It's easy to miss things. Sensory overload seems too weak a phrase to describe the barrage of input and options that await us when we pull back the covers each morning. So, a really great band can toil away for ten years, making sterling albums and grinding it out in clubs, and still get missed. That's almost the story of Portland, Oregon's Richmond Fontaine. 　　 　　Richmond Fontaine 　　Starting in 1995, the band led by Willy Vlautin both helped define the Americana genre and transcend it. They emerged at the same time as Wilco and Son Volt but have explored a more story-driven, subtly tweaked path. Painting houses and doing other day jobs to get by, Richmond Fontaine produced four heavily shaded gems, and then 2004's incredible Post To Wire was released to ecstatic praise from the UK press, especially Uncut, whose great Allan Jones wrote, "The curtain comes down then, everything turning to cheerless black, the colour of the world in mourning, for which Post To Wire is an exquisite soundtrack. Brilliant." Richmond Fontaine is the real deal. For those of us who've been on board since their '96 debut Safety, it's only gotten better with each pass. Their layered, intense playing and blue-collar perspective have the dark ache of a bruise - a blow we've survived and learned from even as it makes us flinch at the next outstretched hand. 　　 　　"The only reason I write such dark stuff sometimes – I mean the world in itself is a pretty dark freaking thing if you look at it realistically – is, I'm not a depressed guy, but up until I was 32 (he's 37 now) I had almost crippling anxiety," says Vlautin. "That was probably the reason I drank so much. And I was really shy, too. The combination of those made my outlook on life a lot bleaker when I wrote. I polarize everything, get more dramatic, and I always write songs off that vibe. I always go for the jugular when I write songs." 　　 　　That crimson impulse has never been as close to the skin as it is on their new album The Fitzgerald, a haunting song cycle inspired by Vlautin's hometown of Reno, Nevada. It's a series of vignettes about the people most folks never even see, the invisible ones who clean up all the sh*t we leave behind us, the toilers in the small hours when most of the world is asleep. What keeps it from being overly depressing are the brief moments of engagement like "The Janitor," which remind us of the strange, clumsy ways love breaks through the concrete we lay to protect ourselves. 　　 　　"I've always been attracted to guys who fall into the trap of a casino town. It's an easy town to fall into a hole in. I wasted a lot of years just messing around in Reno," offers Vlautin. "So, it was a lucky thing I got out of there, but at the same time, it's always been a favorite place of mine. I never saw tourists really. I was always attracted to guys who'd moved to the town. You can get a job really easy there. Like my mom said, 'If you showed up sober and had a clean shirt on, you could get a job in Reno.' And it's true. At the same time, none of the jobs pay anything. I think you get a lot of guys who get caught up in gambling and drinking. A lot of my friends have had real problems with gambling where it destroyed their lives. And I've always had my own battles with drinking. You know, I love drinking, but there's a price you pay staying out all night getting drunk. I never gambled as much as I drank. I always worked pretty hard and was scared of losing my money." 　　 　　Richmond Fontaine is made up of Vlautin (lead vocal, guitar), Dave Harding (bass), Sean Oldham (drums, percussion, backing vocals), Dan Eccles (guitars), and frequent collaborators Paul Brainard (pedal steel) and Mike Coykendall (keyboards, engineering). No one in the band is named either Richmond or Fontaine, even a middle name, so it begs further insight. 　　 　　"Our bass player used to take long road trips down to Mexico. One time he drove down in a beat up station wagon with a friend of ours, and they got stuck out in the middle of nowhere in Baja. They just camped on the road by the car until someone came a day or two later," explains Vlautin. "The guy that rescued them was an American, an ex-patriot of sorts. He got the car out and took them to his trailer where I guess they threw a three-day party. At the end they woke up, and the guy was gone. They waited around a few hours, but the man didn't return, so Dave and his friend left. That guy was named Richmond Fontaine. When Dave got back, he told us that story, and we needed a band name." 　　 　　There's a literary quality to their tales of waitresses and sandwich makers, the ditch diggers and gold diggers, all of whom rarely say more than a few words to anyone. When they do speak, it might just break your heart. It was celebrated short story writer Raymond Carver who inspired Vlautin to write this way. He discovered Carver by way of Australia's Paul Kelly, "The only reason I started writing fiction was because on that record, So Much Water So Close To Home, he does an interpretation of the short story by Raymond Carver. I went right down and bought a Raymond Carver book. It changed a lot of the way I write songs," Vlautin recalls. "He scared the hell out of me because I felt a lot of his self-hatred – just male leeches who were screw-ups and having a hard time and making bad decisions. I identified with all of that. I felt like I knew the guy in and out, and I didn't feel intimidated. I just felt really comfortable that a guy like myself could be a writer if a guy like him could be a writer. I was a pretty big reader, but I never felt I was tough enough to be a Bukowski guy. I didn't ever feel I was smart enough to be a Steinbeck or Hemingway sort of guy, but Carver, to a huge degree, just changed my life in a lot of ways." 　　 　　Their latest may be their most bookish yet, but his brilliant shorthand for life's real moments has shown through since the very first words sung on Safety: 　　 　　Dayton, OH - never even heard of there. 　　Don't know where it is exactly, 　　But I bought a map to see it. 　　I hung it on my ceiling, 　　To watch you disappear by. 　　 　　Reno continues to haunt Vlautin's songwriting, now more than ever. Vlautin says, "I lived there until I was 26. I never really wanted to live any place else, but I was never very successful playing music there. I was a big fan of the roots rock out of Los Angeles like Long Riders, The Blasters, Green On Red, Los Lobos, '80s Paisley Underground, and Alejandro Escovedo and the True Believers. I always wanted to be in a band like that, and in Reno, I just never had much luck. I'd go the library and read all the papers of the West (Coast) cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland seemed like the cheapest. I was really homesick for the first year or two. It's just such a bigger city up here, and I had a hard time with it. I think that's why I write so much about Reno." 　　 　　The Fitzgerald is a casino-hotel in Reno that's been part of Vlautin's life for years and provided a base for crafting the new songs. 　　"I always stay there. They have a whole side of their hotel that's near the railroad tracks, so it's cheap. You can hear the trains go by all night, so they can't charge more than about $25 a night even though it's a pretty nice hotel," says Vlautin. "They let you keep your guitars in there, and you don't feel like you're going to get all your sh*t ripped off. I haven't done it in a while because of touring, but I used to stay there for a week at a time. I've always liked motels and hotels because you can hide out, and you don't have to deal with life in any kind of way or all the things you should be doing or a friend who calls you up and asks you to go get drunk with him. I'm the easiest guy to go get drunk with, so I like hiding out so I don't have to do any of that stuff." 　　 　　More spare, in several regards, than any of their earlier work, The Fitzgerald is a dusky relative to Springsteen's Nebraska or the more straight-razor inducing Richard Buckner. It's the kind of record Vlautin had long wanted to make. 　　 　　"Post To Wire came out and started doing well in Europe. None of us knew it was going to do anything at all, so when things started going good there, I realized that was my time," Vlautin offers. "I'd been working on The Fitzgerald songs, and I knew right then if I hurried up and finished them while everybody was still thinking about Post To Wire, I could fly under the radar and sneak the record in. That's pretty much what I did. (Producer) J.D. Foster was in town for a conference, and I asked him to stay an extra week. He and I and the guys just knocked it out. The band was there maybe three days, J.D. and I for eight or so. And then everybody kind of forgot about it. It was kind of like a chess move to get it out because it's hard to get a band excited about a record like that. We were doing alright, so taking a chance was a lot easier than when things are on the ropes." 　　 　　This is Foster's second consecutive album manning the recording console for Richmond Fontaine. In no small way, his production has helped refine their work in a way that makes it easier to hear just how great they are. 　　"I can't say enough good things about J.D., and we owe him a lot for just taking a chance on a band like us. Our bass player contacted J.D. and asked him. We'd met him a few times when he was in town working with Richard Buckner. He's like the wise older brother you wish you had. The first time, I moved out and gave him my house, and I think that's the whole reason he came back for The Fitzgerald. He was like, 'Are you going to let me stay at your house?' He lives in New York City, and he's got a couple kids. When he came out here, he had this little house to himself with this big backyard, and he just liked the peace and quiet he had. J.D.'s about as cool and smart a guy as you could ask for. I really appreciate him wasting his time on me." 　　 　　Recently, the group was invited to contribute a track to Uncut's Highway 61 Revisited – Revisited tribute to Dylan, putting them alongside some heavyweight talent. In the end, their take on "From A Buick 6" wound up being THE keeper from the set. 　　"It was one of those things when they asked us to do it, Dave [Harding] and I were petrified, I guess would be the word," says Vlautin. "We knew the Drive-By Truckers and Paul Westerberg were going to be on it. We were like, 'Holy sh*t, what are we going to do?' We picked the blandest, easiest song, and if there is a weak track on that record, it might be it. I think we just did it because we were so intimidated by the whole affair. We'd just seen a Dylan-Merle Haggard show three weeks before that, so we figured we'd take the song into our own hands the way he does with his reinterpretations so much now. We did that with Mike Coykendall (Old Joe Clarks, and a mesmerizing 2005 solo album, Hello Hello Hello) producing." 　　 　　Coykendall also twiddled the dials for 2005's internet-only release Obliteration by Time, a spectacular re-recording of songs from the band's first two albums. In fact, the second half (or "b-side" in vinyl vernacular) may be the single best run of songs on any of their studio releases, culminating in a "White Line Fever" that makes one itch to see them tear their catalog apart live. As fine as the originals are, the reinventions are better. There's just more life under their nails when they dig into them now. 　　 　　Besides drinking, Vlautin's only other major vice is horse racing, a fact reflected in Post To Wire's title, which is a track expression referring to a horse that leads from start to finish. 　　 　　Vlautin observes, "I just started betting horses when my friends would go out gambling because it takes a lot longer to lose your money. Maybe I am kind of a gambler (laughs). I go every weekend to a local track in Portland called Portland Meadows. I love it. When we're not touring, I spend the summer following a bush league country fair circuit in Oregon. I just go camping and watch all the races. I'm a pretty pathetic handicapper, but I have a good friend who's a professional handicapper and he's also an agent for jockeys. I wrote an instrumental on Winnemucca called 'Twyla,' and that's for a jockey named Twyla Beckner. She and I have become friends over the years. I get to hang out and see the harder side of horse racing. It's an interesting sport, although brutal for both jockeys and horses. I have a love-hate relationship with it, but I do go out every weekend (laughs)." 　　 　　Others have taken note of Vlautin's literary flare, and his first novel, The Motel Life, will be released in Europe next Spring. A domestic publisher is also being sought out, and Vlautin couldn't be more excited. "It's set in Reno, and it's about these two brothers who end up in rundown motels for almost ten years. It's basically about their lives. I hope it does well 'cause I sure like writing them," says Vlautin. 　　 　　His refusal of easier pathways has helped him pen some of the most memorable characters and interludes in the past decade. Aided at every turn by a band that possesses an intuitive knack for realizing his vision, Vlautin seems ready to take even more chances like The Fitzgerald. 　　 　　"We're not a groundbreaking band really, and we're not on any radar of importance, so it's kind of silly if we don't take a few chances," Vlautin comments. "I get asked why I don't write any lighter songs. I wish I could write like a guy like Doug Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet), who's written at least a lot of fun songs, but I can't do it. I've tried. At an early age, my brother was a guitar player, and all he wrote was love songs trying to get ladies. When I was a kid, I told myself I'm never gonna write for girls. I'm gonna write really heavy stuff. Guess I wasn't bullshitting myself because I have a hard time writing lighter-hearted stuff." 　　By Dennis Cook 　　JamBase | Worldwide 　　Go See Live Music!