Festival of Faith & Music Preview Reviews: Bill Mallonee

I will be attending Calvin College’s Festival of Faith & Music, March 31-April 2. Leading up to the festival, there will be a series of reviews of artists scheduled to appear as a preview of what to expect. Click on the icon for more information about the Festival.


The 18th century guys are gathered around the campfire singing cowboy songs in the drawing on the cover of Bill Mallonee’s Dear Life,. Mallonee, formerly of the Vigilantes of Love, has a bit of a cowboy persona himself. However, thematically, this is more of dark nightclub confessional stuff than covered wagon, cowboy ranch dinner theater.

Songs like “Who Will You Love?” have that Cowboy Western sound, although the song also seems to be a reference to Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love.”

Otherwise, though, I hear a lot of Loudon Wainwright III in Mallonee’s voice couple with some of the AltCountry arrangements of Blue Mountain. Mallonee’s landing in the American Folk section of the Spectrum, but not without realizing the Country sounds prevalent here—much like the recently reviewed Casey Abrams.

Deat Life, contains plaintive folk songs, but also upbeat gems like “Ready and Red-eye.” “High. . .and Lonesome” features the fiddle of David Classen which wheels and spins like Randy Sabien’s playing on Greg Brown’s In the Dark With You.

There’s a drug them to the album—not advocating drug use, but a questioning, struggling, and disillusionment with drugs. There’s the song title invoking lines like “You’re wasted now and the whole thing was a lie/But you’re ready and red-eye,” and “I dunno if the kid’s on drugs or life.” And from “I Will Never Be Normal (After This),” “There are drugs to help you see God/and there are drugs for when drepressed/and there are drugs that make you harder still/for when you get undressed/and there’s drugs for the guiltiness/so you’ll feel one with the universe.”

But like the chorus in “High. . .and Lonesome,” it all seems to be about the highs which don’t get us high, that don’t really give us the love, peace, and happiness we pursue. Mallonee is a cowboy prophet pointing out the emptiness of our pursuits and showing us our great need for something more. As in “Songwriter (Numb),” “they say that it’s a cruel word/some cite it as a sad fact/and they say, ‘God? He, must not give a damn’/and God says, ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’” Mallonee isn’t so quick to give up on God, despite whatever trials he or the characters in his songs have faced. Mallonee leads the listener to “hold onto [God] for dear life.”

Thanks to Bill Mallonee and Fundamental Records for the review
copy.