A RELENTLESS AND DIFFICULT WORLD Willy Vlautin & Richmond Fontaine
Oct 21, 2009
The Portland songwriter wants to let you know that you're not alone.
BY JOHN DWORKIN
There's an old Paul Simon song titled "Some Folks' Lives Roll Easy." It begins by telling the listeners that some people end up living the good life. Yet Simon quickly gets to the heart of the matter: "But most folks' lives, they stumble/ Lord they fall/ Through no fault of their own/ Most folks never catch their stars." Willy Vlautin's songs on Richmond Fontaine's brilliant new We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River (El Cortez/Arena Rock) are about these same "most folks" Simon sings of. Not only do Vlautin's characters miss out on "catching their stars" as in Simon's tune, but that same sky those stars shine in is caving in on them. Freeway is a collection of alt-country rockers and ballads for the accidental underachiever.
Many have written about Vlautin's sparse lyrics. But that can be an understatement. They're often so spare as to be nearly invisible and the song comes at you like an apparition - a sleight of hand formed out of thin air. You don't notice the weight being accumulated until it hits you like an oncoming car. Part of this effect comes from the writing's tone being a sort of blue collar vernacular - more like voiceover dialogue from a gritty indie feature than lines of poetry. And Freeway truly reads like minimalist narratives. Maybe it was an inevitability for Vlautin's sparseness to come to this: The song "Watch Out" has just a single sentence as its lyric. And it works: "Watch out or your heart will be nothing but scars." Just a friendly warning against ruining your own life.
Though comparisons to Son Volt, Charles Bukowski, Springsteen, or even an updated Walker Evans are not unwarranted, it should be understood that Richmond Fontaine and Willy Vlautin's songs are not overly derivative in any way. It's all from the heart, whether it recalls the sound of Wilco, REM, John Prine, or a punk rock aesthetic. And the band is a group of superior craftsmen who take care in bringing these songs to life: Dan Eccles's twangy, vibrato laden telecaster backdrops; Vlautin's stellar acoustic guitar playing, at turns bruised and melancholy or propulsive and fiery; Dave Harding's rich and warm sounding bass; and Sean Oldham's seemingly endless creativity behind the drum kit providing the opening tune's 2/3 clave, straight ahead rock backbeats, tight snare rolls, and a whole lot of attitude when needed like on the punkish "43." Oldham apparently also plays the "radio trowel" on the recording: "The [radio trowel] uses a capacitive sensor array based on Max Mathew's radio baton... The trowel's movements control sound synthesis parameters..." And Sean's brother Collin, along with the cello on Freeway, also plays another electronic instrument he developed - the Cellomobo: "A computer music instrument that attempts to model the behavior of a bowed string. It gives haptic feedback to the bow at audio rate..." These guys don't lock themselves into any single musical box and the music benefits from the openness. The haunting singing saw melody that opens the record is a prime example.
The songs create a mosaic of Hometown Diaspora and speak to a seemingly innate desire to get away. But the act of fleeing where you're from has a built-in push/pull effect: the tension between wanting the freedom of forgetting and independence (push/leave), and the need for belonging and comfort (pull/stay). The chorus from "You Can Move Back Here" states the second half of the equation plainly: "You can move back here/We all miss you/ Please, you don't have to be anything here/We all need you."
This hometown olive branch could be seen as extended to multiple characters in other songs throughout Freeway, but most notably in "Lonnie." Six songs past "You Can Move Back Here," after dealing out some harsh truths to face, Lonnie's old friend tells him, "If you come back I hope I remember you/ But you know it's getting hard to." That's an amazingly razor sharp and brutally honest admission/observation on the nature of friendship to find in the line of a pop song these days - or any day for that matter. It's a heartbreaker. And the way the essence of that earlier song seems to creep into the latter one happens throughout Freeway. The entire record can be seen as being about a single couple at different stages in their lives.
The details in the songs are so precise that instead of getting an image or just a strong emotional reaction, you get fully formed scenes that you can watch being played out vividly in your mind's eye. And these details range from the horrific to the banal (often within the same song): working at a paint store, watching TV to help you sleep, a stray homeless kid finding your gun and blowing his brains out with it, living out by the mall, a drunk cop breaking your ex-wife's jaw, etc...
But as detailed as Vlautin can be, he knows when to draw the line and let the listener do the work. Confident writers aren't afraid to leave an open question in a story that only the audience can answer. Some of the most important details can be the ones that are omitted. For example, Clint Eastwood is a master of the omitted detail in his directing (Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby come to mind). In "Lonnie," the narrator tells Lonnie in the song's closing line, "If you come back, maybe they'll come back too." But we don't know who "they" are. Nobody else is referred to earlier in the song. Are "they" a couple from a previous song on the record? Are "they" even people? And in "Ruby & Lou," these two skip town and "They thought they were finally free of it." What is "it?" There were some things mentioned earlier that you could refer to as the "it" being mentioned, but really it's something larger or a combination of things. Something less obvious. These omitted details are open doors that lead to limitless space.
A few of the songs on Freeway deserve special mention and "Lonnie" is one of them. Its crackling distorted rhythm guitars throwing off sparks, detailed melodic hooks, and attention to dynamics recalls Shawn Colvin's "Get Out Of This House," but with more of the rough edges left in. "Ruby & Lou" is just Vlautin with a weary, beautiful acoustic guitar accompanied by a cello (and light cellomobo). It's a grocery store job, down on their luck, Frankie And Johnny type of love story. But tough events lurk just around the corner and they unexpectedly slap you the face - the way life keeps slapping these songs' characters around, kicking them when they're down and making it hard to get back up. "43" is the knockout punch you don't see coming. It's got the impact of a freight train and you can't dodge it. The first verse opens with just Vlautin's urgent, two chord acoustic strum and voice. Then the band enters exploding and all of a sudden the song is on fire. The song's events keep piling on over the same two chord vamp drawing out like a long blade of trouble into the night. And "The Pull" is yet another sensitively detailed song about hard times. Vlautin's singing here is occasionally closer to speaking (the entire final track is spoken word) and has an almost comforting quality in spite of the facts of the story being told; like a parent telling a child about an unknown uncle who's had it rough. This one is about an ex-addict who turns pro boxer. But for every Rocky Balboa there's five thousand Million Dollar Babies who don't come close to touching their dreams. This song is for, and about, them.
Freeway may come off as unrealistically bleak or morose to "some folks." And whoever sees it like that, can't relate, and doesn't recognize themselves in these songs should thank their lucky stars. But "most folks" will recognize the ring of truth in these songs and will take solace that they're not alone in a relentless and difficult world. They'll be thankful they've got a songwriter and band turning their pain into beauty.
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