Willy Vlautin - Guitar and Vocals
Dave Harding - Bass Guitar
Sean Oldham- Drums
Dan Eccles - Guitar

The past year brought all kinds of new ground being broken by Richmond Fontaine. Playing in clubs from the world famous Winnemucca Hotel in Nevada, to The Borderline in London, to Amsterdam's Paradiso, Richmond Fontaine cut a wide swath through uncharted territory in 2004. The hard work paid off. Uncut magazine named the band's Post To Wire album Number 4 of the year, right behind Brian Wilson, Wilco and Loretta Lynn. Their shows became packed with fans. And Richmond Fontaine felt the first warm rush of commercial success - meaning they could finally book hotel rooms rather than sleep on some kind soul's living room floor.

And while the band came on the radar of tons of new music fans around the world, Richmond Fontaine has been doing what they do for more than 10 years now. To Richmond Fontaine newcomers, the band's new offering, the subdued and shattering The Fitzgerald may seem like a 90 degree left turn. But to long time fans who've ridden with the band since their 1996 debut Safety through Whiskey Pain Killers and Speed (2000) to the present, the new work will be an introspective, challenging new chapter of one of the most surprising bands to come out of the United States.

The Fitzgerald, Richmond Fontaine's sixth and most recent studio recording, is a quiet departure from the raucous, visceral send-ups that have made the Portland-based rockers a band to watch. Written in a Fitzgerald Casino hotel room in Reno, Nevada, the album is a stark collection of songs about the people who live in the shadows of a casino town.

It's a record about the gamblers, the runaways, and the derelicts -- folks who Fontaine frontman Willy Vlautin is intimately familiar with, seeing as he hails from the Biggest Little City in the World.

Produced once again by JD Foster, who was at the helm for the acclaimed Post To Wire, and recorded in Portland, Oregon at Blue Room Studios and due out later this summer on Union Recordings, The Fitzgerald is the first late night Richmond Fontaine record. Gone are the distorted guitars, replaced by Vlautin's light-fingered touch on the acoustic. Multi-instrumentalist Paul Brainard trades his pedal steel in for a piano. The band's rhythm section is reigned in to a soft rumble. From the opening track "The Warehouse Life" about a run-in with a debt ridden gambler and his bookie, to "Laramie, Wyoming" the harrowing tale of runaway's trials and tribulations on the road, to "Don't Look and it Won't Hurt" the story of a woman's escape from her abusive boyfriend only to end up living her life alone in a motel next to a casino, these are the most vivid and compelling songs Richmond Fontaine have written to date.

In fact, in the UK, where The Fitzgerald has just been released, Richmond Fontaine are again enjoying the kind of critical acclaimed rarely bestowed on any artist. Uncut has anointed the new album "Album Of The Month," giving it Five Stars and saying "The Fitzgerald is mind-blowing, Richmond Fontaine honing what they do to a point of absolute perfection." Q called The Fitzgerald "most beautiful sad album of the year." The album has received rave reviews from Holland to Spain, Ireland to Germany.

And while the release of another successful UK album, a successful European and UK tour and an imminent U.S. release on a cutting edge new record label would be enough to make even the most downtrodden songwriter crack a grin, Vlautin has something else to be happy about - a publishing deal with the Faber and Faber, England's last great independent book publisher. His first novel, entitled The Motel Life will be released in 2006 by the same folks who first published writers like Paul Auster, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot and Laurence Durrell.

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