Sat Jan 17, Tractor Tavern, 9 pm, $8.
If you've only known Richmond Fontaine singer and songwriter Willy Vlautin through his band's country- and punk-informed music, no one could fault you for thinking he's penned some of the Northwest's most depressing songs. Over the course of six albums and 10 years, Vlautin's breathed dubious life into the kind of luckless characters who work lowly jobs until forced to flee town in stolen cars or on Greyhound buses, or who sit on plastic chairs in church basements, next to alcoholic wives desperate for their husbands to come home, and for whom the thought of suicide is never more than a moment or two away. Stick out a hand and introduce yourself to Vlautin, though, and he'll pump back with such genuine friendliness that it's easy to believe him when he tells you he hopes every one of the sorry characters he's written about ends up happy someday.
In "Two Broken Hearts," off Richmond Fontaine's latest album, Post to Wire, Vlautin unites defeated lovers under the flawed, romantic wish that together they'll make each other stronger. "It was the first time in his life that he ever felt right/Because he never felt right," Vlautin sings of the guy, as the girl vows, "I won't be careful anymore/With you I won't be careful anymore."
"If you're broken, there's no escaping it," Vlautin explains from his home in Portland. "Even if you find someone and fall in love, if you're both broken people... well, the optimist in me hopes that I'll find someone who will make me level out and be happier, but in the end there's always going to be that creeping feeling chasing you around." A menacing figure appears in "Two Broken Hearts" that Vlautin says is meant to represent the couple's pasts and the darkness that makes them fractured. "It would always be after them," he explains, before his unflagging romanticism gets the better of him, and you can hear him smile when he says, "But in my mind I always figure they'll be alright. They're just gonna have a rough road to get there."
Though he's lived in Oregon for the past 10 years, Vlautin grew up in Nevada and his songs are stained with the residue of bad luck and swift turnabout the state is apt to inflict on its inhabitants, transient though they may be. There is no rue in his tone, though, as Vlautin holds home near to his heart. "Whenever I write about brothers it just kills me," he says, citing Post to Wire's "Willamette" as such a song. Perhaps most tragic is an early, favorite Richmond Fontaine track called "1968," about a kid who trips on his gun and dies. "That's about my uncle, and when I was home for the holidays my stepmom gave me a box of my father's things and in there was my uncle's obituary--it was just so depressing."
Then there's Walter, whose hapless messages arrive on postcards heavy with unspoken history. Between some tracks Vlautin reads Walter's hurried lines, which cast shadows of failure in the artificial light of the optimism he hopes to convey to the people back home.
Dear Pete:
I didn't join the army like I told you I was gonna. I'd been up almost four days straight when I thought about that, and in the end I almost did myself in, but I guess I just went to bed instead. I ain't shit, and I guess the whole world knows it. At least I know it.
His final, unsure lines would be devastating if we didn't know Vlautin to be Walter's cheering supporter.
Post to Wire's opening track, "The Longer You Wait," is the one song on the album with a story Vlautin admits probably won't end happily. About a husband who takes his wife on a road trip after she's suspended from her job and put on notice, the song finds him fretting in quiet desperation and anticipation of the future as he watches her sleep: "unsure of how to handle her/and unsure of what to do/with her brown hair fading gray."
"He's so far away from her," says the songwriter with obvious sadness in his voice, "after so many years of just kind of ignoring his wife. And a situation like that, I think, is more bleak--and that it's probably never gonna turn out good for them."
