Richmond Fontaine
We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River

"And if the whole world were cursed?" Ruby answered "Could be". But since they were together, she knew it wasn’t like Lou had said. "Maybe it’s just the west" and so for years they headed east. ("Ruby and Lou")

Willy Vlautin, before being the leader of Richmond Fontaine, is above all a writer. Or maybe Willy Vlautin, before being a writer, is above all the leader of Richmond Fontaine. So how do you separate the two? Already the title of this last one (2009) of their nine albums explains everything or maybe nothing...we thought the highway sounded like a river. The "on the road" myth that never died in the American spirit in literature as in music. John Fante and Arturo Bandini on the road to Los Angeles, Keoruac and Neal Cassady and their "don’t know where but we have to "go", Bukowski going from bar to bar, Cormac McCarthy and the future road buried by the ashes of atomic catastrophe. And Woody Guthrie with "this machine kills fascists" printed on his guitar, Townes Van Zandt who preferred making $10 a night in seedy clubs to a comfortable life, Dan Stuart and his Green on Red living on gas-food-lodging, Uncle Tupelo and their alt country that in the early nineties brought it all back home.

Willy is perhaps the sum of all this, the dry and fierce alt country of the beginnings has slowly transformed into a richer and more subdued sound but filled with tension, just like the stories he tells. Stories of apparent normality hiding great dramas, like the splendid "Two Alone" tells the dependence on each other of a young couple and the fracture caused by the birth of a child. The music makes this agitation palpable through the always rising acoustic guitar arpeggios. I am reminded of the cover of one of their previous albums where there was an inscription on a beat-up trailer "this is the land of broken dreams". The land of broken dreams belongs to Vlautin's losing characters, the punch-drunk boxer of the novella for guitar and cello "The Pull", or the man picked up by the girl at the bar who sees himself in her child who watches him secretly while he makes love to his mother. This is "The Boyfriend", where the soothing mariachi trumpet tempers the emotional crescendo of the cry "I ain’t like that! / I ain’t like that!".

The echoes of rough alt country run through the melodically complex operation already done by Whiskeytown in "Stranger’s Almanac": it may seem their most accessible album but it is nothing more than the result of Willy Vlautin's personal stories through the misfortunes of his mother’s death and broken arms. Richmond Fontaine will remind you of the best REM in "You Can Move Back Here", will offer a taste of the same Whiskeytown brand country rock in the intense "Lonnie", will dazzle with the electric disorder of "43", will whisper sweet starry lullabies cradled by the cello in "Ruby and Lou". Finally, they will chain you with the spoken song "A Letter to the Patron Saint of Nurses", dedicated to the nurses who are the first to care for that varied humanity made of outlaws, drunks, homeless, abandoned girls, abused children, failed suicides populating Willy Vlautin's stories.