014).
Vlautin says: “Cory’s a genius piano player and an even better person.
“When we started going on the road with him, I realised he’s a good arranger and trumpet player. I was like, ‘Holy s**t, I think we won the lottery.’
“Between him and Sean Oldham, who’s a schooled jazz drummer, it’s insane.”
It was Gray who “beautifully” wrote the music for the three spoken-word passages that anchor The Set Up and serve as a crossover between Vlautin’s songwriting and prose.
Of these cinematic pieces, Vlautin says that Part 1 is set in a lounge — “there’s a couple at the fireside and she’s trying to seduce him”.
“Part 2 is like Ocean’s Eleven. It’s all about, like, sex, love and the idea that you can make money hand over fist, easy.
“Part 3 brings out the sadness when she opens up and says, ‘I can’t live without you. Once we do this job, we’ll be together. I haven’t had it easy in life.’ So she finally hooks him with emotion.”
Before he goes off to band practice for The Delines’ UK tour, which begins in Trowbridge tomorrow, Vlautin brings me up to date on his latest endeavour — a novel called The Left And The Lucky to be published by Faber & Faber in May.
“It’s set in North Portland and it’s about a house painter in his mid-forties who helps out his neighbour’s kid,” he says.
“It’s a pretty simple story but with probably my favourite bunch of characters that I’ve ever hung out with.”
All I can add is that Willy Vlautin has been one of my favourite people to hang out with.
“I just love writing stories,” he says. “I started when I was 11 and have never outgrown it.”