Dear Life

It's been a long go-round for Bill Mallonee. In a business that claims to purvey art, he's one of those artists who has been continually ignored, denied, cheated, and outright lied to for decades. Still the songs keep coming; what else is he supposed to do? Mallonee is a songwriter who, in order to remain sane in a crazy world, has to make music out of the beating drums in his head and the burden on his heart. Dear Life showcases him and his partner in this venture, Jake Bradley. They are accompanied by a host of friends, including producer and steel guitar player extraordinaire John Keane, fiddle player David Claassen, drummer Jon Ranford, and Brandon Reynolds on bass and keyboards. This is a record full of contradictions; it reflects bewilderment and brokenness yet reports them with the only responses left: acceptance and loving kindness toward all those forces one cannot control. With a patchwork country music backdrop that is framed by rock and American folk styles, Mallonee's protagonists speak from the various portals of life's endings. In the opener "After the Dust Settles Down" the singer, buoyed by a whining pedal steel, reflects on what remains important after the travails and catastrophes occur. "Ready and Red-Eye," is a lean roots rocker fueled by Rickenbacker guitar. It takes place in the aftermath of the discovery that one has lived a life of self-deceit and attachment. The poetry in "Carol Merrill" is so tenderly brutal it cannot be quoted here to justice, but it is the tarnished jewel in this album's beat-up crown. The set's final cut, "Songwriter (Numb)," is self-confession at its best and most harrowing. Accompanied only by his guitar, Mallonee leaves the metaphors in the corner to gather dust or lie to one another and bares his weary soul and confesses the self-cherishing and delusions that lead to staring wide-eyed in the cold gray light of dawn with nothing but what you approached the dream with — a tune, a guitar, some rhyming words and the shivering fragility of a heart that doesn't know any better than to lay itself bare. On Dear Life, the middle-aged Mallonee, is bent and broken with a shaky voice; the rage is gone but it's been replaced with the wisdom of humility, and as such he remains an enigma, full of bittersweet words about the precious nature of the traps as well as the fleeting glimpses of the treasures.