RICHMOND Fontaine leader Willy Vlautin may be best known for his critically acclaimed novels like Lean on Pete and The Free these days, but he's not ready to give up his 'day job' just yet.
Far from it: Richmond Fontaine released a brand new album just last year, the very Richmond Fontaine-titled You Can't Go Back if There's Nothing to Go Back To, which featured a raft of richly textured songs cut from similarly rugged, careworn cloth as Vlautin's always authentically-voiced stories.
Take the tune Whitey and Me, for example:
"It's the story of two cowboy brothers who get their horses sold out from under them by a wayward uncle," he explains.
"They run into the uncle years later, only to find a wrecked man. They realize there’s no point in kicking someone who's spent his whole life kicking himself.
"I'd just written the tune and not much later I was driving around central Nevada, and in the middle of nowhere I came across an old, blind Mustang. I studied his scars and thought about all the hard times he must have had. And now he was left alone to die.
"After that trip, the songs just sorta spilled out. The characters in Wake Up Ray, I Got Off The Bus, Don't Skip Out on Me and Tapped Out in Tulsa are all like that horse – beat up, with nothing but hard miles behind them."
No one writes quite like Willy, and no one sounds quite like Richmond Fontaine. Let's hope both sides of his creativity continue to thrive for years to come.
:: Tickets from £10 via CQAF.com.
