MY YEAR IN REVIEW by bill mallonee
Me? I get to speak truth for a living. That notion itself reeks of Pomposity & Audaciousness; Let’s face it: It’s almost Laughable.
It’s also what audiences have always expected a good artist to do. Anyway, that’s what I endeavor to bring on every recording. Talk about living in delusion.
And so across the tape of 77 albums over 25 years, I keep hands to the plow;
A glorious enterprise or a fools errand? I still don’t know…
Faith stumbling, falling, failing hard, getting up and taking the next step, I guess.
The recordings themselves? Almost all of them fiercely & proudly independent releases. Who needs the so-called industry’s “permission” to be what one is?
“Slow Trauma” & “Mule” were this year’s offerings. (“The Rags of Absence” was written & recorded, as well. “She” drops in Jan. 2017.) Anyway: Lot’s of songs.
More than got recorded. There’s at least another 30 songs I wrote o’er the last year, peering through the glass of the nursery; waiting to be find their “home” on a new album.
They’ll wait their turn.
Me? I edit my work, but not obsessively; I deeply scrutinize what I do, examining the motives of why & how I say what I feel needs to be said.
And what shows up?
The songs themselves. They still feel great, still feel visceral, still feel painfully & personally relevant. Such are my cross-bars.
There is, nor has there ever been, a particular audience in mind…
Honestly? I have the best gig an fella could have.
That journey? well, of course, it’s mostly within.
The mad, fragmentary diary of affirming & negating realities.
From the depths of despair to the visions of a neo-Jeremiah.
(He was known as “the weeping prophet.”)
All thrown out on the poker table.
All that’s cloaked within our sad, hungering flesh & expendable blood.
I am grateful for those kind folks who have made, and who continue to make, that journey with me…
And if none of this ever makes any sense?
Well, you can always laugh…
~ Bill Mallonee/December 2016
songsforthejourneyandbeyond 