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Eddie Wilkens and Russell and Curtis have been with Willy Vlautin for a decade.
Eddie and his young half-brother neighbors first appeared in “The Kill Switch,” a short story Vlautin wrote for a 2016 collection about cars and crime. Five years later, that became an audiobook, read by Vlautin himself, along with eight songs by him and his bandmates in The Delines. Another five years later, and the characters insisted on a novel: The Left and the Lucky, Vlautin’s eighth, which came out April 14. It’s the full story of Russell’s difficult home life— complete with a dementia-approaching grandmother, a doing-the-best-she-can stripper single mother, and a bullying teenage older brother—and his unlikely bond with divorce-approaching Eddie, with additional inspiration coming from Vlautin’s own time living in St. Johns and working as a house painter. A companion soundtrack—technically available only in the United Kingdom, but likely to end up on Bandcamp—features both new material and spruced-up versions of “The Kill Switch” stuff.
And now, for the first time, that music can be heard live. Vlautin’s stint on the May edition of the “McMenamins Great Northwest Author Tour,” saw him reading and performing solo acoustic music at the Old St. Francis in Bend and the Spanish Ballroom in Tacoma. But on May 21 at the Mission Theater, The Delines will also appear, playing songs not only from The Left and the Lucky, but also the music that they made for 2021’s The Night Always Comes and 2018’s Don’t Skip Out on Me. They didn’t do one for 2024’s The Horse, which is actually about a musician, because Vlautin wanted to leave that character’s sound up to the imagination of the reader. Vlautin also previously recorded novel soundtrack albums with pedal steel guitarist Paul Brainard from his previous band, Portland’s beloved Richmond Fontaine.
“The reason I started writing the soundtracks is you’re going to read a novel one time,” Vlautin says. “Twice, maybe, if it’s one of your favorite books. My hope was, if I wrote music that felt like the novel, then maybe you get seduced by the record. And then those characters would live longer and longer.”
As they have with their creator. “It was a short story that wouldn’t leave me alone,” Vlautin says of “The Kill Switch.” “I kept thinking about those guys. Russell lives in a house full of darkness. And then, right next door: Eddie and a crew of misfit house painters, that’s like technicolor and funny. The kid sees it, and it’s like heaven. He sees an escape route to safety.”
What also brought Vlautin back to the characters was reading the writing of Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who gives the book its epigraph. “You don’t really know who has the inner strength to overcome hardship until they’re tested,” Vlautin says by way of summing up the quote. “Who has the true grit and who doesn’t. You don’t really know. It could be an old lady has the true grit, and a Green Beret sniper guy doesn’t. So I got obsessed with that idea. And then I started thinking about the two brothers, Curtis and Russell.”
Curtis is older, stronger, better-looking. But when hardship just keeps hitting him—no spoilers—“he explodes,” Vlautin says. “Where the little kid, Russell, kind of chess-moves his way out. So that’s how I got back into it.”
Vlautin’s closest collaborator on the soundtrack is Cory Gray, also of the Old Unconscious, and The Delines’ not-so-secret weapon. Originally drafted to replace The Decemberists’ Jenny Conlee-Drizos, who played keyboards on the band’s 2014 debut, Colfax, Gray has become the band’s third melodic voice (after Vlautin’s writing and Amy Boone’s singing) as a keyboardist, trumpet player and arranger in front of the jazz and country-soul–inflected rhythm section of Sean Oldham (drums) and Freddy Trujillo (bass). Vlautin says Gray brings in far more melodies than The Delines can possible fit into a single song, so these instrumentals are another outlet.
“Sometimes [Amy] and I will look at each other while he’s doing a solo, and we’re like, ‘Jesus, man, we got lucky,’” Vlautin says. “When I write the instrumental sections of songs, or leave space, I know Cory is going to do something really beautiful. It kind of creates The Delines’ world.”
A world that also starts with Vlautin. “He’s a master world builder,” Gray says. “His books and his songs all have little overlaps. So to be able to build worlds with him sonically is really fun.” The soundtracks, Gray adds, “are not quite scoring a movie, and not quite writing a tune. It’s some interesting geography in between those two things, where you’re trying to fill out moods. We just tried to get certain motifs in the stories and match them to certain musical ideas.”
To Vlautin, the soundtrack to The Left and the Lucky “has that same kind of vibe that I think the book has: kind of spooky and real, but easygoing at the same time. There’s some real easy tunes, and then a couple of heartbreakers.” There’s even a few comic monologues: “Subset of Super Drinkers,” from one of the book’s minor characters, Cordarell, and “Hot for Housepainters,” which finds Boone reciting a message for an implausibly specific dating site.
Famously, one of Vlautin’s favorite things about being in The Delines is that he doesn’t have to be the frontman. Reading from his books, playing a few tunes and, for one night only, “fronting” the band for a set of soundtrack songs is more than enough.
“I like being a cog in The Delines,” he says. “It’s heaven for me. But I’ll do anything for the books because I love writing ’em so much I always equate the books, when I put one out, it’s like dropping off your favorite friend in downtown Portland, or in the Pacific Ocean, and saying, ‘Hey, good luck out there in the world.’ It’s tough. So I try to do as many gigs as I can to help the books. I love the books more than I hate doing it.”
HEAR IT: Willy Vlautin reads and The Delines perform at the Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 503-223-4527, mcmenamins.com. 8 pm Thursday, May 21. $24.24. All ages.
