The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Writer

It’s a swelteringly hot July afternoon in the west of Ireland and Willy Vlautin is looking on enviously as Hot Press’ pint of freshly poured stout creamily settles on a Galway bar counter.

“Hell man, that looks pretty damn good,” the Richmond Fontaine frontman remarks in a slow Nevada drawl, drawing the sleeve of his blue check cowboy shirt across his mouth.
Indeed it does and it tastes even better. But Vlautin has resisted temptation and is unenthusiastically sipping a coke. “I’d really love a pint, but I guess I’d better not,” he says. “You go ahead, man. The next best thing to drinking yourself is watching other people drink.”
A wise decision. In the City of the Tribes on a fleeting Arts Festival visit, the 43 year-old novelist and musician is giving a reading with Roddy Doyle in the Meyrick Hotel later on, followed by a stripped-down gig with Richmond Fontaine guitarist Dan Eccles in the Roisin Dubh. If he starts drinking now, chances are he won’t stop. Such professional duties are best performed sober.
Having staggered dangerously on the fringes of alcoholism at various points in the past, Vlautin still occasionally boozes hard, but maintains that he’s currently in control of his demons. “I’ve really cut back on drinking, but I’m trying to cut back more. Me and one guy from the band still go out on the town, but it’s not good to be drinking all the time. I still love going out on a bender... but it wrecks my head too much.”
What constitutes a bender to you?
“It might be three days,” he says, shrugging. “It’s like I know I’m wrecked, so I might as well keep going. And I love that and I don’t wanna give it up, but I have to say that the least amount of drinking I’ve done since I was 15 has been in the last year. I was drinking maybe once a week. I can’t write on a hangover. My thoughts get really dark on hangovers now, and it never used to be like that.”
Though your lyrics and fiction can be quite dark...
“Yeah, no shit,” he says, with a mock shudder. “And I really don’t wanna be that way. In the old days I was a house painter, and all you had to do was get there. With manual labour all you have to do is show up, and the day takes care of itself. But writing...”
Vlautin shakes his head sorrowfully.
“Man, I’m barely smart enough to write a novel, you know, let alone be hungover doing it.”

Such self-deprecatory comments are typical of the likeably modest American, who has released critically-acclaimed albums, authored prize-winning novels, and been described by Mojo as “one of America’s most fundamental artists in words and music.” For all of his success, though, Vlautin’s an ego-free zone. So much so that he often comes across like a man living in perennial fear of being somehow found out.
He tells me that he spotted Roddy Doyle on the train from Dublin earlier, but was too shy to go over and say hello. “I didn’t wanna bother him. I’m not the most eloquent guy, I couldn’t think of anything cool to say. So I didn’t say anything.”
This apparent inferiority complex may well have its roots in his childhood. Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, his parents divorced when he was young and he was mostly raised by his mother. Having worked a succession of manual labouring jobs after high school, he eventually followed a girl up to Oregon when he was in his mid-20s. It didn’t work out with the girl, but the move to Portland rapidly awakened his latent artistic ambitions.
“Portland is a more progressive town, full of artists, writers and bands, much more so than Reno, which is actually kind of conservative. People would think you were crazy there if you wanted to write songs or be in a band.”
Within weeks of moving to the city, he met bassist Dave Harding at a racetrack and his band Richmond Fontaine – named after an American expat, “a burned out hippy,” who had helped Harding when his car broke down in a boiling Mexican desert – was born soon afterwards. Today, following various line-up changes, the outfit is a four-piece. Percussionist Sean Oldham came on board almost immediately in ‘96, and, having guested with them regularly for quite some time, guitarist Dan Eccles permanently joined the fold in 2005.
Since their 1996 debut, Safety, the alt. country outfit have released nine studio albums, though it’s their ‘00s output that has garnered them the most critical acclaim, especially in Europe. Post To Wire (2004), The Fitzgerald (2006), Thirteen Cities (2007) and We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River (2009) have all been ecstatically reviewed, though chart-busting commercial success hasn’t followed.
When he started to write their tenth studio album, The High Country, holed up in his isolated home in the woods, working to a soundtrack of rumbling logging trucks and occasional gunfire, Vlautin found himself imagining a story that couldn’t be properly told in just one or two songs. Rather than writing an album, he realised that what he was writing was more like a novel told through songs. “It’s a gothic love story,” he explains, “about an affair between a mechanic and a really unhappily married girl who works in an auto-parts store.”
In Vlautin’s world, the legendary ‘girl in the auto-parts store’ looms large.
“In the US, the only place you ever see women in a small town is if they work in the grocery store or they work in the auto-parts store,” he elaborates. “There’s always the big auto-parts girl that’s meant to be there, and then there’s the girl that’s stuck. I’ve had bad enough luck with cars that I’ve been in a lot of auto-parts stores my whole life. So she kind of came out of that. But it’s really just a gothic love tale about trying to get out of a small town.”
He insists that it’s not autobiographical. Vlautin shares his rural home with his girlfriend of six years, Lee. Even before he met her, though, he’d never scored with an auto-parts girl. “No, man, I was never lucky enough,” he laughs, shaking his head. “I always had too bad a car.”
Although Vlautin had written stories set to music before (A Jockey’s Christmas and A Motorcycle For A Horse were both released as limited-edition CDs), he knew that the rest of the band would probably take some convincing that this was a direction worth taking.
“I thought the guys would think I was fuckin’ nuts – and they did, you know,” he says, with a wry smile. “So I wrote every single song out and recorded ‘em, just by myself. We go out once in a while and we’ll go to a bar and just talk about what we wanna do. So everybody got really drunk and then someone said, ‘What are you working on, man?’ And I told them the whole story. They were all just shaking their heads, going, ‘Christ, I’m not gonna be able to buy a bicycle after this record comes out. Let alone a used car!’”
Produced by John Askew (The Dodos, Karl Blau) and recorded at Type Foundry and Scenic Burrows in Portland, the album hasn’t been released yet so nobody knows what form of transport they’ll ultimately be able to afford on the back of its sales. However, while its chances of becoming Richmond Fontaine’s commercial breakthrough are slight, there’s no doubting that the band have made a very bold artistic statement.
An operatically tragic tale of drugs, violence, infidelity, loneliness, and desperation, set against a backdrop of permanent rainfall, endless logging roads and the remains of a forest brutalised by logging, The High Country features fully fleshed-out characters, changing scenes, snippets of radio, and spoken-word passages.
“I was really interested in light versus dark, of romance versus violence and destruction and psychosis,” he says. “And I was interested in trying to make the love songs really romantic, and the dark songs crazy. The guys had their doubts at first, but once we started doing it, they all got into it. I think it’s safe to say it’s our funnest record, and our most ambitious record.”
They had a little help from their friends. Fontaine regulars Paul Brainard (pedal steel), Ralph Huntley (keyboards, accordion) and Collin Oldham (cello, cellomobo) all feature. Playing the auto-parts store girl, The Damnations’ Deborah Kelley – who also guested on breakthrough album Post To Wire – sings lead vocals on four of the songs.
“I’ve always liked Deborah Kelley’s voice. I would pay her money to read to me. She’s just got a voice I believe in. She’s got a voice like a real woman. She’s always been my favourite singer. We toured together a few times, starting around 2003, so we’ve known each other a while.”
Speaking of touring, Richmond Fontaine are not an especially hard gigging band. “At the most, we tour two or three months a year when we’re promoting something, spread out,” he says. “I’ve never been into touring that much. That’s probably one of the reasons the band is still together. None of the guys like touring. We’ve always been on the same page, remarkably, about that. I don’t think anyone likes getting on the road.”
Another reason the band have stayed together is undoubtedly the democratic divvy-up of the profits. Although Vlautin writes the songs, all royalties are split evenly. “I write the songs, but my confidence level is such that I couldn’t do it without a band,” he explains. “Those guys are pals of mine so I’m not the leader of the band. I just write the songs. Sean Oldham’s probably the leader of the band. I like the privilege of writing the songs for the guys, and it’s an honour that they let me do it, but it’s a band.
“They just let me write the songs, which is fuckin’ great – for me. And I’m the one that would do it because I like writing ‘em more than the other guys do. So that’s probably why we’ve been together so long. We’re all equal, everybody cuts the same way in the band. Every man’s the same. Because the last thing I’d wanna do is get in a band with a bunch of guys and get paid more than they do. I’d rather do something else for a living.”

As it happens, Willy Vlautin does do something else for a living. He is the author of three novels, the most recent of which, Lean On Pete, won the Ken Kesey Award (and was also the Hot Press critics’ choice for ‘Best Novel of 2010’).
His 2006 debut The Motel Life – a gut wrencher about a pair of working-class brothers who flee their seedy Reno motel after being involved in a fatal car accident – has just been adapted into a movie by the Polsky Brothers (Bad Lieutenant), starring Dakota Fanning, Stephen Dorff, Emile Hirsch and Kris Kristofferson.
The option had originally been sold to Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Arriaga Jordán, who hired Vlautin to pen the screenplay, but unfortunately it didn’t work out. “He hired me to write the screenplay and I spent six months on it. And by the end I gave it to him and he read it and said, ‘It’s alright but I just don’t think I’m gonna have the time to make this movie’. Because he had a bunch of stuff going on.”
As ever, Vlautin personally shoulders the blame. “I wasn’t that good at it, man,” he shrugs. “It’s a learning curve like anything else; it’s a different art form. And I’m barely juggling what I do now. And I was really mad at myself because I had six months off, and instead of working on a novel – which for me is the greatest art-form – I was writing a screenplay that wasn’t strong enough to get made anyway. And my vision of it was very stark and bleak, and that probably didn’t help either.”
Mindful of this when the Polsky brothers picked up the option, he decided not to write the screenplay. “Even though the money was good, I wasn’t cut out for it. Hollywood has chewed up much better writers than me, and I knew where to stay away. I know how to not get my ass kicked. I just don’t show to the party.”
He says he was surprised the film made it to production. “They’re really ambitious, smart guys, the Polskys, but I didn’t think anything would happen. And time passed, I didn’t hear from them for like a year. Then they got in touch to tell me that they’d gotten Emile Hirsch, who’d done Into The Wild, which was a really good movie I thought. And then within four months they were shooting it.”
Vlautin makes a cameo in the movie. Needless to say, it’s in a bar scene. “When you see a drinking movie, they’re all drinking NA beer, fake booze. But I knew the bartender, and so I was drunk as a monkey! I didn’t know it would take eight hours to film a two-minute scene. I was almost too drunk to stand up at the end!”
Although not in the same scene, he also got to meet Kris Kristofferson. “He was cool. I only met him for a minute. He did his scene in a restaurant I’ve eaten in for more than 30 years, and I still go there. It’s basically a shack, and there’s an 80 year-old woman who cooks Italian food. It’s really slow, takes about an hour-and-a-half to eat there. But I love her and I’ve been going since I was six years old or so.
“So they were shooting there and Kristofferson’s sitting in the place I always sit. It was crazy. And he used half my lines, you know. But even being in awe of all that, you’re like, ‘He wouldn’t have said that, he’d have said this’. So I knew I shouldn’t be there. It’s not my thing anymore. It’s their thing. And I hope to God my story’s strong enough that it’ll be a good movie, or they’ll make it a good movie. But it made me too nervous so I got outta there.”
Where do you do most of your writing?
“I live out in the woods and I write out there a lot. But there’s this part of Portland – you’d love it, man! – that’s like the last old-school drinking part of the city. I rent a room across from this bar that opens at seven in the morning. My window looks out at this bar and everybody has to smoke outside, right, so I get to just watch people all day. It’s really lucky. It’s the greatest part of Portland.
“You know life gets in the way and I’ve other stuff to do, and there’s the band as well, but when I can just sit in that room and write stories, I realise I’m pretty fucking lucky. Because most guys have got hard jobs. I’ve had enough crappy jobs to know I never, never want to go back to it. I’ve never been a romantic about the working-class life. I’ve always wanted to get away from it.”

Having said that, the working-class life has provided Willy with plenty of raw material for his fiction. Not that his blue collar buddies necessarily appreciate it. It’s a world in which literature is for someone else.
“None of my friends read,” he sighs, smiling. “You can sit there and drink beers with a guy for ten hours. And you know exactly what book he’d like and you give it to him. And he won’t read it because it’s not important in their day-to-day life.
“I like simple stories you can read if you’ve worked hard all day,” he continues. “That’s one of the things that’s so great about Roddy Doyle. You could be dead tired from working all day and then you start reading one of his books and, next thing you know, two hours have passed. He either breaks your heart or is funny, and is easy. Those are all the things that I really wanted to be. I wanted to write books for guys that worked during the day, even though none of them fucking would read. But that was my goal – to write a book that you could get a guy to read when he was tired after work. That’s always been my goal.”
As he well knows, the artistic life can be hard. “Spending years battling alcoholism, and trying to be a writer and hold a job and be in a band – it kills you, man,” he says. However, if Vlautin had to choose between being a full-time musician or a full-time novelist, it’s obvious he’d plump for the latter.
“I love writing stories. It’s my favourite thing to do. My greatest ambition would be to write Ironweed before I die, but I’m not that smart. But I wanna write a really good novel before I die. Writing’s always been an easy escape, it’s a way to control an uncontrollable world for me. I like the work ethic and the solitude. I like not bothering anybody.”
Right now, as he gears up to promote The High Country, he’s working on the second draft of a “fucked-up depressing novel about nursing.”
As ever, Willy Vlautin has his own personal doubts about it. “I have a title, but I’m too embarrassed to tell you what it is,” he laughs. “Which means I probably won’t use it.”

Willy Vlautin is out now. Richmond Fontaine give The High Country a live airing in the Workman's Club on November 4. For archive interviews, see hotpress.com.