The Fontaine Event: Interview with Willy Vlautin

"It’s been a really good ride, man.”
Drawling down the line from his woodlands home on the outskirts of Scappoose, Oregon, Willy Vlautin sounds in remarkably sanguine form for a man about
to start closing an extremely important chapter of his life. In just a few hours, he and his Richmond Fontaine bandmates will take the stage at an iconic Portland venue to play a warm- up show for what will be their last-ever tour.
“You’d love this bar, man,” he enthuses. “They call it the ‘World Famous Kenton Club’. It’s a ’70s dive bar. They never painted it or gave it a makeover so it still has that authentic dive-bar feel.”
Playing the Kenton Club is something of a ritual for the band. “It’s where we always do our first gigs to see if we’re any good, to see if we’ve practised hard enough, and to get the kinks out.”
The upcoming US and European tour – which includes three Irish dates in Dublin and Kilkenny – is in support of their tenth and final album, the mournfully titled You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing To Go Back To. Released 20 years on from their 1996 debut, Safety, it’s a fittingly melancholic swansong from the widely acclaimed alt-country act.
Recorded and produced by John Askew at Portland’s Flora Studios, You Can’t Go Back features the stalwart line-up of Sean Oldham on drums, Dan Eccles on guitar and Paul Brainard on pedal steel.
“The saddest part is that I love the guys,” sighs Vlautin.
“The guys have been the best family I could have asked
for, the camaraderie of Fontaine is great. That was something I’ve always liked about being in a band, more than anything, is just the camaraderie. When I was putting it all together it was the end piece for the band, but also for all the characters who have drifted in and out over the years.”
Now aged 49, Vlautin has been making music for most of
his adult life. While Richmond Fontaine have always been critical darlings, they never fared especially well commercially. However, a consistently popular live draw, they always made enough to keep going.
“It’s always been a supplemental income," says Vlautin, "like bar-tending for a friend on a Friday night and you get an extra few quid for it, it’s been like that. Always nice money, but if we toured much more we would have had everybody’s life solely revolve around Fontaine. I don’t think we could have done it, mentally.
“We’re all pals and I think that’s when you stop becoming pals, when you start touring that hard. I told the guys that my songs weren’t making money, and I was real apprehensive of them leaving their lives and us going out on the road based on my abilities. The one smart thing Fontaine was able to do was know when to say ‘stop’. When you saw that one guy’s life was starting to fall apart, you sensed it. We always seemed to pull back before any real damage was done.”
Although Richmond Fontaine is winding up, Vlautin will continue to write, record and tour with his musical side- project The Delines. Following the release of 2015’s Scenic Sessions, they’re just putting the finishing touches to their as-yet-untitled third album.
“We’re in a nice fight in the mixing right now. We’re finishing the big bulk of it and we’re just trying to figure out the mixes. I love The Delines, playing music with them is a pleasure. The camaraderie again within The Delines is really great so I’m hoping to do that.”
The last Richmond Fontaine album was 2011’s The High Country. Unusually for the band, it was an experimental concept album mixing music, sound effects and spoken word.
“When I told the guys what I was planning, they all thought that I was going fucking nuts and maybe I was,” recalls Vlautin, laughing. “But you know, you go down a vein until it’s gone and you go find something else that you’re interested in. I always wanted Richmond Fontaine to take some chances and make an art record, which High Country is. It’s a fucked-up Gothic record. It was fun to tour, we had a great time, we toured the album complete.”
That record also wound up inadvertently spawning The Delines. “Yeah, that’s how I hooked up with Amy [Boone]. Her sister, Deborah Kelly, recorded The High Country with us, but she was pregnant so she couldn’t tour, but Amy – who I knew also – did the tour with us and we all became pals. I would listen to her sing every night and I began writing her songs for The Delines."
Richmond Fontaine, however, began to run out of steam when original bassist Dave Harding moved to Scandinavia a few years ago.
“I loved Fontaine so much, but we got waylaid when Dave moved to Denmark,” Willy recalls. “We all just started drifting apart and doing other projects. After that, we knew we were all coming to an end, we were all kind of tired, but we wanted to leave it on the best note that we could . . . and we feel like this is the best that we could do.”
With four successful novels to his name, most recently 2014’s The Free, Vlautin has another sideline career as an author. “I love playing music, though, so I’m going to just stick to one band and otherwise concentrate on novels,” he says. “As you know, man, writing takes so much time and so much concentration that I need to spend more time doing that. Also I’d love to do some touring a little bit, just as a person for writing, just to see some things that I’ve always wanted to see. But music man, I can’t quit being in a band, not just yet.”
Is there a new novel in the pipeline?
“Well, I’ve got one almost done,” he admits. “I’m just giving it a paint job right now. I’m hoping it will fly, but you just don’t know. I have no idea whether it’s any good or not. Personally
I love it because I know it’s got a good heart but whether anyone else thinks that it has any merit we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Does it have a title?
“The novel is called Don’t Skip Out On Me, unless someone thinks it’s a horrible title and makes me change it! It’s about
a kid and an old man who live on a ranch. The ranch is failing so the kid goes off to try and make his way in the big city of Arizona. So it’s a story about this old man and a kid, basically, they’re pals and they’re both kind of flailing and they both lean on each other throughout the novel.”
When’s it coming out?
“Jesus, I don’t know,” he guffaws. “I haven’t even sold it yet! It might be one of those where I put it underneath my bed with a bottle of tequila and cry to myself for a while until I start another one. But I think it’s pretty good and I’m about to start showing it around.”
It’s almost time for Willy Vlautin to pack his guitar and make the drive to Portland. But can he sum up his 23-year career with Richmond Fontaine before he does so?
“We got lucky because I was so self-conscious,” he says, after a pause. “I loved the idea of being in a band and writing songs more than anything, but I never felt like I was a very good frontman. I was very nervous and I don’t have a very good voice and I just got drunk. So it was always a rough ride for me in Richmond Fontaine in that way.
"But it’s always been a laugh. For the first six or seven
years of Fontaine we just had parties. So I feel good any time something good happens the band, because I feel like I’m repaying the guys. It's a really nice thing when they're playing my tunes – I will never forget how lucky that is.”