And, stories about Dylan pounding out Blonde On Blonde between tour stops notwithstanding, the road is not the friendliest writing environment. “Writing is real personal,” he says. “I can’t just do it sitting in the dressing room with everybody drinking their tequilas and writing set lists.”
He also realized that the circumstances were somewhat different now that he had begun building a fan base. “There’s people that have an expectation, that liked this record,” Malin observes. “And I want to make a different record, but I want to still hopefully keep those people.”
He’s enough of a music fan to be well-acquainted with the sophomore slump, and determined to avoid it. “I remember as a kid, I didn’t really understand this, that bands were on the road,” he says. “I remember buying the first Cars album and flipping out, and then getting Candy-O, the second album, and there’s one song, maybe two — I mean, now I like it because it’s weird and there are Suicide influences, but at the time as far as pop, as far as song quality…and same thing with the second Van Halen album, and even the second Circle Jerks.”
If the artistic pressure wasn’t enough, there was also the stark financial reality of diminishing returns from the first album, which, for all its huzzahs, wasn’t making Malin rich. So between tour legs in the U.S. and Europe, he started recording at Stratosphere Studio on the west side of Manhattan, which is co-owned by former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha and members of Fountains Of Wayne.
Initially, Malin intended the tracks to be demos. But as he listened to the first batch away from the studio, back on the road, he decided he liked them. “I sat back and said, this is something good here, maybe let’s just keep going,” he says. Adams had intended to return as producer, but he had seemingly endless projects of his own to tend to. Discussions with other potential producers ran into roadblocks, so Malin decided to just do it himself, with some help from his friends.
“I just had great people around me,” he acknowledges. “Eli Janney from Girls Against Boys engineered and definitely had a lot of input. I called in all my rabbis, anybody I knew. My friend Howie Pyro, who was in D-Generation, came in and gave ideas. And Ryan lended a hand.”
Adams contributes guitars and vocals throughout The Heat, along with other guests including Pete Yorn, former Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson, and Jody Porter from Fountains Of Wayne.
The goal, Malin says, was pretty straightforward. “I knew I wanted it to be a record I could play more with the band,” he says. “I’d been touring more acoustic, as well as with the band, but I wanted something that was more rock, so to speak — whatever that means, rock — but something that was more sonic and textured.”
Thematically, the album covers more territory than The Fine Art Of Self-Destruction. Where almost all of that album’s songs felt like first-person observations, the viewpoints on The Heat vary: a prostitute in “Arrested”, an abused child in “Basement Home”. Even on New York songs such as the elegiac “Silver Manhattan”, Malin sounds more like a narrator than a protagonist — another result, he says, of his distance from home while writing most of the songs.
“At the age I’m at, in my mid-30s, all my friends back home are having kids, like it says in one of the songs,” he says. “I’d call home and everyone says there’s another wedding I’m missing. And watching a lot of my friends since the Trade Center and all that, people that worked in great jobs in entertainment that are selling weed, you know, to make money, or doing different things. Kids that I grew up with who were doing great, watching a lot of people freak out financially because the times got harder. It’s just a confusing place.
“And having that distance, I wrote this record a lot more thinking globally. Just because I played in so many places, like Helsinki to Hawaii, and not just sitting in New York on Third Street where I wrote the other record.”
But don’t expect any grand socio-political pronouncements. Although one track on The Heat is called “New World Order”, Malin’s focus is at the individual level. He says he was asked after September 11 to contribute to a tribute project, but he begged off.
“It’s just something that I think is better left for someone like Bruce or the Bonos of the world, who can really do that for their audience,” he says. “I think a smaller artist coming up with this could come off really pretentious. It just doesn’t work. I mean, I could write it personally or something, but I address in other, subtler ways — more about people surviving, personal situations.”
Not that New York is ever far from his mind. Like a lot of natives, he has mixed feelings about the city’s evolution over the past few decades from grime and crime to yuppie theme park.
“It’s just full of people on the weekends, more and more, from the suburbs that just come in here and think it’s some goofy playland,” he says. “You know, like they just walked off some Gap ad or Banana Republic shop. So the weekends are rough. But there’s still great food, and just a great energy.”
Malin says he can’t imagine ever not having a place in the city. He still lives on the Lower East Side, and still co-owns a bar — Niagara, in the East Village — where he knows all the regulars.
“You walk out your door, and life happens, songs happen,” he muses, stressing “the mix of the different cultures and the different people. And I still do real traditional New York things that tourists do. I love to go to Central Park and get on a boat in the middle of the pond there and just chill out. Or go to Chinatown at 3 in the morning, like Woody Allen says, and go to Wo Hop. Coney Island. Or just walking. You can walk around New York, and life happens. I like that.”
ND contributing editor Jesse Fox Mayshark lives in New York City, where he writes and edits and eats a lot of Indian food. This is the first time he’s profiled another Jesse.
