He listens to The Blasters, The Flesheaters and X…
About 4 years ago a friend handed me ‘Post to Wire’ and told me to have a listen. The cover looked promising; a beat up caravan, sorry trailer, with the legend THIS IS THE LAND OF BROKEN DREAMS writ large on the siding and providing a major hint to the content. I don’t need to tell you this is a great album, and the one which broke Richmond Fontaine to the UK. Songs of heartbreak and loneliness interspersed with the inventive ‘Postcard From…’ vignettes set to a modern western sound; I played it nonstop and was hooked.
Post to Wire was the 5th release by the Fontaine, so I dug back a bit to hear the older stuff and was surprised to find a different sound. In amongst the rootsy tunes on Lost Son, Miles From and Safety there is a beating guitar heart borne from the likes of Hüsker Dü and Green on Red. Some real gems amongst these first outings too, check out Pinkerton, Cascade, Blinding Sight and Safety. The 4th album, Winnemucca, is a stone fucking classic. Northline, 5 Degrees below Zero and Western Skyline are 3 of the finest contemporary Americana songs you’ll ever hear. Whatever happened between Lost Son and Winnemucca changed the sound of the band for good. Winnemuca is an album forged from desert desperation. With the (relative) success of Post to Wire you may think RF would have continued to mine the same seam on their next release The Fitzgerald but in a courageous move they went for a stripped down Nebraska style sound. I’ll admit this was a slow burner for me, but perseverance brings reward, Mabel. The craft behind the songs on The Fitzgerald is incredible. If you can listen to The Janitor without feeling a lump in the throat then you truly are a cold, heartless bastard. One of the things I love about the Fontaine is the ever changing sound and Thirteen Cities (plus the subsequent $87… EP) stayed true to form. Guests such as Howe Gelb and Calexico’s Jacob Valenzuela fleshed out a mariachi vibe to the record. There was something of a more accessible sound in a few of the tracks like Capsized and the astonishing Four Walls, they would sit well in any radio playlist… but needless to say don’t. If Chris Martin wrote Four Walls Radio 1 would fucking wet themselves.
We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded like a River is the current release and doing pretty well by all accounts. It builds on the Thirteen Cities vibe, written and played in an accessible way but still retaining the dark undercurrent of Willy Vlautin’s lyrics. When Willy Vlautin writes he writes of the people around him; blue collar guys, waitresses, gamblers and drifters. The Boyfriends is Vlautin’s part nostalgic, part pained look back at the men in his (recently departed) mother’s life.
If my mother was alive I would never have written that song…even though I’m not attacking her in it. All I can say is I can’t remember any of my teachers or half the kids I went to school with, but I remember all of my mom’s boyfriends. And they’re stuck in my head like a fucking hammer. So I had to write this song.
He’s always written that way. On Safety the track White Line Fever has a trucker take centre stage in, for me, one of RF’s greatest moments. Drama, tragedy and human weakness are all played out with a rolling, tumultuous soundtrack. This song resurfaced on ‘obliteration by time’ sounding even better than before. If you check out one song from this post let it be ‘White Line Fever’ Vlautin is also enjoying success as a novelist, his first two novels getting great reviews and his third, Lean on Pete is due out next year. But don’t go away thinking Richmond Fontaine is all Willy Vlautin; it’s a bunch of friends playing together and enjoying what they do. Hopefully the new album will be a success for them, and they can continue making My Favourite Music.
And as wee treat, here’s an exclusive Hooverville rendering of ‘$87 and a conscience….’