The Delines

Today, The Delines announce their new album The Set Up due out March 6th via Decor Records and available to preorder here. The acclaimed Portland, Oregon band are also soon be announcing October Swedish and Danish tour dates in Malmo, Goteborg, Stockholm and Copenhagen. To accompany today's announcement the band have shared the beautifully a cappella and cinematic piano-based ballad "Dilaudid Diane" as the first single from the album. Click HEREto watch The Delines performing the track live in the studio.

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 realizing he doesn't want to leave. It was a band favorite, 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 realized I was writing songs in the same world as Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, but from different 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 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.

'Keep The Shades Down' was written as a link between the romance of Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom and the isolation of the The Set Up. The couple in the song realizes just how close the haves are to being have nots. The tracks came together fast and it was so naturally cinematic in feel that Cory and I began bringing in instrumentals to make it even more so. I had written 'Jumping Off In Madras' for the woman in 'Her Ponyboy' (Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom), as she gets off the freight train alone after the death of her boyfriend. Cory wrote 'Getting Out Of The Ward' for the guy in 'The Meter Keeps Ticking' who is leaving the mental hospital two days after Christmas and the stunningly beautiful 'The Last Time I Saw Her' for the kid in 'The Reckless Life' as she sets off from the hospital into the darkness of the world.

Our stalwart producer, John Morgan Askew, was at the helm again and he's the king of building atmospheric worlds. You can really feel it on this one. By the time we finished the record we realized The Set Up was the wayward, misguided, and lonely sister to Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom. More ragged and undone but all CinemaScope Delines.