The Delines are set to return with their sixth album via Decor Records next March entitled ‘The Set Up’.
The Portland, Oregon country-soul act has been touring the UK now for over ten years and are coming off the back of their previous album Mr Luck & Ms Doom which finished in the top 40 albums of the year end polls in UNCUT Magazine.
The album will be followed by Willy Vlautin’s new novel ‘The Left and The Lucky” next May on Faber & Faber.
Willy Vlautin of The Delines says ” we were finishing the Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom sessions when I brought in a tune called Walking With His Sleeves Down. Amy learned it on piano and we recorded it live. Her take was stunning but the song didn’t quite fit the record. It was lonelier, more rattled, and it missed that rudderless romance that inhabits the world of Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, so we set it aside. Next I brought in The Reckless Life. The song worked sonically but again didn’t feel quite right lyrically. Both it and Walking With His Sleeves Down pulled the listener into the lives of the drug-addled, the grifters, and the lost and not the romantics adrift on the road like Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom. So we shelved the songs and finished the record.
But even as we toured Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom I couldn’t stop writing songs for it. I think seeing the residue of the opioid epidemic in the US, the thousands of young people rattled with addiction and living in tents and on the streets and in old cars and RVs, influenced Luck and Doom but even more so with The Set Up: Dilaudid Diane, The Reckless Life, Jumping off in Madras, and Walking With His Sleeves Down all live in that world.
And then I brought in the idea of The Set Up, a piece I’d been thinking about for Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, a spoken word song in three parts: the lure, the catch, and the grift. I wrote the words, Cory wrote the music, and Amy played the part and man oh man did she deliver.