Richmond Fontaine

______________________________

You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing To Go Back To

After a three-year hiatus Richmond Fontaine has once again teamed up with producer John Askew to bring us what appears to be the band’s Swan Song. You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing To Go Back To is due out in on March 18, 2016 on Fluff and Gravy Records (North America) and Décor Records (Europe).

Richmond Fontaine songwriter, Willy Vlautin, explains. “We all wanted to make one more record after The High Country. Dave moving with his family to Denmark stopped us for a long while, but we were dead set on one more. I wrote You Can’t Go Back… to give an end piece for all the characters who inhabited the world of RF over the years. Throughout the new record are hints of past RF albums and nods to past locations that the characters had found themselves in, and always they’re drifting and searching, hoping for a decent place to land. In the end they try to go back home where they were when RF first began. It’s where the characters started and now where they’ll end.”

“RF has had a great 20+ year run and these guys are my best pals so it’s a tough decision but the right one. We’ll tour this record for as long as we can and then we’ll a have a knock down drag-out party, wake up with a hangover, and move on.”

Recorded and produced in Portland, Oregon by long time collaborator and producer John Morgan Askew, You Can’t Go Back… is Richmond Fontaine’s tenth full-length record and their first to be recorded at heralded Flora Recording and Playback. The record features the stalwart line-up of Sean Oldham on drums, Dan Eccles on guitar, and Paul Brainard on pedal steel. Freddy Trujillo joins on bass for his first recording with RF, and long time friend Jenny Conlee (The Decemberists, Black Prairie) plays keyboards.

“The idea for the record started with the song Whitey and Me. It’s the story of two cowboy brothers who get their horses sold out from under them by a wayward uncle. They run into the uncle years later, only to find a wrecked man. Even though the brothers hold a lot of animosity towards the uncle they realize there’s no point in kicking someone who’s spent his whole life kicking himself. I’d just written the tune and not much later I was driving around central Nevada, and in the middle of nowhere I came across an old, blind Mustang. As I watched and worried about the horse, I studied his scars and thought about the battles he had fought and the hard times he must have had. And now he was left alone to die a horrible and painful death. After that trip the songs just sorta spilled out. The characters in Wake up Ray, I Got off the Bus, Don’t Skip Out on Me, and Tapped Out in Tulsa are all like that horse: beat up, with hard miles behind them, and near the end of their run.”

You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing To Go Back To is the band at its best. Richmond Fontaine has once again produced a treasure trove of beautifully executed story songs, the likes of which are rarely matched in today’s musical landscape. Vlautin’s raw, emotive voice is the perfect vehicle for the series of hard luck vignettes that make up the record, and the band shines brightly under producer John Askew. The album is set for release on March 18, 2016 via Fluff and Gravy Records (North America) and Décor Records (Europe).

RICHMOND FONTAINE: HISTORY 2015

Richmond Fontaine was formed in 1994 at Portland Meadows racetrack in Portland, Oregon as songwriter/vocalist Willy Vlautin and bassist Dave Harding pored over the racing form and talked music between races. The two took their mutual love of Husker Du, Willie Nelson, X, The Blasters, and The Replacements and started playing music together. Before long, Fontaine was a solid four-piece outfit with an avid fan-base in the US and abroad.

In the 90’s Richmond Fontaine put out three albums on Cavity Search Records (Safety, Miles From, and Lost Son) and garnered praise for their powerful blend of rock, country, punk and folk. Critics took notice of Vlautin’s story-based songs, which have often drawn comparison to the short stories of Raymond Carver and Larry Brown.

In 2002 the band launched El Cortez Records and began work on a trilogy of albums that would earn critical acclaim in the US and UK, across Europe and as far away as Australia. 2002’s Winnemucca marked a departure for the band to a more introspective and acoustic-based style, broadening the band’s audience and catching the attention of critics. In 2004 Richmond Fontaine teamed with producer JD Foster (Richard Buckner, Calexico, Green on Red) on their lauded release, Post to Wire. Uncut named it Album of the Month and included it in their Top Five Albums of the Year, and Mojo called it a “must have Americana purchase”. Working again with Foster on 2005’s The Fitzgerald, the band again garnered rave reviews for this downbeat, stark, literary study of the working class American West. The Fitzgerald also received Uncut’s Album of the Month, calling it “absolute perfection”, and Q Magazine called it “the most beautiful sad album of the year”.

2005 was a big year for the band and especially for Vlautin, who says the band got him the luckiest break of his life while touring The Fitzgerald – meeting a literary agent who was a big believer in his work. After writing short stories and novels for nearly twenty years, in 2006 Vlautin finally saw the publication of his first novel, The Motel Life, on Faber and Faber in the UK and Ireland, and then in the US on Harper Perennial in 2007. The Motel Life earned Vlautin a Silver Pen Award from the state of Nevada and was one of the few works of fiction to make the Washington Post’s Top 25 Books of 2007. The novel solidified Vlautin’s reputation as one of the most adept storytellers working today.

Looking for a change of scenery, in 2006 Fontaine loaded up the van and drove to Tucson to record an album at the legendary Wavelab studio. JD Foster once again oversaw production on this collection of desert-inspired songs. Featuring guest appearances by Calexico’s Joey Burns and Jacob Valenzuela and Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb, Thirteen Cities counter-balances Vlautin’s clean, narrative lyrics with an array of instrumentation, from piano and vibes to accordion and pedal steel, strings and horns. The album was lavished with critical praise: The Independent called Vlautin “the Dylan of the dislocated” and The Sun said “Vlautin’s one of the most compelling songwriters working today, compared equally to great American novelists like Raymond Carver or John Steinbeck and musicians such as Bruce Springsteen or Tom Waits.”

After a year sabbatical and the death of his mother, Vlautin emerged with a notebook of songs that would become We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River (2009). A highly personal and intimate work, these songs are an inventory of love and loss, regret and pain, shot through with instrumentation that expresses a gauntlet of emotion with Fontaine’s highly evolved, hard to categorize signature style. Uncut gave it a five star review saying, ‘Raw, autobiographical brilliance’ and the Sunday Express called it, “A dreamy, reverb-laden masterpiece” – 5/5

In 2011 Vlautin holed up in a room in St. Johns, Oregon and produced a notebook of eccentric, connected songs called THE HIGH COUNTRY. The songs portray a Gothic love story between a mechanic and an auto parts store counter girl. Hot Press (4 stars) is quoted as saying, “The High Country tells an operatically tragic tale of drugs, poverty, violence, infidelity, loneliness, and desperation.” While UNCUT (4 stars) called it “a riveting ‘song-novel’ forked with Shakespearian levels of tragedy”. The band teamed up with long time friend and producer, John Morgan Askew and as well Deborah Kelly (Damnations, RF’s Post to Wire) who sang the part of the girl. Her sister Amy Boone (Damnations, The Delines) toured with the band in 2011.

Vlautin has since published three more novels: Northline (2008), which was a San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Bestseller, and Lean on Pete (2010), which won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and was Hot Press’s book of the year, and The Free (2014). In twenty years, Vlautin and Richmond Fontaine have produced nine albums, four novels, an instrumental soundtrack for a novel (Northline), two live recordings, and an EP.

The movie version of Motel Life (2012) starring Emile Hirsch, Stephen Dorff, Dakota Fanning and Kris Kristoffersen came out to much critical acclaim. The Washington Post calling it “outstanding and enthralling” while Rolling Stone called it “an affecting piece of film-making”.

After a three year hiatus Richmond Fontaine has once again teamed up with producer John Askew and has just wrapped up work on their new album You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing To Go Back To, due out March 18, 2016 on Fluff and Gravy Records (North America) and Décor Records (Europe).

You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing To Go Back To

1. Leaving Bev’s Miners Club At Dawn (1:35)
2. Wake Up Ray (3:38)
3. I Got Off The Bus (3:48)
4. Whitey And Me (Don’t Ride Him Down) (5:23)
5. Let’s Hit One More Place (2:55)
6. I Can’t Black It Out If I Wake Up And Remember (5:12)
7. Don’t Skip Out On Me (4:07)
8. Two Friends Lost At Sea (4:35)
9. Three Brothers Roll Into Town (3:45)
10. Tapped Out In Tulsa (3:02)
11. The Blind Horse (2:14)
12. A Night In The City (5:30)
13. Easy Run (2:59)

Richmond Fontaine is:

Dan Eccles electric guitar, piano
Sean Oldham percussion, vocals
Freddy Trujillo bass,vocals
Willy Vlautin vocal, acoustic and electric guitars

with:

John Askew baritone guitar, electric guitar
Paul Brainard pedal steel, trumpet
Jenny Conlee-Drizos keyboards
Dave Harding acoustic guitar

Recorded and mixed at Flora Recording and Playback and Scenic Burrows by John Morgan Askew
Assistant Engineer Tim Shrout
Mastered by SAE Mastering

All songs written by Richmond Fontaine
(C) 2016 El Cortez Records
(P) 2016 Winner’s Casino Music, BMI

Promo Video

[youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WucmFCvbve4[/youtube]

Richmond Fontaine

You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing To Go Back To

Download Lyrics

Find Richmond Fontaine Here

Download Bio and One Sheet

Download Press Images

Download Full Album

Stream Full Album

Promo Video