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“Just remember one thing: We are loved in Belgium and in Italy.”
That’s a line from Cameron Crowe’s 1992 Seattle movie Singles, but it could just as easily be said about Portland’s The Delines in 2024—with one major difference: Whereas Matt Dillon’s grunge-rock frontman wanted only U.S. stardom for Citizen Dick, Willy Vlautin and Amy Boone of The Delines are truly living their best life in Europe. It just means that you’re out of luck if you’re an American fan of The Delines living anywhere but Portland (or, occasionally, Seattle).
The band will celebrate the release of its fifth record, Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom, at Polaris Hall on Feb. 15 before embarking on a monthlong tour of the United Kingdom and Europe, a touring pattern that recurs most years.
For Vlautin, formerly of Portland cowpunk stalwarts Richmond Fontaine, and Boone, formerly of Austin’s The Damnations TX, touring the U.S. no longer makes sense economically—if it ever did. They’ve also been at it too long to sleep on floors or play dive bars where the women’s restroom has no door. The very thought of getting in a van is traumatizing. “You say the word ‘Econoline’ and Amy and I are sweating bullets,” Vlautin says. “We’re like, twitching.”
On top of that, fans in Europe revere both American culture and so-called Americana music, with The Delines’ torch- and noir-inflected “country soul” also lending itself to more patient and attentive theater audiences. “So if Willie is going to write a ballad that’s six verses, they’ll stay with you,” Boone says. “That’s hard in a bar in America.”
The Delines’ roots go back to Richmond Fontaine’s 2011 album, The High Country, which featured Boone’s sister and Damnations TX bandmate Deborah Kelly on guest vocals. But by the time it came out, Kelly was pregnant, so Boone agreed to step in on the road. And then, before a radio session in Scotland, she was singing and playing piano by herself in the studio, unaware the mic was live. Vlautin, in the control room, said to Richmond Fontaine guitarist Dan Eccles, “Man, I want to get in a band where she sings all the songs.” Then he went and wrote a bunch of them, along with a letter asking Boone to do it.
The resulting debut album, 2014’s Colfax, was an instant cult and critical success, and Boone eventually moved to Portland. At the same time, Vlautin—who survived his first years as a musician in Portland painting houses before publishing his debut novel, The Motel Life, in 2006—continued thriving as an author (for which he’s also probably more popular in Europe). Last year’s The Horse was his seventh novel, while 2021’s The Night Always Comes will soon be the third movie adaptation of a Vlautin book.
“At first, I thought we were really on the shoulders of Richmond Fontaine,” Boone says of The Delines’ steady fan base. “But really we’re on the shoulders of Willie’s writing.”
But also on her shoulders.
“The Delines are Amy,” Vlautin says. “I give her the song, and then it morphs into her song. And you can feel the band revolve around the way she sings it.”
Vlautin jokes that he’s a three-chord bar band hack hiding at the side of the stage compared with the “hot-shot musos” standing behind Boone: longtime Richmond Fontaine drummer Sean Oldham, bassist-to-everybody Freddy Trujillo (who was also in a later lineup of Fontaine) and keyboardist, trumpeter and arranger Cory Gray, who originally stepped in for Jenny Conlee-Drizos and has come to define the band’s sound as much as Boone. “It’s like, I give him a 1970s Pinto, and he comes back with a Cadillac,” Vlautin says of Gray.
There’s a Dusty in Memphis or Marianne Faithfull’s Strange Weather vibe and sound to The Delines that comes not just from Boone’s wary vocals, but Gray’s elaborate orchestration and the band’s play-any-genre versatility, which is both the thing that makes them so good and the thing that makes it hard for them to answer the question: What kind of music do you play?
Vlautin mines the same terrain—working folks and outlaws and doomed romantics and hard-luck families—in both his fiction and his songs. The title track of Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom is one he wrote when Boone asked if he could try and be a little less depressing, but even when they are depressing—“Left Hook Like Frazier” is not another one of Vlautin’s boxing stories (like his novel Don’t Skip Out on Me or 2022’s song “Kid Codeine”) but a reference to domestic violence—the music can be lush and bouncy. Other times, the darkness doubles. “The Haunting Thoughts” is a straightforwardly autobiographical snapshot of the desperation, drugs and homelessness Vlautin sees on the streets from his office in St. Johns, but both his lyrics and Boone’s delivery treat the people with empathy, not othering.
“I’ve always been so scared of ending up like that personally that it just shakes me,” Vlautin says. “It breaks my heart endlessly seeing it, and not knowing what you can do about it.”
As Boone concedes, it’s still a bit strange that Vlautin is “writing about America, and we don’t tour America.” But that might also be what keeps the band together. “I want to protect the records and protect the band more than I want to play gigs,” Vlautin says.
And unlike Citizen Dick in Singles, there’s no brass ring of record sales or rock stardom to chase. “The only brass ring for The Delines,” Vlautin says, “is just to be able to keep being The Delines.”
SEE IT: The Delines with Luther Russell at Polaris Hall, 635 N Killingsworth Court, 503-240-6088, polarishall.com. 8 pm Saturday, Feb. 15. $22.20. 21+.