Dark Horse Bets

Bill Mallonee November 5th, 2007

Dark Horse Bets - a sermon on new SONGS, 15 years of recording, touring and what i learned.

The setting:

I've been writing at a clip of about 5 songs a month for the last 6 months…it's been a way to reach both inside and out to something bigger than myself. There are moments when to draw another breath and extend a measure of mercy towards yourself is…the greatest act of faith imaginable.

There are days when the skin we live in is wrecked and crying from it's own disappointment/disgust with itself. I've been posting these songs about 5 at a time through a monthly subscription service at my website, www.billmallonee.net

I made up many of these songs (save for "Undertaker") the Winter of 2006. In those days of diminishing light I think a particular kind of mood is reinforced. The world is going dormant…the last leaf shaken from the stern Giacometti-like branches of the trees. Even the monochromatic elements of dusk's light lend to a lump in the throat or a heavy sigh. The incongruity of life's heaviness juxtaposed against Advent promise is almost a spiritual strain.

We are not made of such stern stuff. Perhaps we sense our mortality and failures with a greater clarity in the cold, darkening months. It is the stuff of pain to be sure, and Lord willing, a whisper of rebirth and change.

The scene without:

I recorded these songs on an old DAT player I got in '93, right when Vigilantes of Love, the americana-college band i was part of for 10 years was beginning to take off. DAT players are pretty antiquated by anybody's standards these days what with newer, faster, better digital technology.

Me? I dunno. I don't really know how to use computers to make music with and I was fortunate enough to avoid being both engineer and artist when it came to making most of the recordings I've made. Call it the luxury of being able to be completely subjective. I got to sit on one side of the glass and open a vein while some other fellas lovingly nuance the myriad of knobs and buttons and blinking lights to your benefit. I'm a little leery anyway of interposing luminous screens and computer keyboards between a song, it's birth and it's archiving. But shoot, what do I know?

The scene within:

So these new recordings are "live." One favored take preserved. I believe there's the feel of something "fresh" happening by doing it this way.

As I played and sang through each chord change and the phrasing of each lyric I noticed something interesting. There was the constant feeling of chasing something and trying to capture it. Or the feeling that something bigger than oneself was trying to be born. Something being born. I tend to live for those moments these days. I remember the late-great Mark Heard saying something similar in some liner notes he wrote once.

What will you find? I'm working it out. Messy and bloody and hurtful. I think most of these songs are suffused with a sense of failure and loss. Of sadness and regret. Call it the "human condition." Looking at what lives under our skin requires a certain sobriety, at least it does looking at mine.

Those of you who are familiar with my story from A to B won't find it, as Joni Mitchell would say, "the stuff of popular song." But then again, from a different angle, maybe it is the stuff of "everyman's song."

For in the old days popular songs helped us do things like fall in love and stay in love. They helped us travel and adventure without leaving home.

The music of Woody Guthrie made real to us the plight of Dust Bowl farmers, wheelin' and dealin' hobos, and down-on-their-luck-factory workers. They spoke of the electricity of first love and the joys of family and adventure.

Early Dylan took us to a place of "exploded consciousness" and explored the strange and inexplicable complexity of love relationships.

And each of these songwriters spoke with an attitude of authority that made me feel that, no matter how deep the quandary, something "good and generous" would carry the day. In essence, they built my faith. I hope something of such building is here.

Looking back on crude paintings on cave walls in diminishing light:

I've tended to see most of my work as a yearning, a quest, a journey. An awakening to something undeserved. I think that must be why the image and metaphor of the road, both literally and figuratively, figure so large in my songs. The road became a 2nd home for me for the better part of 20 years and 25 records. In the long run, it was never all that good to me. And yes, there are costs for buying such dubious property. Those many years of viewing the world from inside a van or a car can change the way you look at the world…and more n' likely they'll change you, too.

Of course the lack of what they call "commercial success" was seen as a certain badge of honor. The argument running something like: "It must be good 'cause the masses (dem asses) aren't buyin' it." I suppose one can romanticize such concepts for a spell. It's a subtle way of lying to yourself. In the face of another round of disappointments you live in a certain denial that sounds like: "Oh, THAT didn't hurt…didn't feel a thing." And you soldier on, cause that's what you're suppose to do. And you can become vulnerable to a lot of things. You're desperately trying to fill up a deeper well. And, in my case, the compromises and alibis…can become sensational. A lot of folks can get hurt. Houses of cards always fall in the end. Pride is insidious, it seems.

Such events destroyed a marriage. And later the remorse and grinding poverty made such romantic notions as "artistic integrity vs. lack of commercial success" wear threadbare. Me? I never knew what I was made of until I was tested…and after 20 years the road, being a sort of laboratory herself, showed me deficient in painful ways.

All of that to say, if there's anything remotely redemptive here, maybe it's to say that these blood-in-the-vein-songs are my own. Tainted or not. Perhaps that means that these new song's authenticity is vouched for in some sad-but-true way. I humbly hope they will be helpful, in some way, to all.

There is a place where one can fall to and (after having fallen) learn the freedom of never having to point a finger at anyone again, much less throw a stone. It makes the journey quite a bit lighter. Arms at one's side and hands free of the excess weight.

To bathe in clear streams of mercy:

A journey still? Why, yes indeed. A yearning? Oh yes, and an ache like never before…An ache for mercy, joy and something like peace. In these all-too-often darker days (in which many of these songs were written) I find myself just wishing the hurting would cease…but doubting it ever will.

Like it or no, we all have tapes spinning loud and long in our hearts. Some folks seem to have found some secret in their journey, some formula/answer for attaining a consistency in life. Such secrets, as I look back, seemed to have been known at times by my head but rarely by my heart, if that makes sense. Without meaning to sound even remotely cynical, I truly say that I'm glad for those folks who receive more emotional assurances that they are Divinely loved. To be honest, such experiences have seemed so very elusive for me. I'm glad for folks who experience the voice of extravagant Love instead of one that seems to taunt them with their worthlessness at every turn. The latter was my growing up and almost all of my adult life. When I found a guitar and a blank page to write on, it was like pick-axing a Hoover dam of the emotions of confusion, depression and worthlessness. Writing songs has enabled me to hear, in some measure, what kind of tapes where spinning in my head.

Mercy, joy and peace were always elusive graces when I was growing up. They remained fairly so even after I became convinced that God was in the world and "up to something wonderful" in the Person and work of His Son, Jesus. I still believe that.

But you needn't have shared the same view to appreciate the songs…nor do you now. My wager (or hope anyway) is that it'll still resonate. Resonate because it seems to me no matter what faith (or lack thereof) you live on, that we're all still stumblin' around in the same, sad skin. Falling down in the same old bag of bones we hope will steer us. I do often wonder: Why does God deigned to freight so much expectation on such weak scaffolding as our cold-as-concrete-dispositions encased in human flesh?

You gotta wonder at the risk of it all sometimes…

Is it worth it to Him these repeated dark-horse bets He takes on each of us? In my own case, never was there a sorrier, more-half-hearted, unconvinced believer…than I. One who, sadly, is working it out…messy, bloody, hurtful.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 10:41 am and is filed under Bill Mallonee, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.