Under the Western Sky

Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin

Neil Campbell, Neil Campbell

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781943859597
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This original collection of essays by experts in the field weave together the first comprehensive examination of Nevada-born Willy Vlautin's novels and songs, as well as featuring 11 works of art that accompany his albums and books.Brutally honest, raw, gritty, down to earth, compassionate and affecting, Willy Vlautin's writing evokes a power in not only theme, but in methodology.Vlautin's novels, The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete and The Free (2006-2014) chart the dispossessed lives of young people struggling to survive in difficult economic times and in regions of the U.S. West and Pacific Northwest traditionally viewed as affluent and abundant. Yet as his work shows, are actually highly stratified and deprived.Likewise, Vlauntin's songs, penned as lead singer of the Americana band Richmond Fontaine chart a related territory of blue-collar landscapes of the American West and Northwest with a strong emphasis on narrative and affective soundscapes evocative of the similar worlds defined in his novels.Featuring an interview with Vlautin himself, this edited collection aims to develop the first serious, critical consideration of the important novels and songs of Willy Vlautin by exploring relations between region, music, and writing through the lens of critical regionality and other interdisciplinary, cultural, and theoretical methodologies. In so doing, it will situate his work within its regional frame of the American New West, and particularly the city of Reno, Nevada and the Pacific Northwest, whilst showing how he addresses wider cultural and global issues such as economic change, immigration shifts, gender inequality, and the loss of traditional mythic identities.The essays take different positions in relation to considerations of both novels and music, looking for links and relations across genres, always mindful of their specificity. Under the Western Sky shows how although apparently rooted in place, Vlautin's work traces diverse lines of contemporary cultural enquiry, engaging in an effective and troubling examination of regional haunting.

CHAPTER 1

YOU CAN MOVE BACK HERE

A Literary Perspective on Willy Vlautin’s Songwriting

by ÁNGEL CHAPARRO SAINZ

I lose confidence when I go back.

—WILLY VLAUTIN

I do not believe in fairy tales but I do believe in coincidence. Your whimsical choices may turn your life around. It was like that when I heard about Richmond Fontaine for the first time. I woke up too early on a rainy Sunday morning, and I went out for breakfast. Somebody had forgotten a music magazine on the table. I started glancing through it. In the new releases section one name caught my eye. Why? Who knows, but Richmond Fontaine was releasing Post to Wire, and I went back home and had nothing better to do than to go digging on the internet.

Still, it is weird to admit that when, on October 28, 2016, I happened to see PJ Harvey in concert with Willy Vlautin by my side, it was just because some thirteen years earlier I could not sleep and somebody forgot a magazine in a bar. But yes, Richmond Fontaine was touring Europe to say goodbye, playing a venue just a ten-minute walk from where I lived. A few weeks before, I had sent Vlautin an email: I was working on this chapter, and I could not find some of his old lyrics. Then, while PJ Harvey raised her shiny saxophone, Vlautin remembered that email and he apologized because he wrote back saying that he would send them and he never did. I told him not to worry, that I would not need them anyway, but he apologized again and, smiling, he said that it was hard for him to sing those songs again: “I lose confidence when I go back, you know.”

Automatically, I asked him for permission to use that as a quotation for my chapter. Somehow, I knew that it would make sense with what I was writing on him. It was while seeing them on stage, singing “Montgomery Park” again, the first song I ever heard by Richmond Fontaine, that I realized why that negligible utterance would be just perfect to open this chapter.

After more than twenty years, Richmond Fontaine’s musical career has been thoroughly covered in the specialized press. Interviews with Vlautin and other band members abound. Their albums have been reviewed and their music and songwriting extensively covered in publications from all around the world, such as No Depression in the United States, Uncut in the United Kingdom, and Rockdelux in Spain. It is difficult to bring something different to the table. Vlautin’s songwriting, for instance, has already been compared to that of John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver a thousand times. More than once I have read about how he writes vignettes or snapshots. He has been interviewed on topics such as Western landscape, his musical influences, and the cinematic nature of the band’s instrumentals. Of course, writing a scholarly chapter is different from writing a review or conducting an interview. I could have focused on stuff like the dialogues between music and literature and the constant interchanges between his songs and his books, and dressed it up with the proper scholarly critical framework. This is only one way I could have gone. There are many different themes, perspectives, or motifs I could have specifically chosen to provide a thoroughly and rigorously academic chapter: mobility, migration, borders, marriage, family, urban studies, class. . .

Still, when I wanted to make sense out of the data, notes, readings and rereadings, listenings and relistenings that had been piling up, none of those themes, perspectives, or motifs satisfied the personal concern that was gripping me. I needed another way to go. I had not known it beforehand, when I started researching. I knew it then, though, after that final gig, when I found fresh inspiration. Vlautin spoke that negligible utterance, and I realized the question that I wanted answered and how I wanted to do it.

My final question was and still is this: Why do I feel connected to these stories, to this music? Writer Bruce Robbins says, “We are connected to all sorts of places, casually if not always consciously, including many that we have never travelled to, that we have perhaps only seen on television” (1998: 3). I could understand why the American West was a familiar place for me, but why do I feel so close to the characters in Vlautin’s songs? I needed to answer that question, and I needed to do it in a different way: a mixed way, half rigorously academic and scientific and half candid and personal. Vlautin himself writes with intensity and candidness, with undisguised and straightforward force: “I always try to write with blood, you know? I always figured I wasn’t that talented so I had to be honest” (Gibney 2015a: n.p.). In a way, I share that concern about my own personal skills, and I wanted to write this chapter with the same probity and baldness. Boldness, if you wish.

This, I believe, is the proper tone to match the affective patina that my textual analysis will strive for. Steven Livingstone and William Thomson defined the notion of “affective communication,” in which they talk about how “much of the arts is a motivation to communicate and engage affectively with others” (2010: 85). Music would thus be understood “in the desire of humans to understand and learn about the emotional states of others and themselves, and the ways in which this is communicated” (ibid.). I want to explore that “affective engagement.” Emotion, affect, or what I here call affection will be my vehicle.

The answer to my earlier question, therefore, is that affection is central to providing a significant reading of Vlautin’s literary songwriting. Affection should be at the heart (pun intended here) of any attempt to understand his universal appeal. As Tim Easton sings in “Broke My Heart”: “There’s only two things left in this world: love and the lack thereof” (Porcupine, 2009).

Affection, as a synonym for love, is too wide a concept to be used without further clarification. In the context of this study, Ted Gioia helps to define it when affirming that the love song “has demanded not only freedom of artistic expression, but other freedoms in matters both intimate and public” (2015: xi). Love as a musical trope goes beyond the popularized romantic standards that swamp commercial music. It is more than a simple cliché to fill in the blank lines before and after the instrumental bridge. Gioia explains that a love song

brings people together on a more intimate level, but even here the diversity and range of its uses are remarkable, encompassing everything from purely procreative purposes to the most stylized forms of modern-day romance. (Ibid.: 1–2)

In many ways, the word love already encapsulates much of what I am arguing, but I have decided instead to use the term affection. The reason is twofold: On the one hand, it relates my analysis to the theories of affect; on the other hand, and this is the main reason, love is a tragically overused word that we associate too easily with notions of romantic love and sexual attraction. And here I mean to talk about connection, location, a rewriting of individuality: an attempt to redefine oneself by empathy, significance, humanness, and closeness, even tactile, physical, bodily connection.

Brian Massumi, for instance, says that his ideas on affect are also related to connectedness: “With intensified affect comes a stronger sense of embeddedness in a larger field of life—a heightened sense of belonging, with other people and to their places” (Massumi 2015: 6). This is what I try to encapsulate with my use of affection as a key word, to provide a thorough and all-encompassing analysis of Vlautin’s lyrics. Affection then, in this context, can be related to family, friendship, and romantic love, but it also draws us toward notions of belonging and direction within place and within time.

In this manner, Vlautin has confessed that he has always been touched, personally and artistically, by the tension between notions of home and stability, and travel and experience. Extremes have been a constant tension in his writing. This can be connected, in part, to the tension between what he refers to as the “warehouse” life (stability) and the “disappearing” life (motion):

So those two sides have always been battling inside me. The drifter side versus the pragmatic, gut-it-out-in-a-job-you-hate-’cause-you’re-scared-you-might-end-up-living-in-your-car side. (Gibney 2015a: n.p.)

“The Warehouse Life” and “Disappeared” were both recorded for The Fitzgerald, and one perceives in these two songs not only the poetic and musical construction of that tension between stability and mobility but also the uncertain ramifications of making either of those two choices. The middle ground between those two available choices, then, is the natural zone in which Vlautin elaborates and evokes his concept of home. Thus, Vlautin’s idea of home is never simply a “domestic retreat” (Mallett 2004: 69), but more complex, with images of home often related also to itinerant spaces (a mobile home, a motel, cars). He reveals through such ambiguity the necessary struggle to belong.

Shelley Mallett concludes that “home and more particularly being at home is a matter, at least in part, of affect or feeling—as the presence or absence of particular feelings” (2004: 79). That being so, Vlautin’s complex images of home are always defined by the relationships taking place within them. In a way, he recalls Michael Jackson when he explains that “a sense of home is grounded less in a place per se than in the activity that goes on in a place” (1995: 148). Vlautin’s characters exemplify a search for connection and affection represented not only by human interaction but also by an emotional location of their identity within a spatial dimension, the American West, in which fixedness and mobility play a key, contrastive role.

Affection then is related to human association and location within spatial coordinates but also, as suggested above, to an equation of time. As I explore in my analysis of Vlautin’s lyrics, backwardness, looking back, the confrontation of memory and guilt, and the reconciliation and balance of time are also important ingredients in understanding the emotional and artistic profundity and significance of his writing. Mallett adds that searching for a home can be “a confused search, a sentimental and nostalgic journey for a lost time and space” (2004: 69). Time and space. Home and travel. Me and you. Words and music. All of these play out in Vlautin’s songs and in my interpretations of them in the text that follows.

My affective reading of Vlautin’s lyrics places them within the theoretical framework provided by Neil Campbell’s concept of regionality, so that my observations on Richmond Fontaine’s lyrics position my analysis within the wider context of the American West and Western American culture. Vlautin’s lyrics relate to an American West (in terms of representation and revision) understood as a fluid and contested territory that he scrutinizes through the vivid perspective of his fictional characters: an American West that embraces complexity, failure, and conflict.

Lars Eckstein says that “musical meaning is an historically and culturally relative affair” (2010: 73), while Charles Hiroshi Garrett states that music has the power to “act as an essential bearer of social, historical, and cultural knowledge” (2008: 5). Through Richmond Fontaine’s lyrics, and their ruminations on affection, place, and time, a social, historical, and cultural knowledge emerges. It’s an awareness that proposes a different approach to the American West, one that contributes to Susan Kollin’s idea that “the West is a multiply inflected terrain whose identity is always in flux and revision” (2007: xi), and it testifies to David Wrobel’s statement that “the West in rock and pop music has a more interesting and complex past than the casual listener or the western scholar might initially expect” (2000: 96).

Traditionally, the West has been associated with images of conquest and individualism, the archetypal celebration of mobility as freedom, or with notions of spiritual regeneration and renewal. In fact, this perception of the West still pervades the imagination of both insiders and outsiders to the region. It seems ever more necessary today to underline that the West is complex and manifold and that it cannot simply be defined by its mythologies or its unquestioned tropes.

Thus, Campbell’s recent studies on the distinction between regionality and regionalism prove useful for my dissection of Vlautin’s depiction of the American West. My affective understanding of Vlautin’s lyrics fits within Campbell’s articulation of “minor” perspectives in the American West. Vlautin frames his lyrics within his own “minor” experience in a West that he does not understand as a region of “straight lines, neat borders, simple rootedness, or fixed points” (Campbell 2016: 2). Vlautin examines the relationships of characters moving around specific geographical areas and within a particular social and economic spectrum. His perspective proposes insights on a group of people whose categorization as “minor” comes from social or economic aspects, but also from this critical idea that their lives provide “alternative ways of thinking and being” in which the “mythic frame” is deconstructed and altered (ibid.: 3). In Vlautin’s mobile, transient, complex, and personal perspective on the American West, I see that refusal “to allow the local to become static, nostalgic, or reductive” (ibid.), even more so when Campbell relies on a human dimension as central to his theory. To outline what he means by “affective critical regionality,” Campbell proposes a tri-layered bedrock: the “redistribution of the sensible,” “the radical potential of the ‘minor,’” and “human relatedness” (ibid.). It is that third level that harmonizes with Vlautin’s songwriting most strongly. In general, when Campbell talks about the “redistribution of the sensible,” one recalls the snowed-in and urban Western landscape in “5 Degrees Below Zero,” the solemn drumbeat in “Western Skyline” that modifies Western icons by adding the city’s skyline, or the motorway as the main artery of the emblematic journey in Thirteen Cities. Campbell’s focus on “affect” and place is related more to “experiencing” the place than to “representing” it. In the same way, Vlautin’s perspective is progressive and human and it does not rely on direct critical statements; instead, it presents affective stories throughout his songs that engage the listener with regard to people and place. He hesitates, questions, and explores, but does not affirm or denote. Vlautin’s encompassing of the West is born from personal experience rather than symbolic representation: his is a perspective of affection.

“The Water Wars” is a good example. In this song, the main protagonist keeps going ahead because there is no other way to go: getting cheap jobs, stealing money and cars from roommates. But, at the same time, Vlautin draws a poetic connection between him and a postmodern American West that is typified in the concatenation of sprawl and the perpetuation of water problems. There is beauty in how the main protagonist keeps ahead of a downward spiral, and his political and social consciousness seems to suggest that human progress parallels that same personal escape that he is experiencing. The song evokes how both the West and the main protagonist probably need to stop and look back, but that seems unfeasible.

THE BAND AND THE SONGS

I believe that with this broader and more holistic presentation, readers will better understand my analysis of transience and representational traditions. In any case, before I go ahead and start my exploration of Vlautin’s fictional world, I also need to stop and look back. Before I do the whole set list and come to the encore, I need to introduce you to the band.

Willy Vlautin has recently gained recognition as a fiction writer, mainly in relation to his four published novels. His fiction has been highly praised, and he was recently inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Appreciation of him as a novelist, however, is almost always accompanied by a succinct reference to his simultaneously being a songwriter and the leader of the band Richmond Fontaine. However, music and songwriting were there before he started publishing books. In a 1997 review in No Depression of his band’s album Miles From, the reviewer opens with an inspired prediction: “Don’t be surprised to see a book on the shelves of your local bookstore penned by Willy Vlautin sometime soon” (Brannan 1997). Well, we had to wait ten years, but Michael Brannan was right to predict the literary skills Vlautin was showing from the very beginning of his musical career.

Occasionally, his literary work has been analyzed in combination with this musical dimension, from the most obvious connections to more complex and sophisticated approaches in which both his musical production and his novels are examined in conjunction. Justin St. Clair, for example, has studied the musical accompaniment that Vlautin has provided with some of his books, only to conclude that he enriches his fiction with “an extensive system of musical references and allusions” (St. Clair 2011: 92).

Vlautin’s musical career grew from the foundation of his band Richmond Fontaine, formed in Oregon in 1994, following the path opened by bands such as the Blasters, Uncle Tupelo, and Jason & the Scorchers, which, in the second half of the twentieth century, extended the reach of country music. In 1999, Richmond Fontaine released Lost Son, rereleased in 2004: an album about anger and self-destruction, with shorter lyrics, louder soundscapes, and the obvious influence of their two first albums, Safety (1996) and Miles From (1997), both long unavailable. Lost Son reveals the punk and cowpunk roots of the band. (They rerecorded their favorite songs from those two early albums on Obliteration by Time in 2005 with the band’s most solid and successful lineup: Willy Vlautin on vocals and guitar and Dave Harding on bass from the original lineup, Sean Oldham on drums, Dan Eccles on guitars, and Paul Brainard collaborating with pedal steel and other instruments.) They self-released their fourth album, Winnemucca, in 2002, a turning point for the band, and signed with Decor Records for management in Europe. Post to Wire, their next album, released in 2003, as Harding explains, “would open up new avenues and take us to ...