Those sufficiently long in the tooth may remember Margaret Thatcher’s purported praise of senior Conservative Party politician William Whitelaw: “Every prime minister needs a Willie”. For americana enthusiasts, their Willy could well be a Vlautin, songwriter for The Delines. Americana UK writer Andy Davidson suggested in his Top 10 Americana Songs of All Time feature that ‘Willy Vlautin should be in the White House’. Whether or not there’ll be a ‘Vote Vlautin’ badge signifying a run for candidacy in 2028, the bard of Portland has already cemented a place on my personal Mount Rushmore of Americana. Representing the downtrodden, the downcast, and the down and out, he’s done more than most to Make Americana Great Again. Vlautin may just be the busiest beaver in the Beaver State. His just-published eighth novel, The Left and the Lucky, means that he now occupies over five inches of bookshelf space, and my spies, heavily disguised as sheep, recently spotted activity at Rockfield Studios in the Wye Valley consistent with the recording of material for The Delines’ next album.
Americana UK readers should need no introduction to the band. Inhabiting the sweet spot between country soul and americana-noir, they have two AUK albums of the year under their belts – Sea Drift (2022) and Ms. Luck & Mr. Doom (2025). Their first album, Colfax, was the Oregon Music Hall of Fame’s 2015 Album of the Year. Their sophomore album, The Imperial, was voted 4th best in the AUK readers’ Top 10 Americana Albums of the 21st Century poll (AUK writers went one better, placing it third in their poll). Drive-By Trucker Patterson Hood had his finger firmly on the pulse of Instagram in October 2019: “Simply jaw-droppingly great. The Delines. Some of the greatest songs you’ll ever hear, sung by a fantastic singer, backed by a stunningly excellent band.” Hood’s song Pauline Hawkins, from the Drive-By Truckers’ English Oceans album, was inspired by one of the main characters in Vlautin’s novel The Free.
It has been ten years since I funnelled into The Tunnels venue for Richmond Fontaine’s farewell Bristol gig. Willy Vlautin, Sean Oldham, Freddy Trujillo, and Dan Eccles were the last men standing in that band’s journey from post to wire. The end of an era, but few tears, as Vlautin, Oldham and Trujillo had already been in town two years earlier to announce the arrival of The Delines, a classic country soul outfit fronted by Amy Boone. Vlautin informed the audience that he and Oldham first met Boone when they signed up for a skydiving course for which she was the instructor. Supreme storyteller Vlautin sure can spin a good yarn. In Boone, he had found the perfect vocalist to represent his cast of hardscrabble characters. The final piece of The Delines jigsaw, Cory Gray, was enlisted in 2015. He has the ability to pull off the musical equivalent of combined head patting and belly rubbing, frequently playing trumpet and keyboards simultaneously. The band’s sympathetic soundscapes form the canvas for Boone’s round-about-midnight realisations of Vlautin’s vignettes. Their live performances radiate unassuming splendour, all heart and no ego, five consummate professionals at ease with each other and their audience. They return briefly to the UK the first week in October 2026, should you be lucky enough to be within striking distance of Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds, Bristol, or Colchester.
These Essential Top 10 songs by The Delines should provide a warm welcome to the few uninitiated, or a chance for the many converted to compare choices. For the latter, given the abundant options, the likelihood of coming up with an identical list are as remote as hitting the jackpot at Winner’s Casino in Winnemucca, Nevada (Winner’s Casino is the opening track of Richmond Fontaine’s 2003 album Winnemucca).
Number 10: Can You Get Me Out Of Phoenix from The Set Up (2026)
A stately start to the countdown from the maestros of maestoso. A percussionist colleague drew my attention to the ‘behind the beat’ restraint of Oldham’s drums, generating a relaxed, stately tempo. The rhythm section of Oldham and bassist Trujillo are surely the Sly and Robbie of country soul. Back in Richmond Fontaine days, Vlautin reflected on his brushwork experience in the song I Fell Into Painting Houses in Phoenix, Arizona, but for many years now, he’s been painting with words, adding texture with his seemingly effortless, understated guitar work. Can You Get Me Out Of Phoenix sees Boone pull off plaintive with customary aplomb. “I should have listened/ To what my dad told me/ He said keep your own ladder/ ‘Cause when you’re down/ Everyone will just sit by/ To watch you sink”, she sings, playing a twice-bereaved Phoenician without a bean to her name in search of a way out of the mire in Arizona’s Valley of the Sun.
Number 9: The Golden State from The Lost Duets (2022)
A hidden gem from The Lost Duets, a collection of strays from the pack herded together for posterity. Vlautin and Boone bicker con gusto in a cowpunk flashback, emulating Johnny and June Carter Cash in Jackson, or George and Martha in the Edward Albee play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf that inspired Billy Edd Wheeler to write that Cash duet. Adding urgency to the mix are Tucker Jackson’s pedal steel and Jenny Conlee-Drizos’ accordion. The female protagonist is unimpressed by a crappy motel room, skipping out on a San Francisco diner bill, and her partner’s inebriated rendition of the Sir Douglas Quintet’s signature song of 1969, Mendocino. The promise of an electronic transfer of funds from a brother, reminiscent of those Dear Pete postcards from Richmond Fontaine’s Post To Wire, offers the boyfriend one last shot at romantic redemption. The moral of the story is next time round, book a room at the Fairmont San Francisco.
With seasonal songs at unseasonal times generally being cantica non grata, The Golden State meant no room at the inn for the 2023 7-inch offering Christmas in Atlantis, which, as dysfunctional family reunions go, takes the Christmas cookie. Or, as described on Bandcamp, “The Delines may have written the most normal Christmas song ever.”
Number 8: Kid Codeine from The Sea Drift (2022)
It took three tosses of the Portland Penny to decide that the name of what is now the Pacific Northwest’s second most populous city, and base camp for The Delines, would not be Boston. The city’s Lombard Street appears in the lyrics of a number of the band’s songs. There’s a choice of the “pitcher of gin fizz” from Slim’s in Calling In, or “a couple of drinks” at Little Sam’s in I Won’t Slip Up, both on the Colfax album. The annual St. Johns Parade, mentioned in Walking With His Sleeves Down (The Set Up), has crossed Lombard Street on the second Saturday in May since 1963. After a few flips of a coin, I selected Kid Codeine as my Lombard Street representative: “People call her Kid Codeine/ Owns a lounge off Lombard Street.” The song’s eccentric subject chooses a bouffant over a beehive for her big hair, and favours full-length faux fur. She may even have been spotted by Vlautin from his Lombard Street writing office.
Number 7: Her Ponyboy from Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom (2025)
Admirers of place-based songwriting are in for a field day in this musical travelogue. Tracking a pair of young hearts as they run free across the states, the transcontinental journey starts in Florida and ends with a fateful train ride to Oregon. Calling at Delacroix, Louisiana; West Texas; Yuma, Arizona; Blanding, Utah; Baja California and Slab City. Their itinerant work schedule includes fishing, ranching and pecan farming. The song starts with a reference to Ponyboy, the teenage narrator of S. E. Hinton’s 1967 coming-of-age novel The Outsiders. This book was chosen by Vlautin in 2014 when asked by the Financial Times, “What novel would you give a child to introduce them to literature?” Vlautin packs enough storyline into just under five minutes to provide a synopsis for a ninth novel. A line from the song’s final verse informs the title of a trumpet-led lamentation, Jumping Off In Madras, on The Delines’ following album, The Set Up – a haunting reflection on the female protagonist’s experience and losses.
Number 6: Colfax Avenue from Colfax (2014)
Colfax Avenue is a mighty long Colorado street, running from Heritage Road in Golden, east-west through Denver, to Headlight Road in Strasburg. It is long enough to accommodate the Kaiser Permanente Colfax marathon, which includes a lap inside the Denver Broncos’ Mile High Stadium. References to the street can be found scattered throughout the seventeen series of the foul-mouthed adult animated sitcom set in the fictional Colorado Town of South Park. Colfax Avenue is also the penultimate port of call for Charley Thompson, the teenage narrator of Vlautin’s third novel, Lean On Pete.
In The Delines’ song, the search is on for a brother last seen leaving a dive bar on the street after self-medicating with alcohol for his military service-induced post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for PTSD, Desert Storm Veterans had at least a 20% chance of being diagnosed with the condition at some point in their lives, compared with a background risk of 6% amongst the general population. In the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 2.8 million Veterans, 14% of all U.S. Veterans, reported having at least one substance use disorder in the previous year. There could well be more Vets missing in action on strips such as Colfax Avenue, should another generation of US military be committed to ‘boots on the ground’ by a golfaholic with draft-deferring calcaneal (heel) spurs.
Number 5: That Old Haunted Place from The Imperial (2019)
Suction power in Portland, Oregon, appears not to be confined to Stark’s Vacuum Museum. The forces drawing the narrator back towards Felony Flats in That Old Haunted Place are strong. Having climbed up the greasy pole, she is now “sittin’ flush” and determined to stay that way, but the burden of guilt for the welfare of those left behind is heavy. The song sounds like a play from a similar ballpark to that in Vlautin’s novel, The Night Always Comes, set in the Brentwood-Darlington and Foster-Powell neighbourhoods of the Rose City.
Number 4: Left Hook Like Frazier from Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom (2025)
The 15th and final round of ‘The Fight of the Century’ at Madison Square Gardens in 1971 saw one of ‘Smokin’’ Joe Frazier’s legendary lefts put Muhammad Ali, The Greatest, on the canvas. The Delines come out swinging, but the explosive punch here belongs to a verbally abusive Tacoman, the latest in line of the female protagonist’s toxic relationships. Before him came a felon, a junkie from Spokane, and then a depressive. Agony aunt Amy delivers another knockout vocal and suggests it’s time to look after number one and throw in the towel on guys who can’t take care of themselves. “That’s how you break a broken heart’, Boone observes, “Little by little by little until you’re on the ground”. The ringside seat is a familiar Vlautin viewpoint. Farm hand Horace Hopper metamorphoses into boxer Hector Hidalgo in his novel Don’t Skip Out On Me; the boyfriend in Kid Codeine was a boxer, and the Richmond Fontaine song The Pull features a pugilist whose road to sobriety comes to a halt with a career-ending retinal detachment.
Number 3: Little Earl from The Sea Drift (2022)
A sixteen-line study in show, don’t tell. The tale is of two brothers heading east out of Texas on Louisiana Highway 82, after a Port Arthur mini-mart raid gone wrong. The titular getaway driver can barely see over the dashboard. The rear seat passenger, his brother, is haemorrhaging from unspecified injuries. Their location, somewhere between a rock and a hard place, brings to mind a telephone conversation between Louise and her boyfriend in Ridley Scott’s movie Thelma and Louise – “I’m in deep shit, Jimmy, Deep Shit, Arkansas”. Except Little Earl and his brother are in deep shit Louisiana. All this for the sake of “a twelve pack of beer,/ Three frozen pizzas and two lighters”. The Gulf Coast heat is unbearable. “Oh no, oh no”, chirp the backing vocal trio of Vlautin, Oldham and Trujillo, as the drama unfolds in widescreen. “How’s It Gonna End”, as Tom Waits once sang – that’s up to us, as Vlautin executes another cliffhanger. The cinematic credentials of Vlautin’s writing are exemplified by big-screen adaptations of three of his novels.
Number 2: The Oil Rigs At Night from Colfax (2014)
Vlautin had always wanted to be in a band with someone that could really sing. No disrespect to Richmond Fontaine, for whom he was, of course, the vocalist, but when Boone toured with the band, he knew he’d found what he was looking for. Boone and her sister Deborah Kelly were members of the Austin-based band The Damnations. RF fans will be familiar with Kelly’s voice from her duet with Vlautin on the title track of their 2003 Post To Wire album. Boone is blessed with a larynx to rival that of a secret love child of Tony Joe White and Bobbie Gentry. The Oil Rigs At Night was the carrot that Vlautin dangled to persuade Boone to come aboard for the launch of The Delines. It took me some time to figure out that the lyrics mentioned Gulf storms rather than gallstones. I guess I’ve scrubbed up for one too many cholecystectomies in my time, resulting in a mondegreen to rival the band Prefab Sprout’s name that was a mishearing of the “peppered sprout” referred to in Johnny & June Carter Cash’s Jackson.
Number 1: The Imperial from The Imperial (2019)
A majestic and fitting finale. The Delines’ second album, The Imperial, was released on January 11th 2019, an unintended but most welcome 64th birthday present for me. The near five-year wait since Colfax had been enforced by injuries sustained by Boone when hit by a car in a parking lot in 2016. All those scars, the title track starts; ominously prophetic. With her smouldering delivery, Boone captures the emotional intensity of an illicit meeting between former lovers for a final farewell at an establishment unlikely to be found at the top of the Tripadvisor ratings. Vlautin never tires of performing the song, he told me after a recent show in Trowbridge. Long may this continue. A Desert Island Discs shoo-in for me.
