In the work of Willy Vlautin, whose books are written in crisp, spare language, a phrase like “butterscotch-blonde” stands out.

In most novels, that phrase would describe a femme fatale, a plot complication, a diversion leading the protagonist into murky waters. In Vlautin’s novel The Horse, which comes out July 30, it describes a Fender Telecaster guitar given to protagonist Al Ward when he was a 14-year-old aspiring musician.

But like those tropes of a dark and desperate noir, the guitar is a siren that leads Al into a lifetime of regret, loss, and addiction, until he retreats to the desert of central Nevada. There, he lives in a single-room shack writing songs, eating Campbell’s condensed soup, and persevering through his 3 a.m. “night prison,” when his spirits are at their lowest.

All that changes when Al wakes one morning to find a blind horse in the front yard, hungry, alone, and miles from help.

Vlautin will talk about The Horse during an Aug. 16 appearance with musician Patterson Hood at Powell’s Books in Portland. Other appearances, starting July 30 and culminating Nov. 2 with the Portland Book Festival, are here. I caught up with Vlautin to learn about the inspiration for The Horse, his love of Reno, and the music and books that have inspired him then and now. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Horse came out in the U.K. before the U.S. and you have a sizable following there. Why do you think your work resonates with a European audience?

Vlautin: Europeans are interested in the American West, and they’re interested in working-class stories more than Americans are interested in their own working-class stories. In Europe, they listen to lyrics, so if you write real story-oriented songs, you get a chance. In the U.S., when you’re playing bars, so many people are talking and drinking and partying that you quickly cut out your ballads and weirder songs. The U.S. people wanted the boom-chicka-boom cowpunk kind of stuff.  

Can you give an example of a song that worked there that you didn’t feel would work here?  

I’ve got a Richmond Fontaine song I wrote called The Janitor, which is like a 6-minute song about an abused woman in a hospital bed, and the janitor of the hospital and her become friends. It goes on a long time, there’s no chorus, and it’s real simple. That would be a song you couldn’t play in the U.S. And I remember we played that for 500 people in Europe, and people would listen and they wouldn’t talk. It was unreal. It was heaven. I can write those songs a lot easier than I can write a peppy pop number.

What gave you the idea for The Horse?

I was researching a novel of mine called Don’t Skip Out on Me. I was in central Nevada with a buddy, and we were 30 miles from a paved road. Just real high desert. Not a lot out there. Then we came to a big desert playa that went on for miles. There was what we thought was a statue of a black horse in the middle of it. We thought, wow, that’s weird. We pulled over, and we see it’s a wild horse and it’s completely blind, which for a horse is horrifying, because you’re a flight animal. You can’t see what’s scaring you. It was old and it was real swayback. Just the scars on its body told you it had lived a hard life. And to be alone, which is the other biggest fear for a horse — it just stopped me in my tracks. I’d never seen anything that affected me as much. 

We camped near it that night. The next day, we drove back to the Bureau of Land Management, and they came out for the horse. We kept driving on, and I kept taking pictures for Don’t Skip Out on Me. We drove even farther out and came to an old, derelict mining claim that had an assayer’s office, and I’d been drinking too much and touring too much and my life was going kind of sideways, and I told my buddy, “I think I’m going to just get out here, man. I’m too thin-skinned.”

I’ve known the guy for 30 years. He just laughed. He goes, “Man, you couldn’t last a week without your spaghetti Western records, and you’d miss your wife, and where are you going to plug in your record player? Where are you going to read in the bathtub there, man?”

When I came home, I go, “I’m going to write a story with those ideas just for myself.” I grew up with the sons of casino musicians. They didn’t have real jobs. They had showgirl girlfriends, and they made really good money, and they hated it. For them, it was like purgatory, because they had to play crappy songs all day. They played a floor show, and there was a red phone that would light up if they played too crazy or had too much fun. I think it was a combination of all those three [the horse, the isolation, the casino musicians] that made me think that I should write about being in a band and writing songs. But again, I didn’t think I’d publish it. I thought people would think it was too weird, but my editor really liked it, so I took a shot.

The Horse seems very close to your heart, with its central themes of both music and the horse itself. Is it your most personal book?

They all are. I always write kind of close to the bone, because I don’t see a point not to. That’s pretty much the only thing I have to offer. I’ve never liked reading novels about musicians, because I’ve always felt they were fake. It was always about rock stars. The whole point was about making it. I like biographies of musicians a lot, but just straight novels … I’d never really read one that I liked.

Where I started is the idea of why nobody quits. They keep playing regardless of their success or lack thereof. They just play in different kinds of bands, or they play whatever gigs they can get and they get old. Why does a guy keep chasing art? Or why does a guy keep writing songs when no one really cares about his songs? Why does a person write novels when they never get published? I was interested in that.

Then I was interested in my own relationship with why I do it. I was also interested in alcoholism, which I’ve written about a lot. I was trying to figure out my own relationship with booze as I’ve gotten older.

You live primarily in Oregon now, but do you miss Nevada? Do you feel closer to one state or the other?

I’ve lived in Oregon a long time, and Portland has been so good to me. I met my wife here. I got to be in a band here that people would actually show up to. I got to be around open-minded people. I found work up here. I live at the edge of the Coast Range, so I love the wilderness here.

I think I really fell in love with Reno. I go back to that when I’m feeling homesick or heartsick.  I loved the culture of it. I love the nightlife of it. The feel of that city has always been my favorite thing. Now it’s changed and become really successful. When I grew up, it was transitioning out of being a casino town to a normal city. It’s exploded in growth, just like Portland.

When I lived there, Reno had this kind of beat-up quality. There’s a certain kind of pain in a city like that that I really gravitated toward. It had a lot of drifters, a lot of the motels had fallen on hard times, and they could only get residents to stay if they were weeklies [weekly residents]. All these motels became a haven for guys right before they became homeless. I grew up being around a lot of men that had failed. My mom worked with men, and some of the guys she worked with had lived by the river or lived in motels. I could see how you could fall into that easy. I felt comfortable being around those really weird guys.

I also grew up driving around Nevada a lot. My mom’s boyfriend is obsessed with Nevada, so we camped a lot. I was raised to believe Nevada was the greatest place. The Nevada desert or the Eastern Oregon desert, for that matter, is heaven. So I drank that Kool-Aid early on.  If I ever want to feel good about the world, I just write about places I love, so I write about Reno or St. Johns. I love St. Johns.

I moved to Portland just to get in a band and to be around people that liked art. I was not around that in Reno. My mother was really against me being a musician, she was really ashamed of it; so it’s better to be a failed musician in a different town than your family, if they’re not into it.

This book is dedicated to John Doe (cofounder of the band X) and is also in memory of Dallas Good (cofounder of the band The Sadies). Can you tell me what they’ve meant to you? 

John Doe was in X. I remember listening to them, I think I was 13. They were the coolest band. They wrote really great lyrics that hold up to this day. They were a husband and wife at the time, so it was really romantic.

When I was a senior in high school, they started the Knitters, which was a country offshoot of that band with Dave Alvin of the Blasters. I’d always gravitated toward folk music and country music, and John Doe and the Knitters, the Blasters, Los Lobos, I have a poster of the Pogues here —  they’re saying you can be a weirdo. You can be anything you want to be — this music is yours, too. He taught me that. As I grew older, he just never quit. Richmond Fontaine [Vlautin’s previous band] opened for X and the Knitters a couple times, and I opened for him solo, and he was always super cool to me. For a rock ‘n’ roll star, he was real honorable and down to earth.

Dallas Good was in my favorite band and became a real hero of mine. He and I slowly became friends. We’d run into each other or play gigs together. If I could be in any band in the world, I’d rather drive around in a beat-up van with The Sadies than I would be in an airplane with Led Zeppelin or The Who or any of them. I just love their band. He was a really nice guy to me.

When I heard of his death, I couldn’t even get out of bed. We were kind of half-assed going to write a book together. It just devastated me. So I thought I would try to do something cool for him, which is incorporate him in that book.

Thank you for asking, because I love talking about him. I love talking about both those guys. 

Your whole face immediately lit up when I mentioned their names.

Every time I’d go see John Doe or The Sadies or Dead Moon from Portland it’s like, “Okay, I know why I’ve destroyed my life living in a bar since I was 16.” It’s because you want to hang out with bands that cool.

In the book, you describe beautifully moments of transcendence that Al has on stage that explain why he does what he does. Can you remember the first time you felt that moment of transcendence on stage while performing?

Well, I mean, never. I liked writing songs from when I was 10 or 11. My brother wrote songs in high school, then told me to write songs. He goes, “Man, you’re such a sad little dude. You should write songs about it.” I did what my brother said because he was my older brother.

I loved the idea of disappearing into songs. I could be somewhere else. I could be in Reno and then put the Pogues on, and all of a sudden I’m in love with an Irish girl. Or you could be in the industrial section of New Jersey with Springsteen. I was attracted to that, the sad, beat-up storytellers. Shane MacGowan, Tom Waits, and Bruce Springsteen really made a lot of sense to me, because they’re all real big romantics, but they’re also kind of realists and sad. I wanted to write those kind of songs set in a world that I love, which is Reno.

When you’re a kid, the first time you’re playing a song you wrote with a drummer and a bass player, your mind is shattered. Just the sheer volume of it is breathtaking. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than when that first started. There’s something about it. You’re horrible, but there’s the camaraderie I always liked, and you’re so in love with it and you’re so fresh to it and young. But then you’ve got to play a bar and it’s all downhill from there. You’re like, “Oh shit, I don’t know how to entertain people. I don’t want to be in front of people. I’m too shy. I can’t even talk in class at school.” I almost dropped out of high school because I had to talk in class. I think I talked one time in college and about had a nervous breakdown. So I just drank a lot.

With so much of your life being about lyrics, I was wondering if you’ve read much poetry.

Dorianne Laux is a great poet I’ve gotten into lately. But in general, it’s a real weak spot for me. I’ve dabbled in it. I think my poetry has always been rock ‘n’ roll lyrics and folk lyrics and country lyrics. I’ve always been a novel guy.

Is there anything you’ve read recently that you’d recommend?

Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: It’s brilliant. She’s a beautiful writer. She’s resigned to whatever situation she’s in. She always sees the beauty in wherever she’s at, and she does it in such a natural way.  She had a weakness for jazz musicians. There’s a really cool story called 502. I just wrote a song for The Delines [Vlautin’s band] that’s for her. I got all The Delines to read it. I gave them the book and everybody loved it. I have eight of her books because I give them away, because I love the book so much.

And then Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. There’s a beauty in that book. Standing up for doing what’s right is hard, and she tells a basic story that’s really heavy about a guy standing up when he could lose everything, his whole family’s livelihood.

These two writers are just geniuses, but they’re also really in line with their hearts. You can feel in both those books that the writer has an immense amount of soul, and they know how to get their soul onto the page. That’s the dream, to write those kinds of books.

Ironweed is like that to me. Some people find it difficult; it has magic realism. It’s all about failure and alcoholism and trying to come back home and admit that you didn’t mean to be gone and you didn’t mean to abandon people. I always say, if Tom Waits wrote novels, he’d probably write a lot like William Kennedy.

What are you working on now?

The Delines have a new record coming out in January called Mr. Luck and Miss Doom, which is written off a lyric of the Al Ward stuff. When he’s in Winnemucca, there’s a guy that, for whatever reason, loves the song he wrote called The Dice and Me. The guy throws money at him to keep playing the song. The next morning, he writes Mr. Luck and Miss Doom. That’s the title of the record and the song I wrote. When I came up with that title, I wrote the song.

I’m editing a book right now called Russell and Eddie. It’s based on a short story called The Kill Switch that I did an audiobook for. For this tour I was on, I did a little book for one of the chapters. It’s a novel about the characters set in St. Johns, about a house painter who lives next door to a really dysfunctional family and the house painter is just coming off a divorce. One of the neighbor kids starts hanging out at his house because he’s scared to be in his own house. It’s pretty close to being done.

With The Horse, I edited this thing for years. I wasn’t thinking about other people reading it. I was just thinking about my own heart in it. Then I did the edit. Sometimes, I’ll finish an edit and, if I’ve got the spare time and the dough, I’ll go to Pendleton for a couple of days and read the book like I just found it somewhere, like in a library. I’m pretty good at getting distance from myself to do that.

I read it and about page 100, I was like, “Oh man, it’s so bleak. It’s even too bleak for me and really bummed me out.” And I had to rebuild the whole thing for another year, just to get the mixture right of hope and sadness and relief and success. That’s always been kind of a weakness of mine, making stuff too bleak.

But the Russell and Eddie stuff is definitely not too bleak. I like it a lot. I hope other people do. It’s messed up, but it’s probably my easiest-going book.