Interview: The Delines’ Amy Boone On Bouncing Back From Tragedy

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda talks to Delines vocalist Amy Boone about getting back behind the mic after her tragic auto accident. 

Already The Delines’ new album, The Imperial, is being hailed as one of the best of the year. (Read the 13th Floor review here) Its the second offering from the Portland, Oregon-based band that features former Richmond Fontaine frontman and novelist Willy Vlautin and vocalist Amy Boone.

Featuring Vlautin’s strongest set of songs yet, and Boone’s heartbreaking vocals, The Imperial is a record not to be missed. Yet it almost wasn’t completed.

Listen here as Marty Duda talks to Amy Boone about the making of The Imperial:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: Maybe for folks who are listening in you could run down what’s been going on with you and the band.

AB: Well as of now I’m up in Portland, usually I’m in Austin. When we made the first record, they would fly me up and we would do practices and stuff, so when we made Colfax, I didn’t know a lot of the members of the band. So this record was different, I’m up here actually renting an apartment here in Portland just to get back into the swing of things again. But as you know I’ve been out of the loop, I’ve been hit by a car almost, my goodness, it will be 3 years in April, so it’s been quite a long healing time for that so we’re just trying to make up for lost time as much as we can.

MD: You broke both of your legs, is that right?

AB: Yeah it was pretty extensive damage, nerve damage and a Huge skin graft, a lot of soft tissue damage so I had like nine surgeries, the last one was to redo all the damaged tissue on the back of my cast mostly on the left side, there’s a long list of all the things that happened but I’m still walking with a cane but I’m really determined with this physical therapy that I’m going through right now trying to lose that thing pretty soon, be able to do without it.

MD: So you must have had to abandon performing for a while then.

AB: I was laid out for a really long time. And the skin graft itself just took forever, and in order for skin graft to really heal, you have to not move around, you have to really be still, for the first year I was really bed-ridden, I had to keep my leg up on this big giant lift with my leg strapped and so that healing time took forever but I’ve kind of moved from bed to wheelchair and then just progress slowly to working with crutches and now I’m just walking with one cane, and so it’s just a progression to getting on my feet again.

MD: Right, and have you returned to the stage at some point?

AB: we had our first gig, a little gig, just a trial run in a pub up here in Portland last, right before the holidays in December. It was our first one we’ve had in 3 years, it was a big deal. It was just a way to get back into the swing of things without it having to be this major thing, so it was fun. It was low key.

MD: Did it go well?

AB: It did! It was a small pub in a little room, and people showed up, it was good, it felt good to be back up there again. It’s all coming back to me.

MD: That’s good. Did you have to do anything to keep your voice in shape throughout that time?

AB: I was so out of it because I had to take so much medication and so much nerve damage that I didn’t do a whole lot of singing. I was out of it so much that sometimes I couldn’t even watch TV or read a book, I just lay there kind of catatonic. But I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of things and get reinspired. It’s been such wonderful people in the press writing such wonderful reviews, it just gets me so excited to get back out there to talk to people.

MD: The new album is amazing, so when did you record the vocals for the record?

AB: Part of the record was done before my accident. I got hit in 2016 and we started working on this. But the 2nd part, a couple of songs in particular I think Eddie & Polly got done after I was hit, I flew back up here when I was on the mend and there was another one on there that we did later on. But half of it was complete and then we added a couple songs. I’m kind of curious if anybody could tell the difference.

MD: That’s what I was thinking. I’ll have to listen very closely now and see if I can pick them out. You recorded in Portland, is that right?

AB: Yeah, we recorded in Portland, was it The Flora, I might be saying something wrong here, in the tight foundry. My memory is horrible, this was about 3 years ago. But it was definitely in Portland, either The Flora or the Type Foundry. The horns were done after I had departed so the horns were a total surprise to me and I was nervous about it. I was excited but I haven’t heard these songs with the horn section and I thought Cory did such a great job. The keyboard player in The Delines arranged all the horns and I think it’s amazing, I didn’t know what to expect, because horns can be jolting and not always fit in the music but I love them, I think they’re beautiful.

MD: These fold right into it. The sound that they’ve achieved with the production and your singing reminds me of mid 60’s Etta James, Muscle Shoals kind of thing. I was wondering if that was what you were aiming at.

AB: Absolutely, I love that kind of stuff. And I’m timid about saying stuff like that because in the connotation of Soul, we’re coming from a Country-Soul place where we definitely, Willie and I are so nostalgic for the Muscle Shoals, the Dan Penns, everything that went down in a certain era that we loved, so yeah, I’m glad that you hear that because I think that was definitely the aim, although Cory is younger than us, so it’s cool that he still could draw from that influence because he’s not exactly from the same generation as us, so that’s pretty cool.

MD: And the songs themselves, I assume Willie writes all or most of them, is that how it works in the group?

AB: Yes, he writes all of them. I only put one song on a record, once, so he’s the writer and I’m the interpreter.

MD: So do you and he talk about where he’s going to go with the writing, does he have to keep you in mind or how does the process between the two of you, the collaboration?

AB: It’s actually really interesting. He says he writes for me, things that we’ll talk about just as friends, subjects that he partially informs me but I think he also gets to write however he wants because as he’s using a female voice he can write things he would never write for him to sing maybe. So it kind of gives him this freedom to explore anything he feels like exploring and it isn’t gender-specific. Yeah, he does. He says he writes for my voice and he writes for me. I think that’s really cool because I love these songs. He never brought in songs that… he always says ‘Amy please tell me if there’s something you are uncomfortable with, or something you don’t want to sing,’ and we tweak things a little bit, change a few words here and there together but the songs are predominantly there, it’s just about how I’m going to or what I’m going to do vocally. So I just come and do the last bit of the work, he’s doing the big picture.

MD: I’ve only had a chance to listen to the album a few times so it’s early on for me as far as listening but for one thing I was blown away immediately, but at this point a couple of my favourites are the early ones in the record like the title track, The Imperial, so I was hoping maybe you could tell me a little bit more about that song and what you’re thinking about when you’re singing it and how the track came together.

AB: First of all when you have  such a long ballad like that you have to think about the production and how you’re going to keep and it moving and have momentum but also keep it in a place where it’s still introspective and there’s so many clincher lines in that song, I mean there’s line after line in there. But the overall picture is, a person got sent off to jail for a really long time and  another person in the relationship, the woman, went on with her life and are meeting at this bar and he’s out of prison, and it’s just such an intense subject in itself, it’s so sad, but it’s also, she’s kind of saying that was one of the best times of her life, it was back then, so she’s sad about that too. Something nostalgic and sad, I don’t know, there are wonderful lines in that song I think anybody that wants to really sit and pay attention to the lyrics can really get lost in that song I think.

MD: The actual style of the songwriting seems to harken back to earlier times as well as the production and the performance. Is that what Willie’s trying to get through to you now?

AB: Yeah Willie and I talk a lot about those old country soul ballads, Ode to Billie Joe, Bobby Gentry, the list goes on. That style of music is not so popular anymore but…

MD: Well Mercury Rev has just released an album of basically re-doing Bobby Gentry’s second album with all his guest female vocalists on it and the Bobby Gentry box set came out which I got, so I think there’s a resurgence of that happening.

AB: Oh good that’s great for us. Maybe we’re at the right place at the right time.

MD: That’s right, you’re right on the bandwagon!

AB: Yeah, no that’s a good thing.

MD: The other song was Cheer Up Charlie. So with a song like that did you have a discussion with Willie about what it is that he is referring to?

AB: Yes he always gives me back stories and I find that to be really helpful. That particular story he’s citing a bar that actually exists, Slims, somebody he’s watched. He has an office in St. John’s and he kind of watches people from his windows when he’s writing his books or he’s writing, and he just kept watching this man coming and going from the bar below and just kind of watching him slowly just go downhill and not washing his hair, not changing his clothes and getting more depressed during daytime… he just sort of kept watching him and made up this story around this person that he was watching but never really knew. It’s interesting though, he always gives me backstories. And I love that, because it’s not just like I’m memorising lyrics and just singing songs, I feel like the more he tells me about what he was thinking when he wrote it, the more it helps me to interpret it.

MD: I’ll throw one more title at you before we go: Let’s Be Us Again. Anything for that one?

AB: Well I fought for that one! Sometimes when, he’s so prolific that he brings in tons of stuff into the band, and not everything is just working or we have to try it again or whatever but that one, nobody seemed to really say anything about it, and I was like ‘I really want to do this!’ it’s sad but it’s also got a bit of a romantic thing going on but some of these other songs don’t and it’s just so romantic to sing that song even though there’s kind of a sadness about it too. Because there’s that implied thing that they’re trying to rekindle a romance that isn’t really there right now.  But I love the sentiment of this person saying ‘come on! let’s find that again, let’s go to our old haunts and go back to do what we used to love to do, let’s get of the rut’, and I love that. I think it’s really romantic and I love singing that song.