Willy Vlautin

Here's a great album i can highly recommend, especially if you like a good story, I've played it a lot. Willy Vlautin is a member of the band Richmond Fontaine and a great songwriter. He also writes great books and one of them, The Motel Life has recently been made into a film featuring Stephen Dorff and Emile Hirsch. I really enjoyed the book, nice and bleak!... so I'll be interested to see how the film compares. Northline has to be my favourite book of his though and it came with a great instrumental cd,  a perfect mood setter. I used to sit and read it with the cd on a loop... and happily lose myself in it all. There's also a great spoken word cd called A Jockey's Christmas, which i love, again pretty bleak and a catalogue of misfortunes fall upon the young jockey visiting his family for Christmas. For now though I'd start right here with The High Country.