DELINES

The Delines have announced their new album “The Set Up,” due out 6th March via Decor Records, available to preorder here. The acclaimed Portland, Oregon band are also pleased to announce March and October UK tour dates, listed below, and will be announcing more live dates soon. Tickets are available from this link. To accompany today’s announcement, the band have shared the beautifully soulful and cinematic piano ballad ‘Dilaudid Diane’ as the first single from the album.

Band leader Willy Vlautin gives us the lowdown on how things fell into place: “The Delines were finishing the recording session for our last record, ‘Mr Luck & Ms Doom’, 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 with 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 Meter Keeps Ticking’, a companion song to ‘JP and Me’. It’s the tale of a woman visiting her grifter husband in a mental hospital and realising he doesn’t want to leave. It was a band favourite, we recorded it, but again it didn’t have that reckless romance that the other tracks seemed to have. So it too was set aside. And then finally, right before we began mixing “Mr Luck & Ms Doom”, I brought in a version of ‘The Reckless Life’. The song worked sonically, but again, it didn’t feel quite right lyrically. There was a lonely desperation to it, and the other two tunes I just mentioned. I realised I was writing songs in the same world as “Mr Luck & Ms Doom”, but from a different angle. The three tracks 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”.”

“When Luck and Doom came out, and we began touring it, I still couldn’t stop writing sister songs to it. I think seeing the residue of the opioid epidemic in the US, the thousands of young people lost to addiction and living in tents and on the streets and in old cars and RVs, influenced Mr Luck & Ms Doom, but it’s even more pronounced in “The Set Up”. ‘Dilaudid Diane’, ‘The Reckless Life’, ‘Jumping off in Madras’, and ‘Walking With His Sleeves Down’ all live in that world. I also started bringing in different songs about grifters, not the romantic couples from Luck & Doom, but the lonely wreckage left after the breakup. ‘Can You Get Me Out of Phoenix?’ was one of those. It’s a tune about a grifter’s daughter stranded in Phoenix who is thinking about the life of her father. And then I brought in the idea of The Set Up, 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.” (UNCUT)