In Willy Vlautin’s 2014 novel The Free, Darla, mother of Leroy Kervin — a brain-injured soldier returned from Iraq — says, “It’s hard to let yourself have a good time when someone you love is in pain.” The line speaks volumes. Vlautin’s writing generally does.
Vlautin is author of four acclaimed novels — The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete, and last year’s The Free. He is also founder, songwriter, and guitar for country soul band The Delines. He is founder, songwriter, frontman, guitar, and voice for alt-country band Richmond Fontaine as well, who have released no less than 10 albums in their 21 years of existence.
George Pelecanos is a big fan of Mr. Vlautin. He reckons he’s some kind of genius, and that he’s written one of Pelecanos’ favourite novels in the past ten years. “Hell I’m a huge fan of George Pelecanos” Vlautin responds. “He’s just the best, a great craftsman and storyteller. He’s a big inspiration to me. In general, when a guy that cool likes what I do, I feel like I just stopped at a slot machine that is spilling out thousands of dollars and free drinks. I have no idea why it’s spilling out, but I’m so damn grateful and happy it is. I just accept it and try to remember it ‘cause it might not ever happen again.”
Vlautin is working on his next novel as we speak. “Today it’s being a pain in the ass,” he says. “Right now it’s running me over and then backing up over me, but I hope to get up and out of the way before too long. I’m on the fifth draft right now. It features a guy named Lonnie Dixon, a minor character in Lean on Pete. It’s a blast to write, I’m just not quite smart enough to crack it yet.”
As I prepared to talk with Vlautin, my mind kept wondering back to that brain-injured soldier. Leroy Kervin’s situation is a tragedy relevant and palpable to families throughout the U.S. and way beyond. “But there was no miraculous recovery for the new Leroy Kervin,” so it goes.
My questions were couched around researching his characters, but Vlautin’s answers were angled way past that. “Leroy was rough ‘cause I read a lot about brain injuries and soldiers coming home with brain injuries,” he says. “That book in general about did me in because of that. It was a hard world to live in. I really feel for those soldiers, guys like Leroy. Most soldiers are working class and many of them don’t have a lot of career choices except the military. I feel it’s our duty as citizens to not get them in bad situations. But of course we just put them in a series of bad situations and now there’s thousands and thousands who have come back in rough shape.”
Is Vlautin a pacifist? “Ha,” he says. “I try to be. All I know about war is that working class guys get killed, and rich people get richer, and no one ever wants to see or hear about the aftermath until it’s safely put away in a war book. I read somewhere that since recorded time, there’s only been 29 years in total, where there hasn’t been a major human conflict – war – somewhere in the world. I think war, like racism, is in the fabric of humanity. It’s depressing as hell but seems to be true.”
Leroy is just one example of what Willy Vlautin does with his novels. The parts of society that don’t get a break, are a fundamental element of his writing. “What I saw a lot of growing up, were drifters. I grew up in Reno, a casino town, and they attract drifters, they attract people on the fringe of society. I really identified and envied them as a kid. I was foolish, but I couldn’t seem to help it. I grew up thinking I would be a bum, and here they were doing it right in front of me. It seemed romantic to me to give up before you ever tried. That’s different from the have and have nots. Those ideas, working class issues, came from my mother.
“She was a single mother raising two sons,” he continues. “For a lot of years she was broke and she was always worried about money. On top of that, she was paid less than her men co-workers. She worked with mostly men and took a lot of shit from them, but she had two kids and had to gut it out. She knew it didn’t take very many steps to land in a rough spot. She worried about that sort of thing, to the point where, even as a kid, I knew I had to watch out and bust my ass or I could end up on the street. She really drove that into me. So those two sides have always been battling inside me. The drifter side versus the pragmatic, gut-it-out-in-a-job-you-hate-‘cause-you’re-scared-you-might-end-up-living-in-your-car side.”
You can see this influence in his work. A special type of woman travails in Vlautin’s stories. Picture a rough street at night. “Colfax Avenue” is a track from The Delines album Colfax. It tells the story of a woman repeatedly driving up and down such a street, searching for her brother newly returned from Iraq.
“He’s just a kid
Who’s seen too much
He’s just a kid”
Her kids are suffering, her husband is suffering, but she cares too much to give up on him. Then, picture Pauline Hawkins from The Free.’She’s a nurse caring unstintingly for Leroy Kervin. She grinds through life taking care of her mentally ill father and carrying all the weight and the walls that life has constructed. This, however, still does not stop her from taking risks, trying to protect a runaway. Indeed Pauline Hawkins is such a strong character that Patterson Hood wrote a track about her that appeared in the Drive-By Truckers 2014 album English Oceans.
“All the best influences I had growing up were women,” Vlautin says when I ask about the women in his stories.” They weren’t maverick entrepreneurs or doctors or leaders of their communities. They were weak women who learned to be tough out of necessity. A fragile person who is tough, man they can be the toughest in certain regards and definitely are inspiring to me.”
I wondered how difficult it is for him to write through the eyes of women. “I try to do my best,” he explains. “I don’t know if I’m any good at it. The only thing I know is don’t make the girl your dream gal. Don’t fall in love with her. Make the woman your sister or cousin. That’s always helped me.”
So are any of his characters inspired by people he loves? “I love most of my characters; I empathize with all of them. But I don’t fall in love with them. I wrote a few Harlequin type novels when I was younger and lonely. That’s different and fun as hell but shit, I burned those. It’s like watching your pal fawn over some new girlfriend. It’s hard to look at and usually when a guy is that done in by a gal, it’s gonna end badly.”
All this being said – is music with a social message important? “I guess I just gravitate towards what I like, what I think is important,” he says. “I always try to write with blood, you know? I always figured I wasn’t that talented so I had to be honest. And of course [songs] with social messages are important, they’re hard to do right and well, but man when they work they can change the way people think. They’ve changed the way I’ve thought over and over again.”
Richmond Fontaine has just mastered a new album, and it’s due out early 2016. “It’s finally done and dusted” says Vlautin. “What a relief.” He’s gone back to the old guard with this one. “It’s all the same RF alumni, except Freddy Trujillo plays bass on this one as Dave Harding-the original bass player, moved to Denmark. But we got Dave to play guitar on some tracks. Also Jenny Conlee plays some amazing keyboards. She’s just the coolest and so damn talented.”
He’s also returned to John Askew to produce the album “John has been a good friend to the band for years. He did a lot of recording on Winnemucca so I’ve known him for a long time. We did The High Country with him and he’s so smart and great to be around. When I put The Delines together Sean and I really wanted to do the record with him and he was nice enough to help out. He’s like a member of the band; he’s smarter and doesn’t have to tour it.”
This is a Willy Vlautin album though, so I did have to ask if there are any particular issues being addressed on this one. “It’s a record not based in any sorta angst or any punk rock roots like say The High Country or We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River,” he says. “This one is a big desert-sounding record. [It’s] more the aftermath than the upheaval.”
“A lot of the record deals with the age the band’s at,” he goes on. “All our old friends who have lived hard are starting to pay the price. We’re at the age where your vices come back to haunt you, they want pay back. This is the age where relationships fall apart; guys either give in to their vices for good, or try their best fight to get off them. Their bodies fall apart. I was interested in all those ideas with this record, both lyrically and musically.”
Previous albums have overlapped with books he has written. There was Allison Johnson in his book Northline, for example, whose name was also a track on the Richmond Fontaine Post to Wire album. “There was no research there,” he says. “Those kind of characters I just know.”
Is there any overlap between book and music on this new disc? “There’s a few tracks that fit in the book I’m working on right now, sure. Writing takes so long that I can’t help but write tunes set in the world of my books.”
So he writes tunes while he’s writing books. I think about how long it is taking me to put this one solitary interview together and I feel a bit mortified. “They help each other more than anything” he tells me when I ask if one ever detracts from the other. “It’s just that writing is about the work, the grind, the hours. And those hours can’t be done hungover or a step behind. So drinking and late nights are the arch enemy of writing for me. But music, man oh man, drinking and late nights are the only way I know how to do gigs. I get too nervous not to have a few, and then well … So they work great together when I’m at home writing but not great when I’m on the road.”
The books and the music aren’t all he balances though. He writes and plays in that retro country soul band The Delines; and he writes for, and fronts that alt-country band Richmond Fontaine. Both of which are fully active projects. How does he manage that? “I don’t do it very well! I don’t seem to do much without messing something else up. I like writing for both though, it’s fun as hell. I love The Delines and RF. As far as song-writing they help each other but balancing the bands and writing is hard.”
For the previous Delines album Colfax, Vlautin wrote the songs around singer Amy Boone’s languorous poignant voice. I wondered if it was the same for this next album. “You know with The Delines I write bigger songs because I think Amy can sing anything. I don’t have the courage or ability to pull off a lot of songs she can. I just try to see the Delines through a woman’s eyes, try to write songs I think Amy could get behind, and also I lean on her to pull it off. She’s just so damn good.”
“I write all The Delines songs with her in mind. It’s so lucky to be in a band with her, Sean, Freddy, Tucker, and Cory. They’re all such great musicians. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had playing music. We’re recording again this fall. Hopefully people will like it and we’ll be able to keep the band going. We’re doing some shows in the US and then a European tour in Sept.”
First posted in www.culturehubmagazine.co.uk/
Photo credit: Paul McParland.
Video credits: Gerry McNally, InGowan68, accidentsinspace, elcortezrecords,savannasaurus’s channel
