AN AUDIENCE WITH...
WILLY VLAUTIN
The Delines and Richmond Fontaine skipper talks writing, Reno, horse racing and “Tom Waits romanticism”
Interview by SAM RICHARDS
“I was a pretty beat-up little dude”
Willy Vlautin, songwriter and novelist: “If I’m doing bad at one, I’ll lean into the other”
DAN ECCLES
“IT’S breathtakingly gorgeous,” says Willy Vlautin, of the scene outside his window in Scappoose, Oregon. “We’re surrounded by huge fir trees, Twin Peaks-style. We live next to hundreds of acres of logging land and they don’t mind you walking or riding horses on it, so it’s cool.”
It sounds like the kind of peaceful retreat where you’d go to finish a novel. But Vlautin prefers to do things the other way around, commuting into the city to write. “I started going nuts out here. Not The Shining nuts, but a baby version of it. For instance,
I wrote a record called The High Country, and that was me spending too much time in the woods. So I rent this little office in the last real working-class part of Portland, and it looks out at a bar that opens at seven in the morning. There are guys smoking and drinking outside, and I can watch them and somehow that eases my mind more than a beautiful forest. I guess it says something about me…”
With 18 albums and seven novels to his name – and another one of each coming this spring – Vlautin prefers to blur the lines between the two disciplines. “They take the pressure off each other. If I’m doing bad at one, I’ll lean into the other. That’s why they’re so linked. Writing a novel, I’m thinking about a certain set of subjects for a couple of years, and that just leaks into the songs.”