Interviews
Ode the the Road: A Conversation with Bill Mallonee
by Geoffrey Ashmun
"I'm gonna rip out my heart and sew it on my sleeve." It's a recurring lyric in his music, almost a motto for Bill Mallonee, founder of Vigilantes of Love. Since the band's beginnings in Athens, Georgia, nearly ten years ago, the raw honesty of Mallonee's lyrics and VOL's earthy "roots rock" approach has found them critical acclaim and a faithful community of fans and fellow sojourners.
Mallonee and his ever-changing supporting cast have filled eight albums and countless concerts with intimate, passionate songs exploring themes of faith and doubt, love and brokenness. Mallonee wrote the material on VOL's latest album, To the Roof of the Sky, during the band's 1997 concert tour, which also inspired the album's title. "We ended up calling the record To the Roof of the Sky," Mallonee writes, "because we spent a lot of time looking up at the sky in the dead of many a night . . . after the wearying 3 a.m. load-out from the altar of whatever club or bar you'd just made your last confession..."
Following a series of different record companies in recent years, Mallonee and company took a different road with this most recent record. They have released To the Roof of the Sky independently and are marketing it themselves--at concerts, via the Internet, and through other grass-roots channels. The move has given Mallonee greater creative freedom and connected him more deeply with the community of people who appreciate his music: "The new record has been fueled, start to finish, by word of mouth. Doing this independently, I feel much more in touch with people: 'Here's our show that we've just played, here's our record, this is what we do.' It's much better than recording an album and then giving it up for adoption and never seeing it again."
Mallonee views his songs as a diary, a personal venue for examining his life against the backdrop of God's grace. After a recent concert, I spoke with him about the role of the Christian artist, the therapy he finds in songwriting, and the relationship between his faith and his music. Maybe you'll find, as I did, that the road he's been on looks a bit like your own.
--Geoffrey Ashmun
Geoffrey: The vulnerability you display in your music, both on recordings and in live performances, never seems sentimental or contrived. Do you find a kind of therapy in what you do?
Bill: Very much so. The songs are definitely a peptalk, a kind of therapy for me.
My songs are a very private, heartfelt assessment of where my life in Christ is at the moment. Hopefully, the listener can connect with my experience, since we're all made of the same stuff. I think that's the role of the artist--to put some flesh and blood onto the same things everyone is feeling.
Most of my stuff is confessional. I've been given to a kind of cyclical depression for most of my life--nothing real severe but enough to shut me down for short periods. Now that I'm older, I can step outside it a little and tell myself, "Hey, you're doing it again." But when I was in my teens and twenties, it scared the hell out of me. And it was worse after I first became a Christian, because I couldn't reconcile my depressive periods with the shiny, happy attitude of some friends who'd say: "You're just not getting enough victory, brother. We'll pray for you," and all that.
It took me six or seven years to dig out of that and accept that maybe my melancholy temperament is just something I have to accept and watch out for. It seems clear to me from both the Old and New Testaments that some people were definitely given to a melancholy temperament: Jeremiah, for example, was called a "weeping prophet."
I think I've got a sensitivity toward things that can be both a blessing and a curse. It works for me as an artist. I try not to glorify it, but at the same time I can't stay there for long.
Geoffrey: I imagine that this melancholic tendency can rear its head while you're on tour. Do you have any sense of belonging to a community even while you're on the road, constantly encountering new places and faces?
Bill: Oh, yeah, very much so. It seems like the people who get our music--and it may take them a while to find us because we're not all over the magazines--really do connect with what we're doing. We've got a very cool, grass-roots fan base that's really been there for us. Most of our fans have more than one or two of our records, and that's a rare thing in this era of one-hit wonders and "today's hitmaker, tomorrow's old news."
There's a sense in which it's like trench warfare for us--four guys in a band with no help, no manager, no guitar technicians--though we've learned how to streamline it so it works for us. But there definitely is some magic when you step on the stage half-exhausted because you haven't slept for three nights in a row for having to share a bed with your drummer or whatever. It's been worthwhile, though we're not quite sure how long we can keep it up. At this point it seems like more doors are opening than closing.
When we came off the road last year, the safety net felt dangerously thin. But with this new record and the outpouring from our fans, the net feels much thicker, more like a womb to live inside and not get too far away from.
Geoffrey: To The Roof of the Sky seems to be your "ode to the road," a comment on your experience in the music business.
Bill: It definitely is. I wrote these songs during our last tour, at a time when the whole support structure surrounding the band, and particularly the relationship with our record company, was falling apart and failing us. We'd never put a lot of stock in record company promises, but we had contractual ties. So we went on tour, leaving home and our loved ones for a long time, assuming they would work to give us radio and press support. But we soon realized there was no strategy to it at all.
When we came off the road, we severed the remaining contractual ties we had to that company, and also ended some personal connections, which was harder and more emotional. As we prepared to make the new record, I went back through my journals--I had written about fifty songs that year, and we were already playing some of them--and asked myself "What are these songs all about?" And I realized they were about the places we see God's face. In the midst of everything falling down around you, where is God?
Geoffrey: Has your approach to songwriting changed over the course of your career?
Bill: The early records were a little different in that I was coming out of a Reform Presbyterian background where everything was about standing back from the culture and critiquing it. Now I try to get into the culture and speak its language, crawl in and try to understand its mind-set.
That's one reason I started reading Jack Kerouac. A friend of mine, Steve Turner, wrote a book called Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster. In it he talks about how Kerouac wrestled all his life with a tension between this heavy Roman Catholic emphasis on a personal God calling you into account but also sustaining you through redemption in Christ, and this quasi-Eastern philosophy that he gravitated to. That philosophy was basically an obliteration of all the pain he felt as an individual, a sort of losing oneself in the oneness. You see that tension throughout his books.
That's important to understand because there's a whole generation and a half of people since then who follow a sort of neo-hippy thing, people extremely influenced by Jack Kerouac. If we Christians don't try to get inside and understand that, we're cutting ourselves off from the way many people are thinking and feeling.
Geoffrey: Vigilantes of Love is one of the few bands that have had exposure in both the Christian marketplace and the secular. . .
Bill: Actually, we've always been in the "secular" market. We never had formal distribution in the Christian Bookstore Association market until V.O.L., the compilation album that came out in 1995. That record was a deliberate attempt to galvanize a fan base in the contemporary Christian market. Warner/Resound Records came to us and said, "Look, we love the band, and we'd like to pick out some tracks to introduce the band to the Christian audience." It's kind of funny, because this "introduction" took place after five albums--that's a long time to wait in the foyer!
Geoffrey: Have you felt pressure to conform to other people's ideas of what it means to be a Christian musician?
Bill: Absolutely. I have a friend who heads a small, West Coast, alternative label. He told me, "If you can get your image and sound off of MTV and say what the youth pastor wants to hear, you can write yourself a pretty big ticket." I think that's frightening--and I think it says everything about propaganda and nothing about Christian art. I say "propaganda" because most youth pastors want to hear the same old, worn presentation. This doesn't necessarily make the message invalid, but I think the role of the artist is to go beyond that and talk about what grace looks like in one's life--on the good days and the bad.
I don't write with a particular audience in mind, whether it be the fourteen-year-old youth-group kids or the hardcore whiskey drinkers in a regular club; I try to write something of what my life looks like in light of God's grace. Some songs are overt about matters of faith, and others are more veiled. "Blister Soul," for example, has a very strong confessional element in it, but it doesn't speak in "Christianese."
The trick, for me, is to avoid the same old phraseology. How can you make the gospel fresh and keep away from words that some people find to be loaded with all the wrong meaning? For example, if you use the word sin, folk who've been raised in a heavy-handed church environment may not want to hear it. But talk about things like lostness and alienation--the effects of sin--and those same people understand very well what that's about, because they're living it daily.
Geoffrey: In approaching the creative process, a lot of Christian musicians seem to feel a responsibility to put the gospel before the art of making music. I sense that you don't make that kind of distinction, that the two are very bound together for you.
Bill: I don't really think about the categories, even musically. I mean, we're just a "roots rock" band. I like stuff by Neil Young and some of the newer country like Wilco and Son Volt. I don't think an artist can be everything to everyone; you just have to be who you are and hope there's a window for it. It's interesting to watch the swing of roots-rock, R & B, and country artists now coming in vogue--maybe we'll find our little place on somebody's coattail or a train heading out somewhere.
The reason people like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty still have careers is because they borrow elements from country, blues, rock-and-roll, gospel--and those kinds of music never go away completely. They are at the core of American music. It's not the slick, trendy thing where, especially in contemporary Christian music circles, last year it was ska and now there are Christian swing bands, if you can envision such a thing.
I don't spend much time trying to figure out what the next trend is going to be. I mean, I love authors like Frederick Buechner and C. S. Lewis, because I feel like they're scraping some sort of spiritual dust out of my bones--and that's what I want my songs to be about. So I just let it go, keep a journal, and try to write from that.
Geoffrey: There's a way in which that concern for artistic quality and individuality can disappear when Christian artists say things like, "All I want to do is be God's vessel." The late Mark Heard, whom you knew, joked that if he was only there to let God play ventriloquist, he could just send a cardboard likeness of himself to his concerts.
Bill: I think Mark was right. I thought you were going to say that there are Christian artists who step up to the microphone and say, "This is a song God gave me and laid on my heart," and when you hear it, you realize why God was so eager to get rid of it!
Mark was the kind of artist--and I think this is true of a lot of us--who, if he didn't have a mandolin in his hand, would have been doing a lot of time at the therapist. I don't say that in a bad way, because Mark had told me as much. Some of his best music came when he stopped thinking about who his audience was, stopped trying to write nice, tidy little hits and what the pastor wants to hear.
I don't really like to pull the songs out of my pocket and analyze them through a magnifying glass. It's much more organic than that. I don't go through any rationale or reasoning process as to why I do such-and-such with a song. One line leads to another line leads to another.
My favorite songs that I've written, older ones that I still include in the set, are songs like "Parting Shot" and "Judas Skin." I don't know exactly where those songs came from. I know that I wrote them at three or four in the morning when I was very sleepy and happened to have a guitar in the motel room. But they're true in the sense that they say something about me that maybe I would've been more guarded about saying at another hour of the day.
I think an artist has to risk something of his or her life before an audience. That's what we've tried to do with the latest album. And it's what I've tried to do ever since I first picked up the guitar.
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