Writing just comes naturally to Tommy Malone
Tommy Malone is best known for fronting the Subdudes.
By Scott McLennan
Special to The Journal
Published: 09 June 2013 12:01 AM
Tommy Malone wrote many of the songs for his new record “Natural Born Days” with drummer and longtime friend Jim Scheurich. But this was not some sort of Brill Building exercise of sitting around the piano.
“I’m 55 years old now, and I’ve known Jim since I was 14. He’d come over, we’d put on a pot of coffee and have a conversation,” Malone recounts when recently reached by phone while on tour in Colorado. “We’d talk about family, politics, God, flowers, whatever. Sometimes ideas would just come out. I’d say, ‘Wait, what’d you just say?,’ and that would be the start of something.”
“Natural Born Days” is the second solo album from Malone, who is best known for fronting New Orleans’ freewheeling roots-rock band the Subdudes, which began in 1987 and has been on hiatus since 2010. Malone will be performing Monday at The Met, and says he’ll dip into his first solo record, the Subdudes catalog, songs from his stint in the short-lived band Tiny Town, as well as “Natural Born Days.”
In queuing up this solo record, Malone first started working with his brother Dave after he retired from the Radiators.
“We were rehashing old material. It’s not what I wanted to be doing,” Malone says.
After reconnecting with Scheurich, Malone began airing some of his new songs during a Tuesday night residency at the Chickie Wah Wah club in New Orleans. Record producer John Porter, who has worked with Taj Mahal, Keb’Mo’ and others, routinely turned up at those Tuesday shows and approached Malone about making a record.
Malone didn’t box himself in stylistically, recording songs that span blues to country to rock. Most of the songs are kept pretty lean, letting the emotional resonance of Malone’s writing, singing and guitar playing shoot to the foreground.
Malone sounded pretty unconcerned about the record’s zig-zagging flow, saying he just made an album that emulates the kinds of records he liked when he first got into music.
“When I was growing up, you’d get a Stones or a Beatles record, and you didn’t know what was going to be on it,” he says. “And you didn’t care, as long as it was interesting.”
And Malone definitely keeps it interesting here. He cuts close to the bone on the mournful rejection song “Didn’t Want to Hear It” and the measured title track, spun from his own mother’s pill addiction.
“It’s about her struggles, like myself and my father struggled with alcohol,” Malone says. “She is also very religious and has a lot of faith. I tried to paint a picture of somebody who has human characteristics. There’s all that pain and all that hope, too.”
There also is a fair amount of fun and joy on the album, with the swamp rock of “Mississippi Bootlegger” and wry “Hope Diner.” And Malone takes us to church on “No Reason” and “God Knows.”
“Natural Born Days” may not shy from sorrow, but is an overall comfortable-sounding piece of work, perhaps the result of Malone returning to New Orleans after decamping to Nashville following Hurricane Katrina.
“That song ‘Home’ is all about coming back. Even with all its nastiness and problems, it just feels like where I belong,” Malone says. “It’s beautiful to me, though it’s hard to describe. I guess when I was in Nashville, I never felt like I could sit all the way down in my seat.”
Tommy Malone will be at The Met, 1005 Main St., Pawtucket, Monday, June 10, at 7 p.m. $15, themetri.com, (401) 331-5876
Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcLennan1
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