Click Image to Download!
The Delines, who have played sold-out shows and topped Americana charts across Europe for half a decade, are the joined forces of Amy Boone from legendary Austin, Texas, band The Damnations (Sire Records) and members of Americana cult heroes Richmond Fontaine, including songwriter and novelist Willy Vlautin. Based out of Portland, Oregon, Richmond Fontaine released 11 records and toured extensively in the US and Europe. Uncut magazine named the band’s 2003 album Post to Wire the fourth-best record of the year.
“We’d crossed paths with The Damnations a ton. Amy’s sister, Deborah, even sang on a couple of our records. So we were pals,” says Vlautin. “And then one tour we hired Amy to play keyboards with us and we did a BBC radio show in Glasgow. During the session she was alone in the studio playing piano and I happened to be in the control room. She didn’t know there was a hot mic; she was singing a ballad to herself, and the way she sang it just killed me. I knew right then that I wanted to be in a band where she sang all the songs.
“After the tour ended, I went home and wrote her tunes for almost a year. She had no idea that I was doing it. When I’d gotten maybe ten good ones, I wrote her a letter, a thesis almost, on why she should join up with me. She was just crazy enough to say yes.” His Richmond Fontaine mates Sean Oldham and Freddy Trujillo helped Vlautin put a band together and Boone came to Portland from Austin. “We rehearsed for a week and recorded Colfax (the band’s 2014 debut),” Vlautin recalls. “That’s how The Delines began. We’ve been making records ever since.”
Their latest, Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, features eleven new originals that follow The Delines’ well-established aesthetic of down-and-out character sketches set to rich folk-soul-country instrumentation. Recorded at Bocce Studios in Vancouver, Washington, with longtime collaborator John Morgan Askew, Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom features Boone’s lush, world-worn voice; the cinematic production skills of Askew; and the horn and string arrangements of Delines keyboardist/trumpeter Cory Gray. As always, Trujillo is on bass, Oldham is on drums, and Vlautin is on guitar.
Vlautin is no stranger to critical acclaim in the US, UK, and Europe, enjoying cult success and rave reviews from the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Uncut, Volkstrant- NL, Hot Press, Rolling Stone, El Pais-ES, The Wall Street Journal and Mojo — both as a novelist, with seven books under his belt, and as a musician. Three of his novels have been made into feature films: The Motel Life (2013), Lean on Pete (2017), and the upcoming Netflix movie The Night Always Comes, starring Vanessa Kirby and Jennifer Jason Leigh (2025 release). “Willy Vlautin is one of the bravest novelists writing,” renowned author Ursula K. Le Guin said. “An unsentimental Steinbeck, a heartbroken Haruf, Willy Vlautin tells us who really lives now in our America, our city in ruins.”
Vlautin’s writing for The Delines mines a similar vein. Colfax evoked a beat-up Dusty Springfield, a weary Rickie Lee Jones. The record made over a dozen top-ten lists. The Imperial followed in 2019; Amy spent much of the time between records in the hospital, recovering from injuries sustained when she was hit by a car. The Imperial spent two weeks on top of the UK Americana charts, with the band playing sold-out shows across the UK and Europe.
The Sea Drift, The Delines’ third full-length release, was met with even more enthusiastic reviews. A record inspired by the great Tony Joe White, it’s The Delines on the Gulf Coast. The Sea Drift was BBC DJ Gideon Coe’s favorite record of the year and Americana UK’s #1 record of the year, garnering four-star reviews from outlets such as Mojo and Uncut.
The spark that ignited Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, The Delines upcoming release, came from a night in Dublin, Ireland, when after a gig Amy took Willy aside and said, “Listen man, you have to write me a straight-up love song where no one dies and nothing goes wrong or I’m going to lose my mind.” After the tour ended, Vlautin went to work.
At the next Delines rehearsal, he brought in “Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom,” maybe the most romantic Delines tune to date. It’s the story of two ragged misfits: a failed criminal and a depressive house cleaner who somehow hit the lottery in meeting each other. That song determined the soul of the record — ragged couples on the run — but Vlautin eventually branched out beyond Boone’s love-song request. “I wrote a few others in that ‘Luck & Doom’ vein, happily-ever-after songs, but they didn’t quite work and my poor ol’ dark heart couldn’t take it,” he laughs. “So I brought in some others — drifter couples in love, romantic albeit a bit more tragic. Luckily Amy liked those, too.”
They include the heartbreaking “Her Ponyboy,” in which a reckless young couple, madly in love, roam aimlessly across the US; the timeless “JP & Me,” where a grifter couple gets sidelined when the man in the relationship goes mad; and the Bobbie Gentry-influenced “Nancy & the Pensacola Pimp,” the story of a woman getting revenge on a pimp who has an ongoing obsession with just three things: money, Nancy, and driving endlessly back and forth across the United States.
Midway through the session, another thread began to appear with songs that were more upbeat and soul influenced, featuring women on the skids trying to make good. In “Maureen’s Gone Missing,” a woman robs a drug operation and skips town. On “Don’t Miss Your Bus Lorraine,” a woman recently released from prison on marijuana convictions comes back to a society where marijuana is legal while she is now a convicted felon and can’t find a decent job. “Left Hook Like Frazier” is cautionary tale of how the brokenhearted sometimes get into relationships that break them even more. On “The Haunting Thoughts,” a woman can’t shake the fear that world she’s in is going to collapse around her. “There’s Nothing Down The Highway” is the brooding tale of a woman who runs from her life, only to find that she can escape the place but not herself.
This wide-screen, CinemaScope-style Delines at their best. Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom is a record of romantic misfits and grifters who live out of suitcases and cars, who can’t seem to settle down, who hope that in the next town or city will be the score that saves them. But as we all know, it’s a seductive dream that seldom comes true.