“Why are all your songs so sad, Al?” a country singer asks Al Ward, the main character in Willy Vlautin’s new novel, “The Horse,” released July 30, before they end up in a Las Vegas hotel bed. “Every single one of them.”
It is surely a question Vlautin himself has heard about his own work, both as a songwriter and a novelist.
One of his books — which shall remain nameless so as not to fully spoil it — ends in such a way that an elderly lady once went up to him at the Fred Meyer in Scappoose (where he lives, along with a little writing office in St. John’s) and said, “I hate you.” He wondered if it was a neighbor he didn’t recognize, whom he had pissed off for some reason. But it turned out she was just mad about the fate of a beloved character.
Vlautin hopes to avoid a repeat when he speaks about his newest novel with Patterson Hood of the Drive-By-Truckers at the West Burnside Street Powell’s on Aug. 16 at 7 p.m.
But how could Vlautin’s books be any other way, when they’re about the United States? His imaginative but social realist stories have rightly been compared to the likes of Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver. His work also has a lot in common with crime novelists like George Pelecanos, Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö and Dashiell Hammett — genre fiction in which the core subject is our flawed society.
Vlautin’s characters are hard-working, emotionally battered, and in many cases, literally bruised. His work is in no way auto-fiction, but there are still pieces of himself and other people from his life in many characters.
Originally from Nevada, Vlautin has lived in Portland since the ‘90s. He was originally best known for being in Portland alt-country band Richmond Fontaine. His first book, “The Motel Life,” came out in 2007. Both it and 2010’s “Lean on Pete,” which drew on Vlautin’s infamous affinity for Portland Meadows (he was known to use the now-demolished racetrack as an office), also became movies, which will soon be the case for his most recent novel, 2021’s “The Night Always Comes,” as well (it stars Vanessa Kirby, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Julia Fox and Eli Roth).
“The Night Always Comes” — a book about gentrification, family, housing and by-the-hour labor that also reads like a thriller and a feminist revenge tale — defines Portland in the 2000s as surely as Portlandia (which is to say, in a completely different way).
And now, even as he continues to be in a newer band, The Delines, Vlautin is back with “The Horse,” which, despite its equine title, is actually his first book about music. In the afterward, Vlautin mentions X’s John Doe, the Sadies’ Dallas Good (who died in 2022) and locals Scott McCaughey (The Minus Five) and Hood as inspirations.
But protagonist Al Ward is neither a rock star nor a culty indie-rocker, but rather, a working casino musician who writes country songs, plays guitar and has a too-close relationship with tequila. A journeyman. A lifer. The honky-tonk version of Mickey Rourke’s character in “The Wrestler.”
At the beginning of the book, Al is basically retired — living on a Nevada high desert mining claim inside a broken-down assayer’s office, with no running water or electricity, and surviving on instant coffee and Campbell’s soup. Then he meets the title character, if you will: a seemingly blind and immobile horse outside his door. As Al struggles to help out the animal (assuming that it’s real), we follow his mind back to all the moments of his life — family, lovers, bandmates, jobs and many, many, many songs, with titles like “Black Thoughts I Only See,” “The Busted Windshield and Broken Hand,” “I Hit It Big but It Hit Back Bigger (Now I’m Hitchhiking Home)” and “Maxine #6.”
(This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
Jason Cohen: So, you’ve been in bands for 30 years and published your first novel in 2007. Had you consciously avoided writing a so-called music book?
Willy Vlautin: Well, I’ve never really liked novels about rock’n’roll. I love reading biographies of musicians. I love listening to musicians talk about stuff. But when somebody writes a novel about like, rock stars, or the drama within a band, I just was never interested. It always felt kind of false to me.
(With) this novel, I was thinking about a few different things. Most of the musicians I grew up playing with, (and) the guys that I play with today, they’ve never quit. They might have bouts of turning their back if something bad happens — they have a particularly hard breakup with a band, or maybe life gets in the way. But generally, most guys I’ve ever met come back to it. And so I was just interested in why a guy does art. Why a person writes songs, year after year. Scott McCaughey, he’s been writing brilliant songs for probably 50 years. I’m just interested in why a guy would keep going.
Cohen: So who came first, Al or the horse?
Vlautin: The horse. I was working on this book of mine called “Don’t Skip Out On Me,” set in central Nevada. I was driving around there with this old friend of mine, like 30 miles away from the nearest paved road, and we came to a big desert playa, and what looked like a statue of a black horse. We walked up to it to find it was a completely blind wild mustang. You could see all the scars on its body from a hard life. Like for any of us. If you’re lucky enough to live a long time, you get your scars — both internal and the ones you can see.
The scariest thing for a horse is, first, to not have any friends, because they’re herd animals. And then the second is, they’re flight animals, so to not see. It stopped me in my tracks. The hardest thing I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t shake it.
Anyway, we camped near it that night. The next morning we went back to town and called the Bureau of Land Management, and they had a guy come out for it. After that, we just kept driving, and we came to an old mining claim. And there was this old assayer’s office, and I told my buddy, “Y’know, I think that’s as much as I can take. I’m getting out here.”
And so the novel started out of those two things combined. And Al — he’s part me, and part the idea of what I was saying: Why does a guy do art when no one cares? What’s the power of it?
Cohen: In the book, Al’s uncle gets him his first guitar and says, ‘I can tell you got the bug.’ Did that happen for you?
Vlautin: My brother played. He’s four years older than me. He was like my father figure in a lot of ways, and everything he did, I did. So I started playing guitar, and I wasn’t very good at it. I’m really hardcore left-handed, and I couldn’t figure out how to play right-handed very well.
So I kind of gave it up. But I fell madly in love with songs. The power of the disappearing aspect of it. The idea that you could put on — I mean it didn’t matter who it was, but just an example that everybody knows — a Bruce Springsteen song when you’re 11 or 12, and all of a sudden you’re in New Jersey. Or you put on The Pogues, and you’re in Ireland. Or you hear a beautiful woman singer, and you’re suddenly with her, and you’re in love and a million miles away from where you’re at. That was the bug: the disappearing.
And then my brother, being the cool guy he is, convinced my mom to rent me a left-handed guitar, and that changed everything.
What I never thought about was: ‘Oh, you gotta play in front of people.’ I was almost clinically shy. It was a long learning curve for me playing in front of people, and it about killed me doing it. But in another way, it cured me of (the shyness). So I owe music that as well.
Cohen: I feel like every front person I’ve ever known secretly wants to be a sideperson in a band. Is that part of the fun for you in The Delines now?
Vlautin: I don’t think I’ve ever been a really good frontperson. I just wrote a lot of songs. As a kid too. If you want to be in a garage-rock band, or a cow-punk band is what I was always in, you want to do your own stuff, and I was the only guy that consistently would bring in tunes. And so I just, by default, started being the front guy, just because I had them and I knew the lyrics, and it’s the easiest thing to do. It always took more energy from me than it seemed to give. And I never was one that really needed the attention.
As you get older, you start thinking, if you want to make a change in life, you better start doing it, because you start running out of time. I always wanted to just be in a band with a cool woman singer that did more ballads. And I’ve known Amy Boone for years, and she was nice enough to give it a shot, and it’s worked out. I love being in the band. I love being a sideman. I love hearing her sing. I could do Delines gigs every night for the rest of my life, where with Fontaine, I’d probably be in a mental institution if I had to. Just out of insecurity. I always felt like I was letting the guys down all the time because I wasn’t that good at it. All that weight left as soon as I joined The Delines.
Cohen: Your nerves were shot in Fontaine, as Al would say?
Vlautin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Al and I are obviously (laughter) pretty similar.
Cohen: How many song titles are there in this book?
Vlautin: I think there’s 234. There might be more. The song titles I wrote just to give you an idea of what Al was thinking in different times. I was hoping they’d be almost like poems. They let you into the mind of where he was at that time in his life. The song titles, the song snippets and lyrics and the casino band stuff was the most fun of the book.
Cohen: And did any of the song titles exist before the book existed?
Vlautin: Well, not really. I mean, I’ve been working on this book for quite a bit. So I’ve written a lot of songs off those titles. I think the earliest one is The Delines’ song, “Kid Codeine.” And “Tapped Out in Tulsa” was a Richmond Fontaine (song). That I just put in there as a nod for the guys in my band.
Cohen: You’ve done a few companion records to past books. Is there an Al Ward EP coming?
Vlautin: No, because I wanted to let the reader figure out what it sounded like. I figured anyone that reads it will have their own take on what his songs would be like. Now, the new Delines record, which comes out next year, has like four or five titles of Al’s.
Cohen: So, since this is Street Roots, we also have to talk about your last book, “The Night Always Comes.” Unfortunately its themes are no less pressing in 2024 than they were when you wrote it.
Vlautin: I started writing “The Night Always Comes” just hanging out in St. Johns. You see all the cute two-bedroom houses, kind of towards Cathedral Park, where you’re always like, man, someday I wish I could live there. And they always seemed just out of your reach.
And then all of a sudden, I’d pass by a house and go, how is that $300,000? Then you go back two months later, you see another comparable house, and it’s $350,000. In six months, $400,000. That idea of working-class homes built for working-class people. Now somebody has enough money to tear down a normal house so they can build a nicer house. It made no sense to me, and really kind of shook me and frightened me.
The idea of Portland, at one time, was being a really affordable working-class city. When I first moved to Portland, I bought a house, and I was a house painter. It was difficult to get a loan and everything, but the house was cheap enough for a single guy. It was a one-bedroom house. Now, if a couple both worked for UPS, which to me would be a pretty high-end, pretty cool job, you probably can’t afford to buy a house in Southeast Portland, or those old-school houses in St. John’s. It would be difficult. It would be a stretch.
Cohen: And now it is soon to be a major motion picture. Was it Vanessa Kirby herself who optioned the book?
Vlautin: It was a production company. They knew that she was interested in it. I didn’t have anything really to do with it. Movies, it’s a lot of juggling chainsaws. You’re trying to get all these people to believe in this idea, and she had the juice. She’s doing really well right now, and I think really helped get it made. I’m really happy they shot it in Portland, and they spent a lot of money in Portland. They gave a lot of people jobs, which made me feel good.
Cohen: Do you think of yourself as a guy who stopped having a day job to be an artist or do you also think of writing as a day job?
Vlautin: Oh no, man — I think it was the luckiest day. When I quit — I painted full time for maybe 13 years — I didn’t sell my gear for five years. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t wake up feeling grateful that I don’t have to work. I was trying to write novels for fun and then be in a band and work a full-time job. And then I think you either realize, oh, this art thing is not going to work out for me, or you’re playing in a bar ’til (2 a.m.) and then getting up at (7 a.m.). And obviously, it’s easier to give up the thing that doesn’t make any money. So I feel really, really lucky. Every day I’m writing a story, I feel like, ‘Hey, I just won the lottery. Or, when are they going to make me go back and work a job?’•
“The Horse” (Harper Collins) is out now. Willy Vlautin appears in conversation with Patterson Hood at Powell’s Books downtown on Aug. 16.
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This article appears in July 31, 2024.