He's a Renaissance man from a rough place. Richmond Fontaine's Willy Vlautin is a singer, songwriter and novelist with a talent for making you think. He tells Tony Clayton-Leaabout turning it all around

WOUNDED but still-walking, flawed but decent, dysfunctional but committed to living as good a life as possible – Richmond Fontaine’s singer and lyric writer Willy Vlautin knows these people because he’s one of them. It’s rare during something as potentially trite as a promotional interview that someone says something that makes you think as you transcribe the words from tape to screen.

This happens often when listening to the music of Richmond Fontaine, and pretty much every time you read a page of a Willy Vlautin novel. But listening and reading are, arguably, passive aesthetic treats. It’s when you ask a question about how Vlautin got from where he was at at the age of 20 (a nowhere man, as you’ll soon discover) to where he is today (a critically lauded songwriter and novelist), and what he tells you, that makes you feel either lucky, curiously introspective, a little bit voyeuristic or a mixture of the three.

“I never thought anything that I’d write would be considered,” reveals Vlautin. “I assumed the worst for me. That’s why I have such a fascination with the darker side of life, the seedy aspects. And that’s because I had always assumed I’d end up there. From an early age I’d be going into old-man bars in my hometown, just to see if I could handle being a bum. So, no, I had never thought I’d amount to anything. I reckoned I’d just be a guy who got a job . . . My biggest goal, though, was to get a novel published some day. When that happened, it changed my life insofar as how I looked at myself. I didn’t beat the shit out of myself as much I’d normally done.

“When you’re 30, you see the guys you used to romanticise, the old weird drunks – and then you realise you’re turning into one of them. That’s when you realise it isn’t fun, that they’re not 20 but 30, which means 10 years have passed and you see those hard-living friends of yours starting to fall apart. It became too real for me, to tell the truth, and I knew that if I didn’t watch out, I’d be one of them. That’s when I started running as hard as I could in the other direction.

“Low expectations of yourself is an easy way out, but I do have that thing in the back of mind that will make me get up in the morning and work.”

Everyone has their own demons, is essentially what Vlautin is saying, admitting that his own struggles might be more pronounced. “Most people have had bad stuff happen to them, and the thing I’m interested in as a writer is how to navigate that. How do you move forward if you’re always on your heels getting pushed back? If you’ve had bad things happen to you, how do you try to get up each day and make a better decision than the one you made the day before? These are basic ideas I think about.”

Richmond Fontaine's new album (their ninth), We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River, is perhaps their most fully realised to date, a synthesis of distraught-fuelled vignettes and what can safely be described as severely economical lyrics.

So much dirty realist heartache and lowlife pain in so few words – think Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski having a fine old time of it on Twitter.

“I started writing when I was a kid,” says Vlautin, who remembers his neighbourhood in and around Reno, Nevada as conservative, tough and unwelcoming of the creative spirit. “My brother bought me a guitar because he thought I might go crazy without one, told me I should write songs to help me get though stuff. I was always a huge fan of records, too; they were my best friends, and they still are.

“The consistency of a good record will get me through my darkest times. So more than anything I wanted to be a part of that. For me, music and writing is all about getting through the day. It has become, I suppose, a crutch, a habit. And on the other side of it is that I really bought into songs – they helped me through my life.”

Vlautin mentions the likes of Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Shane MacGowan, X, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü and Tom Waits as some of his self-help-therapy touchstones. Between these influences and his singular background, his lyric writing and prose work have taken on a distinct life of their own. He has become, without hype or self-aggrandisement, a critically successful writer and rock star whose material is locked together in a marriage of inconvenience.

“I always write about the same things, whether it’s songs or stories, because those are the areas that trouble me, haunt me, or I’m stuck on. I’ve done both for so long. I started writing fiction when I was 20 – I’m 41 now – and wrote my first novel when I was 23. I like the process of writing because you can be by yourself, you don’t bother anybody. I remember the first 15 years of playing music in bars – it always felt like I was annoying people. But the work ethic of writing fiction? I enjoyed that.”

And, of course, reading it.

“Roddy Doyle is from Dublin, right?” queries Vlautin, “He wrote those books about that downtrodden woman, Paula Spencer? I really liked her character – she’s very flawed, and made some serious mistakes, but she tries in her own way as hard as she can to have a better life.”

Are we detecting a theme here? “I couldn’t put those books down,” he says. “I loved them, because they gave me hope – that you can screw up and then keep trying for something good to happen.”

- We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a Riveris on release through Décor Records. Richmond Fontaine tour Ireland in October