Richmond Fontaine's tenth studio album, The High Country, tells an operatically tragic tale. Songwriter and novelist Willy Vlautin has written an extraordinarily eccentric album like no other. More than a concept record, The High Country is a song-novel: a fully realized, novel-sized story set to music. Set in a rural logging community in Oregon, The High Country is a Gothic love story between a mechanic and an auto parts store counter girl, whose secret love inspires an effort to escape the darkness of the world that surrounds them - drugs, violence, madness, loneliness, and desperation set against a backdrop of endless logging roads and the remains of a forest brutalized by logging. In this story of light vs. dark, Vlautin has woven a tale where screw-ups and freaks demonize the lives of innocents.

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Inventory (A Confession at Arlene's Paperback Exchange)
2. The Girl on the Logging Road
3. The Chainsaw Sea
4. Let Me Dream of the High Country
5. The Mechanic Falls in Love with the Girl
6. The Mechanic's Life
7. Angus King Tries to Leave the House
8. The Meeting on the Logging Road
9. Claude Murray's Breakdown
10. The Eagles Lodge
11. Driving Back to the Chainsaw Sea
12. Lost in the Trees
13. On A Spree
14. I Can See A Room
15. Deciding to Run
16. The Escape
17. Leaving