The new album, which survived a couple of false starts before settling at Compass Records, is under the name Bill Mallonee & Vigilantes Of Love, which he says gives him the freedom to show up in concert with anyone he feels like playing with at the moment.
“I’ve just learned not to think too much about it,” he says of the vagaries of the music industry. “I really don’t want my life to be consumed by all that nuts-and-bolts stuff. It’ll make you go crazy. I found out that a lot of this business is perspective. It’s a matter of how it looks from where another individual sits. I consider myself really lucky to be able to do it, and still have a marriage and family that’s worked in the midst of it. I realize that’s often the first casualty.”
The latest incarnation of VOL is a kind of folk power trio, with bassist Jacob Bradley and drummer Kevin Huer building a rhythmic wall behind Mallonee’s guitar and harmonica. Lunching one afternoon at a downtown Athens Mexican restaurant, the three tie into burritos and a bucket of Negra Modelos, while discussing plans for an upcoming trip to England and Scotland that will include an appearance on BBC radio.
Figuring out what to play is sometimes a problem, they say. “Bill just writes so many stinking songs,” Bradley jibes. Among the new songs that are in the running, several stand out as distinctively complicated in their point of view. (Buddy Miller calls Mallonee’s lyrics “both cerebral and emotional,” the kind that “grab both sides of my brain.”)
Mallonee says most of his ideas come from the journals he keeps on the road. “I don’t write songs in a linear fashion. I can tell what a line might mean for me personally. I’ve written songs about Eleanor Roosevelt and Isadora Duncan and people like that, and those are a little more linear, but even those songs have some sections that are pretty surreal.”
On Audible Sigh, “Resplendent”, which features a haunting harmony from Harris, begins as a fairly typical story set in the Depression but veers into a much more complicated philosophical realm. “When I get into the historical side of things, there’s a tendency for me to take a particular and move it more toward a general thing,” Mallonee says.
“In ‘Resplendent’ there’s this question looming over everybody’s head about suffering and affliction, not just in the Dust Bowl, but in the world in general — is it from God or is it from Satan? That’s the big eternal question. For me, I can’t come to grips with evil and suffering, but I can come to grips with how much I’m responsible for it.”
“Hard Luck And Heart Attack”, which ponders the flesh-and-spirit conundrum, was inspired by Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angel. “It was sort of his attempt to reconcile his Catholic upbringing with his Zen Buddhism,” Mallonee says. “It’s a bit like some of the stuff I’d read by Thomas Merton.”
As for his own faith, Mallonee admits he’s often been hesitant to talk about it in the mainstream media, for fear of being painted with the same broad brush as many conservative Christians. “The whole evangelical thing has aligned itself with these boilerplate causes,” he says, “and the way it has gone about representing itself has been so loveless, and so cold and so lacking in compassion, it just makes me wary to discuss it with people.
“My Christian faith has been a shelter from the storm. It’s been the thing that’s literally kept me out of mental institutions over the years. But it’s not an agenda as far as my music goes. I don’t feel like I have to save anybody’s soul, or even tell anybody about it. My songs tend to be confessional, in the spirit of poets like John Donne. They’re really more like pep talks to myself most of the time. And hopefully my faith comes out in my music in a natural way — sort of like Trent Reznor’s nihilism comes out in his Nine Inch Nails presentation.”
What is perhaps most refreshing about Mallonee’s struggle to come to grips with the everlasting is the way he’s able to wear his heart on his sleeve and still crack a joke. In a recent song called “It’s Not Bothering Me”, he sings: “God’s love shines through a prism/I’m so confused by Calvinism/Honey meet me at my house/Kiss me long upon the mouth/Like they do in San Francisco.” It’s funny and poignant at the same time, a view of a good world gone wrong, where we all hunger for significance, whether we recognize it or not.
“To know that it’s all really going somewhere is the key,” Mallonee says. “So much of pop culture is in the other direction. It’s only about the moment. You don’t think about the future. I think eternity is in the moment and the moment spreads into eternity.”
Bob Townsend lives in Atlanta, where he tries to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable while writing about music and gardening for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Stomp and Stammer.
