Recently reviewed on KLOF Mag, Mr Luck and Ms Doom is the fifth album from Portland-based country-soul band The Delines. One of the highlights of the album was Willy Vlautin‘s big lounge ballads; Vlautin, the band’s lead singer, guitarist and songwriter, is considered one of America’s greatest songwriters and novelists, so I was excited to take the opportunity to chat with him recently.
Throughout our conversation, Vlautin was very forthcoming; he chatted about his songwriting process, upbringing, the iniquities of the American penal system, his love of novel writing, and his fondness for Italian movie soundtracks from the 1960s and 1970s.
I understand that the back story to the new album’s title track ‘Mr Luck & Miss Doom‘ has two strands; one, that the song title comes from the Al Ward character, the ageing musician, in your latest novel, ‘The Horse’; and second, the song lyrics emerged following a conversation with band member Amy Boone when she asked you to write a straight-up love song?
Yeah, you know I tried my best to write Amy straight love songs, and she took me aside and said: “look, man, I’m a normal woman; I want romance; the guy and the girl have to get away with the money and live happily ever after once in a while or I’m going to go crazy”. And so I tried my hardest. It was really fun to try to do that, and I wrote four or five of those types of songs that didn’t make the record – the happily-ever-after kind of songs. But ‘Mr Luck & Ms Doom’ is the one that made it onto the record. And then I started bringing her songs like ‘JP and Me’ and ‘Her Ponyboy’, and ‘Nancy and the Pensacola Pimp’. Couples’ songs, yeah, sure, but a lot rougher and darker. But Amy put up with those. Luckily for me, she didn’t strike on me – she was great.
I wrote a handful of other songs besides the title track that just didn’t quite work, but the beauty of getting to write for Amy is she’ll tell you what she likes to sing about, and what she doesn’t want to sing about – and it makes me think about things in a different way. And it’s good for a guy like me who’s stark-minded to try to write happily-ever-after songs, and that is why when we were going to put the record out earlier this year, I said, “Let’s put the record out on February the 14th because I did the best I could with that one” (‘Mr Luck & Miss Doom’).
Would it be fair to say that, unlike the current album, the previous record, The Sea Drift, had a more definite sense of place about it, specifically The Gulf Coast? In contrast, this new record is more people-focused, with individual stories this time.
I do write generally in geographic terms, you know. I think of things as little movies. I write songs thinking they’re movies in my head. So, The Delines is billed as a cinematic band. You want to put on a Delines song and have it take you somewhere. So this one was more set in the South West, kind of like the cover of the album. The feel of a lot of those songs is the South and the South West.
Throughout our conversation, Vlautin was happy to expand into more detail, as he did here, highlighting how musical changes in their sound had come about.
By the time of ‘The Sea Drift’ record, we had started kind of living with each other as songwriters and musicians. And then I think it’s just a continuation of Cory’s influence on the band, and me then thinking about horns – leaving more space for string arrangements – even though there’s probably more string arrangements on ‘The Sea Drift’. But then there’s also a lot of tempo changes. Parts of ‘Mr Luck & Ms Doom’ are more upbeat. The one thing with The Delines was that both Amy and I never wanted to go back to the cow punk stuff. So it was kind of tricky to figure out how to move out of that kind of real sultry side of The Delines to a more upbeat Delines without relying on what we both grew up doing, which was cowpunk. So it’s a combination of those two things that made the records kind of change, and we were growing and changing as a band.
With ‘The Imperial’ it was the first record we did with Cory Gray on the keyboards and as a trumpeter. He’s also a string arranger and horn arranger. I’d written about half the record without thinking specifically of the trumpet. I didn’t know how good a trumpet player he was. You know, initially, we started the band with Jenny Conlee from The Decemberists – she’s an old friend of mine – but she started touring too much. And she was like, “Look, I can’t tour with you guys on this tour; you’re going to need to find a different keyboard player”, so we found Cory. And we didn’t know how good he was and how cool he was. He’s one of my favourite people. And so he fit right in. And so I started writing songs, thinking about Cory and what he would do. And so ‘The Imperial’ was like the start of that.
You must inhabit these characters to a fair degree. Do you feel any sense of betrayal if things don’t work out for them?
No, I mean, it’s tricky. If I have to throw a guy in front of a bus or stab a man who’s been hurting a woman or doing something bad, I don’t mind. I know Amy would like that. So I don’t mess with the ladies. ‘Don’t Miss Your Bus, Lorraine’ is probably the saddest and probably the most political song on the record. It’s just that idea of being incarcerated for a drug charge. You know, in America, we imprison more people than any other Western democracy. It’s a whole infrastructure; it’s a whole business. It’s heartbreaking. And the thing is, people are set up to fail when they get out. There are so many restrictions on felons that it’s hard for them to get back into society. So, ‘Don’t Miss Your Bus, Lorraine’ is about a woman who gets out of prison for selling marijuana to find that now there are marijuana stores that are legal. There are now more marijuana stores than bars in Portland. And then she still can’t find any job, but as a maid. And so she starts giving up. I think the saddest song is the very last song, which is – ‘Don’t Go Into that House Lorraine’. By that, I mean, “Don’t go back into that same old thing that you’ve been doing”. Amy’s singing on that short little song just kills me. But it’s like, “Please keep trying, don’t miss your bus – just keep trying”.
‘Don’t Go Into That House Lorraine’ is slightly ambiguous. The song only lasts one minute and 37 seconds.
Exactly. It’s like you saying to yourself, “Don’t give up”. Some days, you feel like giving up. It is that idea of: “Is she going to go in and revert to her old self? Or is she going to keep fighting a fight when the odds are so stacked against her? She’s not getting the proper help. And people get frustrated and disillusioned. You’re not sure if she’s going to go in or not. She’s by the house, and that’s why the music is the way it is. It’s heartbreaking.
There’s a great book called ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness’ that really influenced that song. But any time you get corporations into anything that should not be for profit, once you get prison lobbyists fighting for stricter criminal charges and more draconian sentences, then you’re screwed. And it’s built like that way, and America is heading back that way when they’re going to start imprisoning more people because the new administration says, “Let’s put them in and throw away the key”. And once you corporatise prisons, it’s never-ending; they need customers. It’s awful. I remember Jimmy Carter having big discussions about breaking down the prison system as we know it. And looking to move away from how we’ve been imprisoning people. And then Reagan got in and started the war on drugs – and bam!
The tragedy of that song is that you’re almost thinking that Lorraine’s not missing her bus is a small victory in the overall scheme of things.
Yes, Lorraine knows she’s not going to be respected because everybody knows she’s been in prison. You have to put down on your job application that you’re a felon, which immediately makes her a second-class citizen when she walks into the job. In my personal experience, the lower the level of the job, the worse the bosses are. And when you’re working a hard job, no one cares about you; no one is happy, and so sometimes the most abuse comes in the lowest-paid jobs.
Your identification with the underdog sounds like it originated in your childhood. But your hard-scrabble upbringing in Reno hasn’t impacted your facility for empathy, emotional intelligence, and good memory for emotion.
My childhood was alright, man. My Mum had a job. There was never instability in the house. My Mum was a workhorse. She struggled in her life but was dealt a few bad hands. But she never quit. She worked for 30 years for less than the men around her and got sexually abused by the men. And she came out alright. She was tough.
Did you inherit some of that work ethic from her?
My brother and I are both kind of workhorses. And my Mum always said if you’re a small family, which we were, she always said you’re only a few bad moves away from living in a car, so you’d better watch out. She worked with a lot of guys that her boss would hire – homeless guys who lived by the river in our town and tried to rehabilitate them. And for what reasons, I don’t know why he did, because he wasn’t by nature an altruistic guy. But he did, and my Mum would see those guys kind of rise up and fall back into boozing and fall apart again. I remember Mum took a walk one day; she always walked by the river on her days off, and she said, “Hey I saw Steve today, and he’s back pushing a cart again”. And the guy was sober and had a nice place to live for like 10 years. And he was back to living by the river. So I guess I understood falling apart like that, and so maybe that’s why I gravitated towards hard work. And my Mum was really cool in a lot of ways. She’s not a fan of the arts, you know. She’s tough, man.
You wrote your first novel, ‘This Motel Life’ in 2006. When did you start writing songs, and was novel writing a natural evolution from writing so many story songs?
I started writing songs at 11; my brother wrote folk songs in high school, and he’s 4 years older than I am. I did pretty much anything he did, so I started playing guitar, and then I quit because I’m left-handed. I’m really left-handed and couldn’t figure out how to do it. My brother found a left-handed guitar, and my Mum got it for me, and then I started playing with him, but he said, “You know, man, you should start writing your own songs”. He told me, “You’re such a sad little kid; you should write songs – and get it out”. And so I started writing songs at that age.
But I didn’t start writing stories until I was 18, really. And then from 18 onwards, you’re in a bad band for most of your adolescence; like, I was in bands that nobody liked; and your Mum’s pissed because you’re making too much noise, and your neighbours are pissed, and if you’re playing bars people don’t really like you, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence and it killed me – and then you go to a library and you start writing a story; you don’t bother anybody; you’re just hiding out inside in your mind. And nobody thinks you’re an idiot. You don’t have to be in front of people to do it. And so I fell in love with the work ethic of writing about 18, because it’s so silent. You know like when you have roommates and you’re working on a song, it drives everybody crazy. So, I think I got addicted to writing then; it just took me from 18 to 35 to have the confidence to show anybody. Because I was in a struggling band – Richmond Fontaine – for a lot of years, and then I didn’t want people to say I was bad at writing stories, right when somebody said, “I don’t like your band”; I thought that would be too much. So, I kept the stories to myself. But I wrote a lot of short stories from about 18 to 30 or so, but my love has always been the novel. So, if I write short stories, they come out as songs. And I’d focus mostly on novels; probably from my early 30s, I haven’t written more than a handful of short stories.
What’s the difference in the discipline required to write a novel relative to a short story?
It’s a digging-in, and it’s years of commitment versus dipping your toes in. You’re essentially digging a ditch for a mile instead of 50 yards, so I like it because my biggest goal as a novelist is to make the reader forget they’re reading a book. I just want them to drop inside this world.
Essentially, reading a novel as though it’s an immersive experience?
Yes, exactly. And somehow, with short stories, even as a fan of them, I always feel like I’m being led around. You can feel the writer in short stories because there’s so much more craft often, and so there’s that – and also they end! You know, you might be really enjoying a short story, and then it ends, so you’re like, man, I wish it would go on, and so I’ve gravitated towards novels myself, just because I’m a fan of them. And I do like the work ethic of a novel. I like the treachery of it. And I love sitting in the ditch digging all day. And the grind of a novel – I don’t mind that.
In a 1983 Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review, Raymond Carver once said: “Nobody ever asked me to be a writer… After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realised I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of a payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now. Hence, poems and stories”. So you’re already better than Raymond Carver because you’ve been able to write both short stories and novels.
No, man (laughs). That guy is a short story legend. Carver is one of the reasons I started writing. Maybe it’s because I was in a band; I did get payoff. With my band, Richmond Fontaine, I’d get to go out and tour around and at least play a bar, get free drinks, meet people, have parties, and do stuff that little bands do. Whereas being a writer – if you’re writing a novel by yourself for three years, and it’ll be a miracle if anyone reads it –even your best friends will think you’re nuts. I get what Carver’s saying there. For me, it was different; it was more of a sanctuary. It was pure escape and just working on craft, whereas being in a band is so much about logistics and tours, like “Hey, did we get the van fixed?; “Did we design t-shirts?”; “We have to go pick up that guy because his car broke down”; “We’ve got to set up this tour”; “We’ve got to do this and that”; “We’ve got to get motels”. So much of it is about logistics and getting to places. Whereas writing is all about work; it’s just the work of building a story and building a world, so I never mind the disappearing. But I get it. A really great writer named Larry Brown wrote a story about another writer, a working-class guy that was writing stories who was kind of falling off the wagon; he was going on a bender, and he wasn’t going to write a novel any more because, as Carver said, it takes years off your life and if it doesn’t work it’s wasted; and so you might as well write stories, and see if one hits.
Will we see a short story collection from you at some point?
No, probably not. Just listen to ‘Mr Luck & Ms Doom’, The Sea Drift’, or any Fontaine record – and those are all short stories.
I’m wondering, seven novels in now, how you manage the time between writing books, writing songs, being away and your family’s needs. It must be hard to juggle.
I don’t do any of it well, that’s for sure. I struggle with it all. I guess the only answer is that I really like writing novels. And so I spend a lot of time doing that. My wife is really cool, so my home life is great that way. And my band doesn’t tour as hard as normal bands. The Delines aren’t built to tour a lot, and I love that, so it gives me more time to write, but yeah, it’s hard juggling all of those things. It’s hard putting on your band hat, being a mom and pop band too: we do everything, every part of the band, you know, I’m a part of. So it takes up a lot of time, but The Delines is a lucky band for me to be in, so I’ll run any errand I have to for that band, but it’s hard juggling, that’s true.
Do you have any daily writing habits? Are you like Nick Cave and absent yourself from the home environment, where you go into your studio for an allocated period each day? Or is it more on the spur?
No, I mean, with novels, you kind of have to clock in, I think, if you want to get it done. I mean, I live out in the woods, but I’ve rented a little room for the last 14 years in Portland and across the street from us, there is a bar and a movie theatre, and if I could be there every day, all day, I would. I don’t really have any rituals except the time; it’s all about time. If I get the time to do it, I will do it. I hate to say this, but I have said it before: if you said, “Hey look man, you can have two weeks in Hawaii, all expenses paid, and drink Mai Tais in the morning and go swimming and drink beer all day”, or you can buy yourself some work on stories or without life getting in the way, I’d always pick writing. I just like it, so I don’t have any rituals, except don’t be hungover, and hope to God you have time.
Your love of literature is well known. Is there anyone else producing music that you’re fond of? I understand you’re a fan of Margo Cilker.
I’ve kind of become friends with Margo because we have the same producer, John Askew, who is a brilliant guy with a really cool studio in Vancouver, Washington. But Margot, I relate to her in so many ways because she loves the West, East Oregon, and Nevada, so we’ve hit it off over our mutual love of the same places. She’s the first musician I’ve met that really likes the same sort of way out, far out, places in a real way. So I’ve been a huge fan of hers. Man, I’ve got to be honest, I’ve been listening to nothing but ’60s and ’70s Italian soundtracks, such as Gianni Ferrio, Piero Piccioni, Bruno Nicolai, Nora Orlandi, you know, Ennio Morricone of course, so all I do all day long, is listen to that stuff. And people are thinking, I’m nuts. And maybe I am going nuts. But I’ve listened to that stuff obsessively for the last six months.
The only other record that I just listened to – granted, he’s a friend of mine – but it blew me away, is Patterson Hood’s new record. And Craig Finn’s new record – both those guys’ new records are amazing. Craig Finn’s new record, which I think is coming out in March, I mean lyrically, is one of his best. That guy’s unstoppable. And Patterson Hood of The Drive By Truckers is the same way; It’s one of his best records. He’s a singer that I love, and this might be my favourite singing of his, so I’ve listened to those guys’ records – and I dig them. And then I go back to my Italian soundtracks, and I lose my mind.
The Delines’ new album, Mr Luck and Ms Doom is out now on Decor Records.
Bandcamp: https://thedelines.bandcamp.com/album/mr-luck-and-ms-doom
The Delines UK Tour:
The Delines have added a second show at Union Chapel in March 2026 after their April-date sold-out.
March 25 – Brighton – Old Market
March 26 – Manchester – Band On The Wall (Sold-Out)
March 27 – Leeds – City Varieties
March 28 – Glasgow – St Lukes
March 29 – Newcastle – Gosforth Civic
March 30 – Nottingham – Metronome (Sold-Out)
March 31 – Birmingham – Glee Club
April 1 – Bristol – Lantern
April 2 – Southampton – 1865
April 3 – London – Union Chapel (Sold-Out)
March 26, 2026 – London – Union Chapel