“Nothing good happens in a bar at night to a guy over fifty. It’s just a fact,” an old soak named RJ tells Al, the narrator of Willy Vlautin’s seventh novel, The Horse. Al, an ageing songwriter, hiding out in an abandoned mine in central Nevada, takes the advice to heart and resolves to quit the bar life and spend his time listening to old jazz records and Ennio Morricone soundtracks and writing brooding folk ballads on his harmonium, songs with titles like “Nancy & The Pensacola Pimp”.
It’s one of a handful of songs that show up on Mr Luck & Ms Doom, The Delines’ sixth and finest album to date. Vlautin has always worked on the fertile borderlands or fault lines between fiction and song, and insists most of his novels are songs that somewhere along the way got a little out of hand. In fact, the last Delines album was a largely instrumental soundtrack to Vlautin’s novel The Night Always Comes (which in turn is soon to be a movie). But you’d have to reach for the likes of Bobbie Gentry’s Patchwork or Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates, or indeed a film like Robert Altman’s Raymond Carver amalgam, Short Cuts, to find a world so rich and intimately strange.
It was borne, apparently, out of singer Amy Boone’s desperation, after five albums of gas station meltdowns and trailer-park burnouts to sing “a straight up love song where no-one dies and nothing goes wrong”. As the resident singer in Delines-ville, a burg where broken hearts outnumber the stars in the sky, she surely knows that the chances of such a thing are rare as a Tucson snowglobe. But nevertheless Vlautin came up with the title track, the lush, lazy ballad of a luckless couple of drifters who roll up in St Augustine, Florida. Ms Doom is more used to sweeping hotel floors, but she sweeps him off his admittedly shaky feet, and their fledgling romance finds them wearing out rented mattresses all over town. You can hear the relish the band take with their tale: the piano, bass and guitar, slinking around the corner of every verse, like lovers sneaky-peteing past the motel checkout, Boone’s voice sweet and wry as a glass of bourbon for breakfast.
Of course the mood can’t last – it reminds one a little of the precarious, hard-knock romance in Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves a couple of years ago – but even the hazy mirage of happiness is something to be treasured. You can see it glimmer like fools gold throughout the album – the moment where teenage lovers swim “naked in the San Juan River during a thunderstorm” in “Her Ponyboy”. Or the moment in “JP & Me” where the couple cross the Los Cruces Highway from their motel every morning, just to watch the colts.
Even “Left Hook Like Frazier” – one woman’s sorry lovelife litany of boozers, losers and substance abusers – grooves like prime Curtis Mayfield, with Cory Gray’s scintillating horns emerging like sunshine in an Oregon January (weirdly a lot of the album is reminiscent of that strange mid-’80s interlude when Paul Weller and even Billy Bragg managed to marry tales of domestic abuse and political strife to the bluest of blue-eyed soul).
But the heart of the record is that song from The Horse, “Nancy & The Pensacola Pimp”, sadly not featuring Al’s harmonium but a knife-edge performance from the band. It’s like a dream collaboration between Bobbie Gentry and Bobbie Ann Mason – or the kind of country song that Lucia Berlin might have written if she’d drifted through the Florida panhandle some time in the mid-’80s. The pimp is beanpole nightmare, 6 foot 5 and 110 pounds, living on Orange Crush, powdered donuts and seemingly inexhaustible meth-fuelled self-obsession. Nancy meanwhile is his teenage bride and meal ticket, smart enough to take notes while he’s blabbing, and wise enough to bide her time before decisively pursuing her own happiness. In a little over four minutes Vlautin, Boone and the boys take you on a road trip across the grand divide, from the casinos of Biloxi, Mississippi, right on up to the rodeos of Utah and somehow chart an entire continent of cruelty, desperation and clear-eyed determination. In USA 2025 it feels like a very timely tale.
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