There are random encounters that can stay with you for years, changing the way you think about life, art and just about everything else.
For author and musician Willy Vlautin, one of those came when he was in central Nevada. While working on the novel, “Don’t Skip Out on Me,” he and an old friend were driving through the desolate region where the book is set. “Not a tree around, barely any sagebrush,” Vlautin says via Zoom from his home in Oregon. “We came to what looked like a statue of a black horse, and we walked over to it to find that it was an old, wild mustang that was completely blind.”
SEE ALSO: Sign up for our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more
Vlautin, the former frontman of alt-country rockers Richmond Fontaine and current guitarist for country-soul band the Delines, was stunned at the state of the horse.
“Both its eye sockets were completely swollen shut, and it was covered in scars, swaybacked, alone in the desert,” he recalls. “It just stopped me in my tracks. I’d never seen anything that sad and that bleak.”
That horse — which was eventually rescued after Vlautin and his friend called the Bureau of Land Management — inspired a track on Richmond Fontaine’s album 2016 “You Can’t Go Back if There’s Nothing to Go Back To”; the cover art for the record is a painting that one of Vlautin’s friends made, based on a photograph Vlautin took of the horse.
It also inspired “The Horse,” Vlautin’s seventh book. The novel follows Al Ward, a 67-year-old musician who has moved to an assayer’s office in an abandoned mining claim in Nevada in an effort to dry out from his hard-drinking days. Al spends his days eating Campbell’s soup and taking long walks, but his routine is interrupted when an old, blind horse turns up — and refuses to leave.
Al’s decision to give up the city life for the middle of nowhere was a dream that Vlautin considered shortly after seeing the horse, when he and his friend came upon an old mining claim.
“I told my buddy, ‘I think I’m going to just get out here. I’ve had enough,’” Vlautin says. “I gave him this whole speech: ‘Just let me out here, and I’m going to just disappear.’ And he just made fun of me. He was like, ‘Man, where are you going to plug in the record player? You can’t live without your Morricone spaghetti-western [music].’ He was right, but I was rattled, going down that dark hole.”
SEE ALSO: Why books about bands are the best
The American West has always been part of Vlautin’s imagination. He was born and raised in Reno, Nevada, where he had friends whose fathers — like Al — had played in the city’s casinos.
“They would complain about how horrible those gigs were, but I’m 14, and they have showgirl girlfriends, and they work four hours a day or whatever,” Vlautin says. “It seemed pretty glamorous. I thought maybe that would be a little bit of romanticness that could pull me into writing about what the book became about, which is why a guy does art, survives being broken his whole life, just chasing one thing.”
And Al is undoubtedly broken, unable to let go of memories of long-ago days and struggling with inertia.
“Sometimes you hope in isolation you’ll protect yourself, but what you do is open up all your memories and start living in the quagmire of your past,” Vlautin says. “He’s basically a semi-sound guy that made a bad decision, and he’s trying to slowly kill himself, really.”
Vlautin says he didn’t originally intend to publish “The Horse,” thinking it might be too “dark” and “weird” for readers. That’s not new for him — although he published his first book, the novel “The Motel Life,” in 2006, he’s been writing novels since he was 20.
“I just wrote them and put them in my basem*nt,” he says. “I didn’t tell anybody about them, because I was in this struggling band, and my confidence level has always been shaky at best. So I just wrote for myself and hid them.”
Vlautin took a few night classes in creative writing in Reno but kept his writing life a secret. That changed when he was painting houses in his early 30s, and his boss called him to say that he was working in a writer’s house. He told Vlautin to come over and meet her.
“Her name was Kate Bernheimer, and she was the first novelist I started hanging out with and being friends with,” Vlautin recalls. She wouldn’t be the last author to recognize Vlautin’s talent with the written word — he has received praise from Benjamin Myers, who called Vlautin his favorite American writer, and from the late, legendary Ursula K. Le Guin, who compared Vlautin to John Steinbeck and called him “one of the bravest novelists writing.”
Despite earning critical raves as a songwriter, Vlautin hasn’t written extensively about music in his fiction until “The Horse,” although his two worlds do sometimes collide — so much so that his latest novel is dedicated to John Doe, the co-founder of L.A. punk band X, and written in memory of Dallas Good, who sang and played guitar for Canadian country-rockers the Sadies until his death in 2022. In his acknowledgments section, Vlautin also says that much of “The Horse” was written while he was thinking of his fellow musicians Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers and Scott McCaughey of The Young Fresh Fellows and The Minus 5.
“Dallas and I became pals because he liked books,” Vlautin recalls. “He liked Jim Thompson and Cormac McCarthy. I didn’t meet a lot of musicians that liked books, but he was a bookhound. We always planned to write a book together. I just admired him so much; he was one of those guys that was a big hero of mine. I felt I owed it to him to dedicate a book to him.”
It’s fitting, perhaps, that the book in question is likely Vlautin’s most personal one yet — something he discovered while doing press for the novel ahead of its publication in the U.K. and Ireland.
“It wasn’t until I started doing interviews that I realized, ‘Oh, man, a lot of me is in Al Ward,’” he says. “I think I knew that, but I don’t think about stuff like that when I’m writing. But this guy’s pretty close to me, although I’ve gotten luckier in some ways.”
The character, Vlautin says, “just hangs on because we all hang on.”
“The majority of us, no matter what hardships we go through or what we’re enduring, we just get up and keep trying the best we can for whoever we are that day,” Vlautin says. “Sometimes the only way to save yourself from drowning is to save somebody else who’s drowning.”
Originally Published:
