Steven Delopoulos is perhaps best-known for his time leading the band Burlap to Cashmere. Since that time he has released two critically acclaimed solo albums, 2003’s Me Died Blue on Universal South and the brand new Straightjacket (one of my favorite’s of the year), with Monroe Jones’ Eb+Flo independent label. Throughout, Delopoulos has maintained an artistic vision that Derek Webb describes as “full of a transcendent wonder and poetic grit that I don’t hear coming from any other contemporary artists.” As part of my ongoing interview series, I recently talked to Delopoulos about the release of his new album, life after Burlap to Cashmere and the band’s possible return.

• Were you raised in a musical home?

Oh yes, my parents played music all the time and my uncle played classical guitar. I always loved classical music, even as an infant. My mother would tell me that I would lay in her lap and pretend to conduct. My mother also led; we’re Greek, so we’re from the Orthodox tradition and my Mom always led in our church.

• At what point did you begin creating music?

I was always a scatter-brained ADD child. My mother had put me into a choir, I must have been around 12 or 13. It was called the Mama’s Conservatory Music Choir and I started singing. My mother would play piano and there was a composer there who used to conduct the Vienna’s Boy Choir in Germany, Felix Multer. He decided to move to America and take on a position that was a lot smaller and nobler. He wound up leading at our church and conducting this conservatory boys choir. There was a director there by the name of Paul Hart who would present these plays to Felix. They’d be these wild, avant-garde plays. One was called Pollicino which came out of Germany and we performed it here in New Jersey. Another one was a Holocaust piece called Brundebar, written by the children of Terezin, the death camp in Czechoslovakia and we got to perform that at a big festival there, I forget what it’s called and then we performed it for Holocaust survivors in Red Bank, NJ. I was fortunate to be among really smart musicians and composers and theater directors and I think that led me into wanting to continue with it.

In high school, I wound up going to a performing arts school and majored in theater. I stayed in musical theater and also did some serious acting. From there I found myself in a theater college. I auditioned for a theater college called Marymount, Manhattan. That led me to want to continue theater, but what happened was that towards the end of my sophomore year, we had to do a project. I decided to do a music project. I think I’ve jumped ahead: high school was also a big musical part for me as well. My acting teacher, Joe Russo would pay folk songs. He was a great folk singer and we’d sit around in a circle and I’d just drool, thinking this is amazing! I’ve got to do this! He taught me how to fingerpick on the guitar and I started buying Harry Chapin records and I just loved folk music. I ate it up. To go back, in my sophomore year of college, I did a musical performance and I called it Burlap to Cashmere and that was the beginning of professionally doing music.

• Where did the name “Burlap to Cashmere” come from?

It came from a roommate who came up with the idea and it just kind of stuck.

• From there you involved your cousin in what would become the band, is that right?

I did. I asked my cousin Johnny to come down and play with me and he did. From there we met a manager named Jay Ernest from Jamieson and Ernest. It just kind of all snowballed into a nice little run we had.

• You’ve mentioned growing up with church involvement, would you say you were raised in a Christian home?

Oh absolutely!

• At what point would you say that faith became your own? Can you talk a bit about your own salvation experience?

I’ve always had a deep reverence towards God. As a child I would make my mother pray with me every night. She thought this was a little odd because they never enforced bible reading or prayer in the house though we would pray before dinner and God was present in the home. They weren’t strict about it. I think that’s what led me to want to experience God because in the Greek Orthodox Liturgy there’s a lot about the mystery of Christ and the mystery of God that makes you want to touch God. Sometimes, when God is spelled out for you too much it’s like: Oh, OK, well that’s done, now I’ll move on to something else. That’s one of the things I love about my Orthodox faith; it really emphasizes the mystery of Christ.

Growing up in that household, being involved in music, I think it all inspired me in the back of my head that if I ever went through any kind of suffering, that there is a God would be there for me and there was a God that existed. And then I was in college. I was about 18 or 19 and I had done some partying. I had experimented with some drugs in fact and it kind of damaged me. Something happened to the way I perceived life. It changed me in a frightening way. I remember going to Greece that year and I was on a boat going to an island called Sondureni, which actually has been a theme in my life for some reason, this island is just gorgeous! I remember just looking up at the sky and saying: “God, I know you’re there, reveal yourself to me. I can’t do this anymore on my own”. I was just a frightened 18-year old.

That year actually, I wound up meeting a lot of evangelical Christians, some Pentecostals, some Baptists, some Non-Denominational. They were more outspoken Christians and I would get invited to Bible studies a lot. And so, to make a long story short, I did get baptized, I did make a re-commitment towards Christ and from then on, I was like a chicken with my head cut off! Before you knew it, I had a New Testament Bible in my hands and I stopped acting. I went to an extreme, obviously, but I frightened everyone around me, there was just no way of stopping me; there was light coming out of my eyes, I had these Pentecostal experiences as well. I believe personally that I had a Holy Spirit experience and, what can I say? When you get touched you get touched and you can’t explain it.

So then, like most Christians, you kind of come down, you land, you come back down to the ground and you ask the question, “Now how do I deal with being a human?” That duality, I think, is in my music. I love thinking about it, I love talking about it, I love writing about it, although subconsciously. I really don’t have an agenda. I tell people that because I’m not that smart, I’m really not. There’s a song on Straightjacket called “Ruin of the Beast” that deals with this duality. It tries to deal with this issue of God and me and also having to deal with me and me; the two parts of me. Me and the godly man and sitting down and saying “OK, how are we going to live together?” Most Christian friends I find go through that when they have kids. They see themselves as a little child again and they see the human part of them and they have to deal with that without getting mad, which makes them have to deal with themselves in turn.

• Your music very openly deals with your faith. Is that something you have been intentional about or is it something you even think about?

I don’t. If I did, I think I’d have more of a career.

• What do you mean by that?

I feel that sometimes there is quite an agenda to the music business. Thank God the music business is changing, that’s all I have to say. But there was always this agenda in any kind of music genre, whatever it might be, whether CCM or pop music or folk music; the guys behind it who want to sell the records always have this agenda saying: “If you’re going to make a “Christian” record then it has to, from A-Z have a Christian message and it has to be lite, lite, lite, lite.” Well, that’s phony to me. I can’t do that, I’m not that good!

I don’t have an agenda when I write music and I try to be as sincere as possible with where I am at the time. I think that’s why people still buy my records; they feel kindred to that and they feel that they’re not getting a phony sense of hearing about God but that it’s something they’re going through too. Hopefully they can relate at some level.

• What do you think of the tag “Christian” Music?

It’s strange, for me, I think. But not just for me. For a lot of my Christian musician friends it’s strange. If someone comes up to me and asks if I’m a Christian, I’m very comfortable saying, “Well, yes I am,” and if someone were to talk to me and says: “Let’s talk about God and open up the Bible,” I would feel very comfortable about doing that. I’m very open about my struggles, especially at this point in my life. But if someone were to come up to me and ask if I’m a Christian artist, I just wouldn’t know what to tell them. It may seem strange to say, but I would tell them that I’m a human artist. You have to be a human before you can be a Christian.

• Burlap to Cashmere was signed, to A&M and not a Christian label, is that right?

That is correct but we were distributed on the “Christian” side of things on a label called Squint, Steve Taylor’s label for Word records.

• But your lyrics were infused with Scriptural truths, did you receive any negative feedback because of that?

Oh, it was definitely a paradox for us. I wrote those songs out of a reverence for God and the mystery of God. I didn’t think for one second that we were going to package it and I was going to have to put a suit on and say “Buy this” and there would be an agenda and that I would have to go a certain way about selling it. I didn’t think for one second that that would happen and when it did, it threw me off, it threw the guys off as well, so it was an interesting experience to see the “Christian” music business. And I do say Christian music business, I don’t say dealing with Christians, that’s a whole different thing.

• Though Burlap to Cashmere ended, you and your cousin have been doing reunion shows, is that right?

That’s right, we have been and we’re in talks about possibly making another record.

• How has it been different for you making music as a band versus going solo?

I struggle with how it all works. I’ll tell you, I’m not a business man; I’m really bad at it. All I am is this scatterbrained guy who writes songs and sometimes I’ll make money doing it and sometimes I won’t. I went from being on Squint and then Squint folded and everyone at Word records, everyone got fired, which was unfortunate. They were our family. They were the people that connected the dots to our fanbase. When they all left, we kind of went under. There was really no platform for us anymore. Then there were all these rumors about us. I’ve heard some crazy rumors that we were in jail or something and someone else said I was in rehab for all these drugs. I couldn’t believe it and I felt a little hurt. I would walk into some Christian manager’s office and they would say “We’ve heard that you were in prison” and I would look at them and I just wouldn’t know what to tell them. “No sir, absolutely not,” was about all I could say! Google my name, I have never been in prison, but I’m sure the reputation would help record sales! Maybe they were on to something. I did wind up leaving the band, due to a little bit of exhaustion. We were all tired. Once the platform was taken from under our feet, there was really no place to chime.

• Artistically, how would you describe the progression from Burlap to Cashmere to Me Died Blue and now to Straightjacket?

Me Died Blue, I was just so excited to put that out there. I had an interesting couple of years after Burlap, I kind of went into seclusion and struggled with minor depression. Me Died Blue was a great healing record for me where I got to express the gray areas of life; as C.S. Lewis calls it, “the shadowlands.” I think that some of the Christian market didn’t want to put it out because it wasn’t lite, lite, lite, lite, lite. But I felt like I owed it to the fans who bought the Burlap to Cashmere record for them to hear something true because the Burlap to Cashmere record was written with the same notion. I wanted to keep the art alive and I felt like I succeeded.

But what I failed to do was reconnect with the Burlap fans. I didn’t even think about it too much. I went with different management, I went with a country label. I almost completely turned my back on the Christian music business, not for any other reason than that I just didn’t think about it. I’m not one of those guys who thinks about what’s going to be good for my career, probably to my demise. The good part is that if I find people who “get” me, which I have recently, which is great, is that I’ll always be about the music. My singing will always reflect whether I’m struggling or having a great day.

• At what point did you begin to think music might be your life’s calling and when did you begin to think that was actually feasible?

Like I said, I had a couple of Pentecostal experiences. I had this one experience when my parents were arguing. I went to the beach and I just remember yelling at God saying “Why, why, why, how could you do this to me,” that type of thing. My parents were actually splitting up. And I had this; God gave me this news flash and it was me playing a guitar. This was before I was playing music professionally. My hand was out into the audience and the Spirit was flowing through me into the audience. It was really fast and I thought, “Well there’s an inspiration. There’s something maybe I could do.”

That year I actually started to pursue it. I actually wanted to get into the Christian music business at a young age. I thought it would be a great idea to go play at churches and share the Word and it would be a great thing. So I started buying Phil Keaggy records and Steve Taylor and I got into some Keith Green and I just thought “Oh, these guys, they’re doing it!” I began to discover that there was a market out there. It wound up that it worked out that way to an extent.

• So how do you balance not being good at business with trying to make a living at music?

Well, you surround yourself with really smart people and you keep doing it. You keep going like a shark, you just keep on moving.

• As far as incorporating faith and music, are there any artists you think are doing these things the right way?

I do, I think that Derek Webb is doing that very well. I think he’s sort of the next version of Rich Mullins. Some people are intellect and some people are heart people. Derek’s got both. He’s this “heart-intellect” guy who I think really challenges the church. He’s really outspoken about it; he’ll call a spade a spade; he’s outspoken about it, which I like. I think that’s important to have that in the culture, especially in the music culture. You have Jars of Clay, who have only been themselves. I’ve toured with them lots and they’re amazing people. They really are sweethearts. They’ve given me a platform when I was at my lowest. I believe that they’re doing it right. They’re living the life as well.

• Are you involved in a local church?

I am.

• What role, if any, do you think local churches ought to play in supporting its artists?

I think of the Psalms. I think the artist has that duty, that calling of being the creative juice in the church. I’m just beginning an art ministry in my church which we’re just starting. We’re different people, the artists, and I mean all artists, people who are trying to escape their fathers. All the ministers that I’ve encountered in my life all seem to like the artists, they welcome them in the church as important for whatever reason. I think they like the fact that artists have the tendency to not care and to be gutsy and put it out there whereas ministers have this sometimes unfortunate political platform where they can’t fully be themselves. There’s a part of them always looking over the shoulder and I think the artists give them that whisper saying it’s OK to push. I believe it’s important for the minister and the artist to bond and be friends. I think there’s a lot they can learn from each other because they’re essentially both doing the same thing. I’ll let you know in a year actually.

• How has the experience of going from a major label to Eb+Flo been for you?

It’s different in that it’s more scattered. You’re dealing with a lot of noise. There’s a lot of MySpace people out there and everyone’s got a record out. So I always say that if you have a small platform, scream loud. At this point, it’s about surrounding myself with smart people. We’re approaching different labels for distribution, so there’s a lot of ups for this record. Right now it’s nice because I feel like I’m connecting with the fans more, the people that are buying the records and the responses have been great. I get to communicate with them and that I didn’t get to do with Burlap to Cashmere or even Me Died Blue when it was on a big label. It was like a machine and now it’s more intimate. And in a way, that’s what music is all about, it’s about the small and I believe that if you’re responsible with something small that God will bless you.

• Do you listen to much music?

No, I don’t, I don’t! Not anymore. I used to all the time. I just feel like we’re in this time of a lot of noise; environmentally and spiritually, I just feel like it’s in the air. But I feel like there’s a new beginning happening here and it feels like for the first time I’m opening my eyes. It’s almost like I’ve been in a fog for the last 15 years. I just feel like at this point, quiet is good. At this point in the game, I’m always ready to either go sign a record deal or join the monastery.

• Have you seriously considered monastic life?

I have. I’ve considered joining the priesthood as well of the Orthodox faith and I’m still considering it.

• Do you read much?

I try to. I always start books and don’t finish. I really love to read when I’m in it. But my concentration level is pretty bad. I love reading a good book, but I’m pretty bad at it. I have ADD. Maybe not medically, I don’t know if that’s true or not but I feel like I do, my concentration level is pretty bad but I do enjoy a good book when I’m there.

• What are some of the books that have impacted you?

The Orthodox Way, I love. It’s a book about the Orthodox Christian faith. You know, it’s funny, I’ll be in the South sometimes and they’ll ask me if I’m a Christian. I say yes and when they ask what church I go to, I say I’m Greek Orthodox and then they ask “But when did you become a Christian?” It always makes me laugh and I just think “Well, that’s not fair, you should read this book called The Orthodox Way.”

I enjoy Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, I like Oscar Wilde, I like some of his books. I just finished The Picture of Dorian Gray, that was a haunting book. It was awesome. He’s a great writer. I think he’s one of my favorite writers. The poor guy, what a life. I was pretty spooked by it.

• Do you feel as though the Evangelical community understands the Orthodox tradition?

No, I don’t think so. That’s a good question. But I do know that a lot of them are becoming more open to Catholicism as a Christian church, which is pretty cool. But I think they think we’re Muslims or something. But, if you ask a hardcore Greek Orthodox church goer about the Evangelicals: “Do you think the Evangelicals are Christian?” The older men will say “No, we think they’re lost.” In every church there’s going to be that ideology taking over Christ’s love and the things that are real. I don’t think the Evangelical church gets it, but I also don’t think it’s my job to try and help them see the light. But it would help at least for them to know that we are Christians.

• Is it possible to bridge that gap?

Yes, it is and that’s a good point. I would love to see in what form and shape that’s going to happen. Who knows, maybe that can be an open dialogue.

• You mention the emphasis in the Orthodox tradition on the mystery of God and the mystical aspects, do you think that that emphasis helps encourage artistic expression?

Absolutely. When you see that God is big and life is big, when you go to the ocean and you have this personal moment and you just think about how the ocean goes on forever and ever and you don’t stop to think about the point where it ends, there is a feeling of possibility and of communication and a feeling of identity because it’s outside of yourself. It’s grand and its eternal. I think that that’s the mystery of God and the mystery of Christ; He is so big, so eternal that it makes you want to fall in love. It makes me want to write, it makes me want to touch Jesus’ robe. It makes me want to love and feel and expand and not be afraid.

That’s a great term. I can never write music when I’m in fear. I don’t want to even do my laundry. They say that when you’re depressed you want to write, but that’s absolutely not it for me. I just want to stay in my room and be left alone. I shut off the phone. But when I have that feeling of eternity and possibility of moving mountains is finally here, then we feel like the adventurer that God has made us to be. Then you want to paint, you want to express, you want to write about what you’re feeling. You want to express that love because you do it out of joy. It comes from that feeling that you’re OK and that feeling of trust.

• A couple of years ago my wife and I saw you open for Derek Webb and you shared a bit about what happened to your cousin, could share a bit of that?

My cousin, who was actually the lead guitarist for Burlap to Cashmere was involved in, he was actually the victim of a very severe case of road rage. He was beaten up pretty badly and was even in a coma, a very severe coma and we almost lost him at one point. That affected me greatly. Whenever you have family that in the hospital, it makes you appreciate family and God all that much more. He’s absolutely 100% percent better now and we’re thankful for that.

• Anything else?

No, just that this is good stuff. I actually have to write a devotional for a website and you’ve given me some good ideas. I thought this was a really great interview.

• Visit Steven Delopoulos’ official website
• Listen to Burlap to Cashmere
• Listen to Steven Delopoulos
• Download Steven’s new album, Straightjacket from eMusic
• Read my other interviews

Today we continue looking at my recent interview with former Vigilantes of Love frontman Bill Mallonee (Read part one here). Mallonee fronted the “critics’ darling” band Vigilantes of Love for many years before embarking on a solo career. He has long struggled with being “too Christian” for the “secular” market and too “secular” for the mainstream Christian market. Yet he has consistently worn his heart on sleeve, delivering moving songs and performances.

Today we pick up right where we left off yesterday (see part one of the interview here), discussing Bill’s move from being an elder in a Presbyterian house church to joining the Roman Catholic Church and his views on Calvinism and from there we move on to quite a few other issues, including Open Theology, Tom Waits and and trains.

• I hope you don’t mind if we touch specifically on a doctrinal issue. If I’m not mistaken, the original line to the song “It’s Not Bothering Me” from Summershine read: “God’s love shines through a prism, I’m so confused by Calvinism,” is that right? Are you still confused by Calvinism?

I have been and I don’t really want to go down that path too much. To me, I just don’t know that Scripture teaches it, it just seems like an untenable position and at the end of the day it makes God look capricious. If you pin a Calvinist to the wall, at least the numbers that I’ve talked to primarily say, “Well, the way it kind of works out in practice is that we’re all responsible to respond to God’s grace but only the ones God gives grace to will respond but somehow or another, you’re still culpable for not responding.” I think that that’s just theological double-talk. You can’t give that to somebody and expect a believing, rational person to understand that. That doesn’t make sense, that God’s not extending grace to you, therefore you’re not elect, so you can’t respond, but you’re still responsible for not responding? I mean, that just makes no sense at all. After a while, I just couldn’t believe it.

The book that kind of did it for me, and you may raise an eyebrow at this, and I don’t buy the guy all the way down the line, but Clark Pinnock’s Openness of God. Pinnock’s assertion is that the Calvinistic doctrine, if there is such a thing as “councils of eternity” and things have basically been decided, and that was Saint Augustine’s position in a lot of ways with that doctrine of double predestination, then you’re never really relating to God directly. That which you’re relating to is a will of God, it has already been decided. So it touches everything from prayer to the more salvific elements. So, you’re relating to this will of God, and he says that this is a static relationship and in some ways, it’s almost a fatalism because you’re always waiting to figure out whether or not you’re in or out. The only way you can, quote, know is this doctrine of “perseverance of the saints.” That doctrine meant nothing to me, just because of the turmoil in my own heart, I thought, “Gosh, if I have to look inside and grub around for something that looks like the work of the Holy Spirit, nine times out of ten, I’m going to come up with nothing, and, what have I done, I’ve taken my eyes off of the Cross, I’ve taken my eyes off the only thing that’s going to save me anyway.

I just thought after a while that there were too many incongruities inside of it, but, ultimately, I thought that it gave a poor depiction of God and God’s love and so I just had to abandon it. I couldn’t sign off on it.

• Where would you differ from Pinnock?

You know, it’s been a while since I read the book but I remember reading and just raising some eyebrows, but I couldn’t even comment on it directly. He edited the book and there were some other writers and I followed up on some of his other stuff and the other writers as well.

• Are there any artists you think are combining faith and art particularly well?

Part of the problem with that question and with CCM is that people see themselves as Christians and then as artists or as artists and then as Christians or something like that and I just think it’d be great if people just didn’t even think about it. So I don’t really know. I just think I’m a human being, there’s an image of God-ness in me, and then just go from there, what does it look like on the good days and the bad days. I don’t think there should be any kind of agenda in it. Are there any CCM artists I think are doing it well? I don’t keep up with it. I don’t buy records over there, I don’t visit websites or go to CCM Myspaces or anything like that. I’m not saying that in a haughty way, I just say that it doesn’t interest me anymore.

The times that I have gone, I think that there’s sort of like this code that they’re speaking in and that if I understand the code, then I can pat myself on the back for being the codebreaker. But the code always comes back to contemporary Christian doctrine because that’s what they’re trying to put out. What I want to hear is somebody wrestling with their own flesh and blood and then coming up on the side of hope or affirmation or faith and it may not even have anything to do, at least on the surface, with, you know, like Tom Waits’ songs do that to me sometimes. He has this incredible, beautiful, fractured sounding way of affirming the beauty of humanity, even in its fallenness. It’s astonishing to me how well he does it. Now, he gets out there a bit too. He’s a fan of the bent and twisted, he’s always got that carny kind of vibe, that kind of whacked out carnival kind of vibe going through his music. I think that’s metaphorical for the fact that in a lot of his songs, we’re all freakshows on some level. It’s finding a metaphor that describes a spiritual crisis in our lives, which is, we’re freakshows, we don’t fit in. He’s great at that sort of stuff. Now, whether Tom Waits even remotely thinks about how to apply this to his faith, I don’t even think he gives it a second thought. I think he just intuitively writes stuff that lines up in that area, that’s what works for him.

• So, if Tom Waits’ musical metaphor is the carnival freakshow, what is yours?

I think that because of spending so much time on the road, mine is probably more of the “high and lonesome” thing. It’s definitely there. You try to connect the dots and sometimes the line between the two dots, if the dots are leading somewhere, sometimes those lines are blurred, or they’re just erased altogether. It’s easy to fall off on a detour that maybe you didn’t need to make. I don’t know how that translates into something 25 words or less, but the road has definitely been a huge metaphor for me.

There was a small book that I put out a couple of years ago that was really just a short prose/poem called Perishable Goods and it was about that, that whole thing of just playing in clubs night after night, drinking a bunch of coffee, three hours of sleep, on to the next gig, that kind of thing. It really does something to your faith after a while after you’re trying to find a safety net. But, I think that it’s also the thing that made the music, to me, it made it more authentic and more personal because it was my story, it wasn’t somebody else’s story. Sometimes when I hear the CCM thing, I want to hear your story, I don’t want to hear somebody else’s.

• Trains also figure rather prominently in your music, has that been an intentional metaphor as well?

Yeah, I love them. I grew up around them, and I had model trains when I was a kid. I lived near a train depot and that would definitely be a huge metaphor for me. Rain in deserts as well. It’s interesting that some of the artists who use these metaphors, you know Buddy and Julie Miller, they’re an interesting study because, the country artists tend to be able to take a real, straightforward spiritual song and stick it in the middle of a set full of “you love me but done me wrong” songs and it flies. So that to me is a whole-orbed existence. On some days, it’s Friday night at the bar and you went home with the wrong person and on some days it’s Sunday morning and Jesus is going to roll the stone away and they seem to be able to get away with all of it. I respect that because I think it’s kind of the way life falls out. It’s both and it’s all of that messy stuff.

• How do you think the rise of digital music affects an artist in your position?

That’s a great question. I think it’s either good or bad. There have been some gains and I’ve been lucky enough to own the masters of about 20 or 21 of the 25 records. So what I’ve done, is I’ve put all of those up on the website; they’re all up for a nominal fee, it’s not very much. You can dip into all of it. There’s even two free records up there because I figure, heck, if you like it, you’ll come get more. So that’s been good, the labels don’t control any of that. We even have our own store with all the albums available for download for a small fee. It’s pretty amazing to be able to get at all that stuff and of course you can hear it before you buy.

I also have my new work on a subscription service. Since I write about 5-7 new songs a month, I record them and put them up at www.BillTunes.com I’ve been doing this for two years now…and I’ve written 5 new songs a month for about the last year. They’re all recorded in my kitchen with me on guitars and harmonica and vocals and my wife, Muriah, on piano and back up vocals. CIRCA, just released 3 months ago, is a sampler of the Billtunes format.

The downside of all of that has been that, because there is so much stuff out there now, in a Pro-Tools/Myspace world, it kind of means that every weekend hobbyist is now as legit as anybody else. It’s like the pond is overstocked is the metaphor I like to use. That makes it a little harder for people to ferret through what’s out there to find out the legitimate stuff, or what I think is the more artistically on top of it stuff. And there’s nothing wrong with it, but it is the democratization of music in some ways, or the McDonalds-ization of music, now anybody can make a record in their bedroom and have it up on Myspace that afternoon and be seen as a legitimate artist, so I don’t really know if it’s a plus or not.

It’s an interesting thing, an ex manager and I had a talk last week about this and he was telling me that, even though everyone has thrown the paradigm or the model of the old school record label signing artists kind of out the door, it is working for some folks. He thought it was working well for country artists. He said that those artists actually have more of the traditional model now. When they put out a record, it’s like the old classic rock motif, they put out a record and it shows up in Wal-Mart or Kmart or something like that because most people that buy country music, they like hard copy, they don’t download a lot whereas indie kids, that’s about all they do, they don’t really need hard copy.

I think there’s something missed when you don’t have the hard copy. Just last week my wife and I went out and bought the new Springsteen record. I just wanted to see it, put my hands on it, look at the lyrics, the photos, but you don’t get that experience with a download necessarily. You get the music and so the music can integrate into your iPod as you hit shuffle and it becomes a virtual backdrop for your virtual life, I’m being cynical now, but you see the point. But I think there are other ways to listen. Bruce Springsteen for example, here’s a guy who’s been around the block, what’s he saying on this record? Strange enough, there’s religious symbolism coming up all through the record and I don’t think that’s just a coincidence, I think he’s really at a place in his life where it’s, you know, “rock n’ roll has done me well and the spirit of human love and affection and I’ve been luckier than most men, but really, there’s deeper things here.” You know, he’s got kids, he’s thinking about these things. He’s also a disgruntled Catholic! I think he called himself a lapsed Catholic once.

But I like having hard copy. My wife, Muriah and I actually at this point are trying to figure out at this point whether we just buy a digital or a small replication machine just to make available copies of the records at shows, just hard copy to put in people’s hands. To me, the live show and the delivery is what’s kept us going. We don’t have a formal agent right now booking us, we don’t have a formal label, there’s nothing at all underneath of us except fans. We’re doing mostly house shows, old VOL fans having us and it never seems to hurt. When we play these things, there might be 5 to 10 people who have heard of us but they’ve invited another 20 people who haven’t heard of us and we always seem to do really well at these sorts of things. When we’re able to put hard copy into people’s hands they really seem to appreciate it. That’s kind of what I’d like to see even though I know the indie world runs almost completely on downloads now.

If you walk into a Border’s bookstore now, you can tell that they’ve made less and less space for recorded works. It is really shrinking and it’s sad, except for the major label stuff. I kind of miss it, but you’re talking to someone who was alive when the LP was in fashion.

• Who are some of your musical inspirations?

I think the early Dylan stuff, I still love Dylan. I’m a big Neil Young fan, although I think he’s released some really weird records. I think that Living With War record is a travesty. I know he’s in your face about it but it just has all the subtlety of a jackhammer, it’s just in your face and it just sounds like a rant. I’m not actually won over, I’m actually offended by it, even though I share a lot of his views. It’s a ridiculous war in a lot of ways and where were the weapons of mass destruction so the average listener or voter or whoever is left with all these questions about it anyway, but I do like Neil. I think a lot of his older electric stuff back in the Crazy Horse days was fabulous stuff. I think he’s a great rocker. Even the indie guys like him just because it’s so raw and visceral. “Out of the Blue Into the Black,” whatever version of it, “Hey, hey, my my,” those songs were incredible, that would be one of my top ten favorite songs. It has such a simple, in your face sort of riff, but it’s really a song about the industry going south on an artist. That’s that line, “Once you’re gone you can’t come back.” It’s a phenomenal song and it’s so well done.

Dylan, Neil Young, early Wilco stuff, especially up through Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, along with Uncle Tupelo. I’m a big fan of Jay Farrar and Son Volt. I think he’s probably more of a poet of the road than a lot. Am I acquainted with the Woody Guthrie catalog and Johnny Cash catalogs, yes, but not song for song. I listen to it along with Hank Williams.

• You’ve mentioned the British Invasion influence. That certainly made its way into Summershine

Summershine and Perfumed Letter definitely. I’ll tell you how that actually came about. We were on radio, on AAA radio, Adult Album Alternative. In the mid ‘90’s there was this fledgling format and there were about 90 to 100 of these stations across the U.S. that were emerging from about 1992 up until about 2000. These stations were going a little bit deeper into records and we were actually on about 90% of those stations in the top 10. So we’d get into a city like Philadelphia or Chicago or Minneapolis or Boulder or Denver or San Francisco and there’d be a AAA station and we’d look at the top 10 and it would say Counting Crows, Melissa Etheridge, Cracker, Vigilantes of Love, Indigo Girls, Matthew Sweet, it was amazing and it was all over the US.

So, we were getting this massive radio support that didn’t translate into numbers. It’s because those stations also play a little bit of everything. There’s such a huge, multi-faceted format that a heavy rotation song, which, we were in heavy rotation on a number of those stations, on a modern rock station, a heavy rotation song is anywhere from 18 to 24 times in a week, but heavy rotation on a AAA station is 6 or 7 times a week. It’s very much a listener’s format and that’s all good for the listener, but for the artist, we weren’t selling any records. Our label, Capricorn records at the time, was scratching its head not understanding. But I understood it. You’ve got to play in the morning during drive time, at lunch time and at drive time in the afternoon and then one time before everybody goes to bed, that’s the rotation you need to sell records.

At that time, MTV was still playing videos in the mid ‘90’s so we said “please, we want to make a video.” The sound at the time was very much like what you hear on Summershine. We were rockier maybe, but they wouldn’t do it. We felt like we needed the visual connection and we were a pretty good live band too.

But anyway, Summershine was a deliberate attempt to get back on the AAA charts. That record came out two weeks before 9/11 and then when the towers came down, that was the end of everything for a lot of folks. The record industry didn’t even crank back up for a year after that, so our label basically pulled the plug on the record. We pleaded with them to re-release it about three months into 2002 and they wouldn’t do it.

It’s funny you mention this because I just listened to that album about two weeks ago in the car. It was the first time I’d listened to it in about 5 years. We may put that record out again, a friend of mine who is an engineer, re-mastered the record so the guitars sound a little fuller with a little more bite to them. Tom Lewis is his name. That record for us, we were in the studio for 30 days, and that was a long time for us. That was kind of our Yankee Hotel Foxtrot record. It’s just such a beautiful album in a lot of ways, it had string sections and ‘70’s keyboards and mellotrons, it was just really a beautiful record that had nice pop songs on it.

We were just in tears over it. Gary West at Compass Records is the guy that put the kibosh to it. I told him that we had spent a year thinking about that record, recording it, living it and here it was and he was telling me he couldn’t put it out again and give it another birthday. But there were actually other labels out there doing that. Ben Folds’ Rockin’ the Suburbs was released at the same time. His label gently pulled the record and re-released it about 5 months into 2002 and it did fine. But they wouldn’t do it, they said they didn’t have the resources, so the record died a death and I broke the band up after that.

• That seemed to be the last appearance of the Vigilantes of Love name.

In some ways that could have been a solo record. Kevin the drummer, Jake the bass player, that was the last time that incarnation of the band was together.

• Are there any plans to resurrect the Vigilantes of Love name?

I think we’re just going to go with my name at this point. If there was a chance to resurrect it I’m not sure what it would look like. If a label to us and said we really want that name, we think there’s some mileage in it, I would consider it. But I had so hoped that by this time there would be a label deal so that I could put a new name in place.

The weird thing is that when I started releasing the solo records, the publicist that was hired, I kept thinking that there was going to be an automatic recognition, “Oh yeah, that guy from the Vigilantes of Love,” but it was surprising to me, she came back and said, “Bill, I have gone to all these newspapers, all these magazines” and people were saying that they knew the Vigilantes of Love name but had never heard of Bill Mallonee before.

It was strange and the thing about it was that Vigilantes of Love was always a rotating door of musicians. The band had so little commercial success that we were always losing somebody. You know, to a day job or another band, so we were always filling the ranks with the next guy to play bass or drums or whatever. I was the only consistent guy and I was writing all the songs anyway, so I actually think we hired the wrong publicist. I think the story was a good story but it didn’t carry the day so when Paste magazine had their record label for about five minutes, they put out the first solo record, Perfumed Letter, which was in some ways, very much like a Beatles album, a little like Summershine but a little trippier. Full of singles, even the label said, “Yeah, we’ve got 3 or 4 singles here.” There was a song called “She’s So Liquid” and another one called “Life on Other Planets” that they just loved.

But that record sold, once again, here’s fate at it again, but that record sold less than 1,000 copies. But here’s the story, Paste records had hired a distributor to get the record in stores. The distributor, before the album was actually released, was under a suit from other labels for something, so the lawyers came in and seized all the intellectual property and shut it down. 7,500 copies of that record were pressed. I got 1,000 instead of a cash advance, I got some copies which I sold pretty quick. They sold around another 1,000 but 5,500 copies of that CD are still locked up in a warehouse in New York City. You can’t break an artist when you can’t find his record and at that point, and I’m not minimizing this, I was mildly suicidal. I couldn’t pay the bills, I couldn’t do anything.

That record was the official solo record and it was shut down. You only have one chance to make a good first impression. It really was like, VOL was over, a good history with a bit of a sad ending, so here’s the solo record and it went off the diving board into a pool with no water. The Paste guys were incredibly upset about it but they couldn’t do anything about it. So that was the end of the association with those guys.

Fetal Position, My Year in Review and Locket Full of Moonlight were internet-only releases through Paste and they did real well as far as internet records go, but the very first, official solo album, official meaning that it was going into retail and press was Perfumed Letter and it sold 900 copies. Here’s the backlash on that; whenever I approach a label and talk to an A&R person, that’s the record they’ll type up. You can hear them go on SoundScan, they can retrieve all of those numbers and I can almost hear it on the phone, them saying, “uhhh, that first solo record….” I say, “Yeah, I know, 900 copies,” and you can just hear it immediately, they’ve lost interest.

I think that’s because A&R people, labels, they actually listen with their math, they don’t listen with their ears anymore. They want to know how many records you’ve sold to your massive ground-swell, indie following of fans. That’s’ again, a lot of CCM bands that come out of church environments, they actually do have a lot of fans. But for me, never really being embraced by the church, I can’t show the numbers. I can show them the music and I think it sounds great, but unless you listen aesthetically as opposed to listening with your math, I don’t stand a chance and I tell them that.

So anyway, the last VOL album, Summershine, which I think could have done great, dove into a pool with no water and the first solo album, Perfumed Letter, was the same kind of scenario, so I was pretty distraught by 2001.

• How did you come out of that distress?

Well, I didn’t do very well. I went through a divorce. My ex-wife and I had drifted so much over the course of time. I look back over it now and I think, I was on the road 180 shows a year, how is some relationship not going to suffer? After a while, it was like the family became the epicenter and the marriage itself became somewhat secondary.

Then I met a woman on the road and married her two years ago. Any friends that I had in “evangelical world” sort of just left at that point. I understood their anger because my first marriage, for many had become sort of an icon for left-of-center young Christian families. There were people out there who liked Vigilantes of Love and they just pointed “to that great Bill Mallonee, he’s got two kids and he’s a songwriter and he’s on the road and he’s a Christian and his wife is there with him some times and she’s such a strong supporter and aren’t they great?” Part of the problem was that the marriage started getting icon status among some folks.

Somebody should have stopped me to take my spiritual pulse, saying, “I see you up there, I see you playing, and giving it all, but you don’t even have a pulse right now.” I just didn’t know it at the time. I just kept going. I knew I was running on empty but I kept thinking it was just a dry spell.

• That brings up the interesting question of how local churches can best support artists.

It’s a tough thing because most Christian artists that I know have a certain amount of distrust for the local church. They don’t think the church understands them and because artists are so stupid anyways, there’s a degree of solitude that we need to create. That’s a good thing, we need it and people can benefit from it when we’re inside that solitude and we come up with something that resonates with other people. You need a solitary environment to create it, and at the same time, most artists that I know are extremely quite and humble and laid back about that sort of thing. So there’s a tendency for them to already sit on the periphery of institutionalized Christianity. So it makes it that much easier for them to drift maybe a bit outside and what they really need is maybe something like a loose collective of people together. I don’t think even necessarily other artists, just other people.

The house church that I was actually talking about earlier, my wife and I were actually the oldest couple in that church because it was a church ministering to the students at the University of Georgia, but we were 10 years older than most of those students. That’s great for the students to watch me, but I didn’t have anybody to watch. I didn’t to ask what the next stage of life was supposed to look like. Once again, the 180 shows a year, the touring like crazy, what did it do, I had 1,001 acquaintances, but no friends whatsoever. Seriously, there was nobody I could call up in the midnight hours if there was ever trouble.

To a certain level, I was sort of put up on this pedestal as being the articulate Calvinistic spokesperson for the faith and, you know what, I did it. I rose to occasion and did it over and over and over again. But at the end of the day there was no one to support me. Doug Burr and I have had some of these conversations just because Doug and I tell him to keep close to his fellowship and his wife. You need to have someone there encouraging you all the time and I didn’t have it. My bandmates were often 15 to 20 years younger that I was and there was the tendency for me to be mentoring them rather than the other way around and it was very difficult for me to divulge my heart and expect something in return. It was all very high and lonesome and it went right back into the songs. That’s hugely important for a Christian artist, find other people with whom you can wrestle with the big issues and work it out.

• How can the fans help?

It’s funny because Muriah and I were having this conversation last night. I would love to be able to make another record that’s a studio album. I’ve got like 50 songs and I told Muriah, out of those 50 songs, I think at least 25 of them could be great band songs. So to be able to assemble the band, record the record and then be able to go out and play that record for audiences and try to get a larger fanbase again. I’ve still got the songs, I just don’t have the resources anymore to do it. In some ways, to find someone who was the quintessential patron of the arts, that would be great. Because, like I said, two years ago, this year was a little better, but two years ago was just extreme poverty. I thought they were going to cut the heat off. I just couldn’t find work, it was ridiculous. So that would be great to find an investor.

• Who are some artists you currently listen to?

Like I said, we bought the new Springsteen record. We don’t buy a lot of records, partly just because we’re so broke. I listen around on Myspace. There’s a guy out of the western mountains of North Carolina, a band called Sparklehorse, they’re pretty cool and have actually worked with Tom Waits. I’m a big fan of that sort of approach. I think he creates a neat world to live inside that’s pretty special.

Are you familiar with the work of Peter Case? He’s got a new solo record, I think you would really like it. I played a show with him about a month ago. It’s called Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John. It’s really a good record. The packaging isn’t real ornate or anything. It’s through a little label up in North Carolina called Yep Roc. It’s just solo acoustic, him doing what Pete does. I think he is one of those guys who affirms human life with a little bit of the ratty, rugged edges on the outside, but ultimately, underneath, is a genuinely sweet spirit.

I thought his first three records for Geffen were just really good. I think T-Bone Burnett helped him out a little bit on some of that stuff. But he was one of the first guys, basically when he lost his record deal and I think that was back in the mid ’90’s, he threw a couple of guitars in an old beat up car and just hit the road and he’s done it like that ever since. A critic’s darling but never seems to sell a ton of records. That’s sad because I think he’s very underrated and under-appreciated.

• Do you read much?

Not much, but since it was the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s On the Road, I’ve read probably 4 or 5 of his novels this year. I’m reading Desolation Angels right now. He is an interesting study. British poet Steve Turner, a Christian, wrote a book about Kerouac called Angel-Headed Hipster, and Turner’s thoughts made me read the books in a new light. Kerouac got very upset at the end of his life, he died at 47 and was an alcoholic, died of esophageal hemorrhaging, which you don’t do without drinking a ton of alcohol. It was a sad story, but all of his life, he was raised an old school Roman Catholic and its funny because his books are always peppered with these prayers to Christ, he never turned away from the church. He wanted the church to be something bigger and broader and so he got so upset with his fanbase that just grabbed all of the hedonistic parts out of the books.

The point that Steve Turner was making was that in the long run, Kerouac was trying to integrate something that looked like a compassionate Buddhism with Christianity. That wasn’t his goal, but towards the end of his life he was always a seeker. The crazy thing is is that in the last two books of his that I’ve read, The Dharma Bums and The Desolation Angels, that’s exactly where he’s coming up. He couldn’t buy into the impersonality of Buddhism because it doesn’t leave you with anything. That would have meant that all of his creativity, the guy wrote like a madman, all of his creativity would have been for nothing. He has visions of the Cross and keeps coming back to Christ and hoping that there’s something bigger and broader than just going out and living for kicks, which is what he had gotten really good at.

It’s heartbreaking, but I think he was a really good to great Americana writer and very original. I can’t read all of it, but if someone goes in on something like Visions of Cody or something like that, that’s a good place to go. I think On the Road is in many ways actually an inferior book compared to Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. But that’s what I’ve been reading lately is a couple of things by him and then little bits and pieces out of Karen Armstrong’s History of God. She was a disgruntled monastic who seems to have an ax to grind. She’s an epileptic and therefore given to that area of the brain that sort of shifts things around but she’s telling her story I’m reading because at the end of the day, I don’t know anything about Islam. I’m pretty sketchy getting into the beginnings of Judaism anyway and that’s why I’m looking at that book.

At this point, I don’t have a lot of time to read. I write 5 songs a month. They go up on a subscription service called BillTunes. That’s what I do, that’s my output to the world, they’re recorded in my kitchen, my wife and I, she’ll put some pianos and vocals on it. They’re all done live on one track because we don’t own any recording gear really. That’s been our way to pay the rent for the last two years. So, at the end of the month, it’s like “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to write five songs!” I keep copious notes and lyrics lying around and I’ll pick up the guitar and can usually write five tunes in a week to eight days.

• What’s your typical writing process?

When I’m on the road I write a lot of lyrics and then come home and guitar parts come later as I try to wed those things up. They don’t necessarily have any kind of point of integration until then. I’ll keep a journal and write some ideas down as I play guitar and sort of chase them down over the course of a few days. It tends to start on guitar and hopefully there’s a library of lyrics to draw from and start pushing things around and then do some editing. It’s a lot of fun, it’s a bit like waiting until the last minute to take an exam. I think I’ve written about 50 songs over the last year or so and that’s about the clip I run at.

• Writing from a Christian perspective, how do you justify language some people might find objectionable?

I think its just a matter of being authentically human. I don’t think I’ve ever dropped the “F-bomb,” on a song before. That’s a pretty harsh word on any level. If somebody else did, it wouldn’t bother me, it’s just that I think artists sometimes use language just to get a rise out of people and I do think that can wound sensitive consciences. I don’t consider that I’m making music for Christians, I’m making music for people. So, depending on what sone you’re referring to, I might drop the passing, you know, the lyric in “Flowers” which is “getting your sh*% together.” If I’m playing in a church crowd, it’s “getting your act together.” Especially if there’s kids in the audience, it doesn’t come out that way and sometimes there are though my wife doesn’t think I should be playing for kids but adults and be able to say what I’m going to say. We all know what I mean but I don’t want to wound somebody and make them think that it’s OK for Christians to just frivolously use four-letter words, no, I don’t believe that. Language should be a way that we hallow life and not tear it down but there’s also a realistic side to things too.

• Anything else?

You know, through 16 records or whatever it was as a band, we really tried to punch a hole in something like widespread acceptance and Vigilantes of Love just became kind of a cult status. I don’t think we ever had the resources we needed to bust through, it was a critic’s darling band pretty much from the beginning. The problem for me now as a solo artist is that we’ve become so tweaked to expect the next flavor of the month and something new but I’m not new anymore. But I’m tried and true and if you want a tried and true artist, I’d be your guy.

• Visit the official Bill Mallonee website
• Read part one of this interview

Since 1991, Bill Mallonee has been on the road and in the hearts of many music fans. Mallonee fronted the band Vigilantes of Love until 2001 before going solo. At one point he played up to 180 shows a year across the country and internationally. He has released 25 albums which have consistently received 4 and 5 stars reviews from a variety of publications. Buddy Miller has called Mallonee one of his all-time favorite artists, and he ranked at #65 in Paste’s list of the 100 Greatest Living Songwriters. But critical acclaim does not always equal commercial success and great reviews do not always sell albums as the demise of Vigilantes of Love reminded us.

I recently called Bill at his Georgia home to get his thoughts on faith, art, “Christian” music, Jack Kerouac and just about everything in between. The interview appears in two installments beginning today. Enjoy.

• Where you raised in a musical home?

Yes, my Dad was a jazz drummer so there was great music going on almost all the time.

• How has your upbringing impacted your art?

My family upbringing was driven by alcohol and it was extremely abusive so on the negative side of the equation it’s affected it a lot. If it’s affected my life in a warm fuzzy way, the answer would be no. There was just a great deal of turmoil and tension that even up until this very minute has reaped a huge negative influence in my life so it’s tough to really know how to answer that question.

• When did you first become interested in music?

Music was a means of escape from the insanity of the household. I was a drummer at an early age, my Dad was a bit of a jazz drummer and I grew up on the British Invasion stuff and had drums which was probably a bit of salvation, to be able to get really good at something and learn how it works. I got inside all of that and loved the records that were coming over. Some American bands but a lot of British groups. It was that world that kids get into where one band kind of becomes the beacon or the icon that an individual sort of rallies hopes, dreams and aspirations around.

The bands that I listened to at that time I guess; I was a big fan of the Hendrix Experience, Eric Clapton and Cream. I was also a big fan of the folk-rock psychedelic stuff that was out on the West Coast, kind of no-name bands that people wouldn’t have heard of necessarily. I was a big fan of The Byrds, but what I do know is sort of an Americana sound. My sound has drifted over the years to be able to incorporate both of those influences. When I’m playing in a band format I tend to go towards stuff that’s in that direction; I’ve done kind of folk-rock, psychedelic Americana records and other albums that are more just straight-ahead folk. But those were the kinds of groups I was brought up on. Definitely The Beatles and the whole harmonic structure of what Lennon and McCartney were about was just profoundly huge on me.

• Describe the move from playing drums to being the one out front. When did you realize you had something to say?

That actually wasn’t until much later. I was real into life before I ever picked up a guitar. I think part of it was just the need to try and make sense of the ramshackle, incongruous life that I’d had. It was sort of like the guitar was a cheap form of therapy.

• The band went through several incarnations, how did you finally arrive at the Vigilantes of Love?

You know, the Vigilantes started just in the Athens, GA music scene. It didn’t come out of anything except an Athens music scene. We were, on any given weekend, competing for stage space in a club with some of those big Athens bands that made it like R.E.M. obviously. The rather lesser bands that had a fairly strong impact on the town were bands like Pylon and Love Tractor and we were all competing for the same space. We made it out a few years later when we finally got signed. The local music scene, the sort of “hipster” scene was the incubator for what I was doing and what we were trying to put across but it go through various incarnations just because with this town, so many people were playing in and out of each other’s groups and when we finally got signed in ’92, actually playing in Austin, TX as South by Southwest, that kind of cemented the group for at least a spell.

• Mark Heard and Peter Buck of R.E.M. worked together with you on Killing Floor. That seems like an odd pairing, how did that come about?

It was a total odd pairing, I agree. In fact, you’re the first person that’s ever said that out loud, though I think some people have probably raised an eyebrow. I had done two independent records at that point, probably written about 150 songs. One album was called Jugular and the other Driving the Nails, so we came up on this album called Killing Floor and it had had some interest. Pete Buck was kind of an acquaintance, not really a friend, but he said that he would be interested in working on a record with me, but the investors were actually part of Mark Heard’s label. That was guys like Dan Russell and a couple of other guys, there were three that sort of drove that thing. That was being based more or less in Boston. Dan Russell handles Black Rebel Motorcycle Club but Dan at the time was Mark’s manager and then came on board and managed me for about seven years. So that was the weird pairing. It was sort of like “Well, if you’re signing with us, we’d like to volunteer Mark at least as a co-producer/engineer on the project.

As it kind of worked out, for the two weeks, sixteen days or whatever it was, Mark was actually in the studio for the bulk of it, Pete Buck actually had very little to do with that record. He was in for about three days. Pretty much between Mark and I, we produced the record in probably two weeks and then there were another 30 phone calls and that was about it. Mark had his first heart attack at the Cornerstone festival that year and then a subsequent heart attack maybe 30 or 45 days later, something like that. I didn’t know Mark that well. I knew kind of, vaguely, what Mark was doing in the sort of sidebar thing of “Contemporary Christian Music,” but I wasn’t associated with that, so I didn’t know Mark except for previous histories.

• You were a school teacher, and then a stay-at-home Dad, and thena full-time musician, which brings up the idea of making sacrifices for art and romanticizing that concept. Looking back, what’s your perspective on those early years and that concept?

I think it’s great though I think in some ways it kind of hurt us. I think that staying at home and hanging out with the kids for six or seven years; we had the role-reversal thing going on. I was writing and then playing on the weekends but by the time the band really got going my kids were in grade school so there was a little bit less need for Dad to be immediately around. I wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

In the long run, when you look at it, artists are often viewed as completely irresponsible sorts of people because they end up giving everything for their art and they’re socially maladjusted and their relationships are all awry; there’s some truth to that. The stereotypes are only around as you know, because there’s a grain of truth in there. But I had all of that stability to create out of. It’s weird though, because even though I had the stability, at the same time, the music was pretty bleak and pretty dark. Once again, I think I was just trying to work out all those inner demons from just having grown up in a crazy family which affects everything. It affects your ability to believe in God, to trust Him, to view yourself with any kind of wholesome perspective.

It runs real deep and you don’t realize it all of the time. When you grow up, you think “Oh, this is normal, this is the family,” and then finally, maybe if you’re lucky enough in your teens and twenties, you realize that it wasn’t normal because your able to judge it against other people’s lives and family upbringing and you finally realize yours was crazy as hell. Then you start to wonder “Gosh, I wonder if this left some scars and some marks.”

Yes, I did the house-Dad thing with the kids. Then when we started playing, it took off at a time when it actually became feasible for me to get in a van and go to 140, well, initially we weren’t doing that many shows, we probably did 100 shows a year at first. But very quickly, by the early ‘90’s, it was up to about 160 and 180 shows, through pretty much about ’94, through about 2001. So I was gone a good, solid 5, maybe 6 months out of the year or so.

• You mentioned some of the bands from Athens that “made it,” sounding as if you didn’t make it . .

I think that Athens has been a horrible home for us. It was never a town that embraced us. I’m 99% sure it’s because the perception was that it was a “Christian” band with a “Christian” agenda.

• The other side of that though is that you haven’t ever really been accepted by “Christian” music either…

No, that’s why Bill has lived below the poverty level!

• Would you call yourself a Christian?

I usually have to ask people what defines that. I’m a creedal-believing Roman Catholic. I tell people I’m an evangelical in recovery. I did 25 years in a Presbyterian house church and was even an Elder for 7 years, so I understood that whole approach. I think my perspective is that I think the church talked out of both sides of its mouth. During that mid ‘90’s period, there were so many CCM mainstream bands out there, everybody from Third Day to Jars of Clay that had these slight Americana overtones but the band they were all listening to was Vigilantes of Love. Tons and tons of bands and artists and I knew because I met them, knew them on a first-name basis and they would always tell me “We love Vigilantes of Love, you guys are spectacular.” The records we were listening to weren’t CCM records, they were Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. On the college side of the equation we listened to Wilco and Son Volt, The Jayhawks and we were trying to make music; I was trying to write and make music that I felt was competitive with that.

The weird thing to me is that the church during that time period was talking out of its mouth very long and loud in its publications, its seminars, everything about “faith, art and cultural relevancy” and after a while, I kept thinking “Good grief, I can’t think of another band that’s more authentic than VOL, we’re very rarely playing churches, we’re out there playing clubs on most nights.” I was being as articulate as I could coming from a mild to hyper-Calvinistic sort of Reformed, theological perspective and I was trying to make that hip and understandable, articulating that in the press. I didn’t do it obviously for money reasons. I never thought I would be a songwriter or a musician and now I realize its my vocation and calling, but that didn’t come to me until a little bit later in life.

All of that to say that there were numerous bands who I thought had way lesser talent that went right by us in terms of success and stability and all of that. We just felt continually like we were getting kicked to the curb. When it came down to having a home to come home to, i.e. Athens, GA, the preconception that it was already a Christian band with a Christian agenda hurt us amazingly.

It actually hurt us in the secular press too. A record that actually sprung us nationally was a record that we did with Buddy Miller in 1999 called Audible Sigh. That record was in the charts in England very quickly. It’s as good if not better than anything; and you know, this is my less-than-humble opinion, as anything Son Volt or Wilco ever did. It sold real well for being a very small label with no resources behind it at all. We went out and toured 200 shows that year behind it. The record had Buddy Miller, who at the time was Emmylou Harris’ guitar player, Steve Earle’s guitar player, Buddy produced it, Emmylou Harris sang on it, we had a little bit of “star power” working on the fringes of the record and that made for a good bit of a story, but you know, at the end of the day, there was a particular Americana journal called No Depression. The title’s taken from a Carter Family song, an old spiritual that the Carter Family did.

But No Depression magazine learned from Buddy directly, whom they loved, they’d given Buddy a cover story once in a while. This was before Paste, before Harp, before a lot of the trendier Americana magazines, this was the journal to be in. When the record came out, they refused a story. They said “they didn’t think Vigilantes of Love counted.” I remember walking around Nashville that night, in the middle of the recording session and we just found out they weren’t even going to review the dang record; I just remember crying out, thinking “Lord, this isn’t fair!” The church isn’t getting it and the “secular” people who it was actually being made for, they aren’t getting it either. The weird thing is, if you go in that record and take it apart, there’s nothing in it, there’s nothing in it that would lead you to believe one way or the other that I’m a Christian. You would just say that this guy knows about the dark side of life and he’s hoping for some kind of redemption. Sometimes that has a religious symbology in it, but that’s really as far as you get into it in that record. I think the preconception on that side was that it was an Americana band with a Christian agenda but it was just being wrapped up in this Americana overlay, so they just weren’t going to have any part in it. Pretty much a year later the band was done.

You just can’t keep playing when there’s no audience. I’d kept four or five guys in a truck well paid and fed for almost ten years and so I just gave up. So my little ax to grind with Evangelical “faith art and cultural” voices is, “OK, where were you people? You were certainly supporting U2 and Bruce Cockburn and on the other side of the equation, you were certainly supporting people like Waterdeep and Derek Webb, Caedmon’s Call and all that other stuff.” But where was the little bit of love when we needed 20,000 record sales to even put a record in the CMJ charts, we didn’t have anything from you guys.

I recognized very, very quickly that I was starting to get bitter about it. I was poor. I was selling gear, I was into deep, deep debt and there was nothing that was even remotely stable. But all during that time, when most critics who were actually writing about it were giving it 4 and 5 star reviews, so the incongruity of it was just madness.

• So how have you wrestled against bitterness?

Well, I wrestle with it, but I don’t win. At this point in my life with 25 records out and 17 years of touring, it’s just, there are really days when I wake up and think “Shoot, I should have gotten a job at the Post Office or taken a High School job teaching.” But in some ways, I’m so committed to this thing that I’m really not even employable. I spent last Christmas just desperate after I’d sold a guitar, just to pay the rent. I spent last Christmas looking for a job and couldn’t find one. Nowhere, not even a temporary service. You go in and fill out an application somebody says “Well, what have you been doing for the last years, what was your last job?” When I say I was self-employed, they ask “Oh really, what were you doing?” When I say I was a songwriter, I managed a band and made records, you can just see them look, they look at the application and just say “Mr. Mallonee, we might call you later!” Nobody ever did. And we’re talking school systems, hospitals, temporary work for Christmas shoppers; nothing, I got nothing last year. It’s pretty scary. Bitterness? I don’t know the answer to that. Sometimes I really do wonder. The whole thing’s starts to feel a little bit like the book of Job without a happy ending.

I know you’ve interviewed Doug Burr (see Doug’s interview here). Doug’s been at it for a while. Doug’s an acquaintance. I think if we were living within each other’s 100-yard radius or something we’d probably be friends. Doug’s a young guy starting out with it and I wish him the best but for me, it just seems like every time we’ve ramped up with a new record and good intentions; and I don’t know the business side of it. Most people who stood outside of it who do know the business say “You guys were so connected to the wrong people and not inside the right pipeline, that’s why it never happened.” I keep thinking, you know, I just didn’t even think about that, I’m an artist and a writer, I’m not a business man, I don’t jockey for position, trying to be at the right table trying to brown-nose somebody so I can get my record in the right magazine. I just figure, the cream rises; somebody hears it and it moves from one level to another. I think that was my misplaced faith, I kept thinking that God is bigger than Interscope records, and He’s bigger than David Geffen, He’s bigger than all that and in reality, I don’t really know anymore. Like I said, I see so many lesser artists who have so little to say and they make these paint-by-numbers sort of songs out of Nashville, but, they’re selling records. People are digging them. I just don’t even have an answer, so if I sound dazed and confused, you got it.

• For someone like Doug Burr, just coming up, what is some advice you might pass along?

Doug’s got a good thing. He has spent years sort of getting to the first record. He was sending me demos of his stuff years ago. I thought it was pretty good then but now I think it’s really well formed. That’s just judging from an outsider’s perspective. I didn’t think it was hugely great initially, but there was a record he did I got a copy of about three years ago I think, Sickle and the Sheaves and I thought that record had a real spark of something genuinely cool in it and I kind of feel like he’s followed that through to this Promenade record.

The only advice: I think he’s doing it right, Doug’s a family guy, he’s got a kid and he’s married and I think he’s going to start finding out what that balance is like. The advice would be, well, I taught high school and it got to the point of “well, we’ve got a record deal now” and it was a decent deal, so I quit the day job. With Doug doing the indie thing, things are a little bit different because when I came up in ’92, that’s 15 years ago now, it was the “sign to a label, have the label be the bank” so to speak and offer the resources, it was a different paradigm from what’s going on now. So now if someone goes out and sells 5,000, 10,000 records, that’s as large of an impact of, say, in the ‘90’s when we were going out and selling 20,000-25,000 records. But the overhead was a little bit higher. In this day and age, you make the record, hand it to the label, they put it out and I know he’s got a pretty good press agent I think working for him. That’s one thing that I haven’t actually had the resources to do because they’re so expensive. A good press agent will cost you about $1,500-$2,000/month. I don’t have those kinds of coins to do anything now.

I’ve made records into a solo career now, but I’m just selling to old VOL fans who are generous enough to keep ponying up money. I think the records are good. I think actually the life experiences have made the songs better and better but I’m not really able to round it out with a band or a really good studio. I do most of it just right here in my kitchen. They’re very acoustic, home-spun records. My wife and I make those records and that’s kind of where it’s fallen. I can’t remember what the quote is in an old Dylan song but it’s something like “You’re either on the way up or on the way down.” For me, one of the sad things is that I feel like none of the records have actually gotten the kick-off or the birthday they deserved. When we were in the middle of it, traveling like nomads for 180 shows a year, it kind of began to feel like something was happening, but on the other side of the equation, it never felt like there was a strategy behind anything. So the advice to Doug would be: try to find something that looks and smells a little bit like a strategy, although you’ll never be able to cover all the bases, there’s so much of it; good intentions and strategy, all of the sudden you realize that you’ve come to the end of that very short fuse and you’re just making it up as you go. Hopefully, the lines fall, as the Scriptures say, “the lines fall in pleasant places,” but sometimes they don’t.

I was always laboring under the illusion that if you gave it 110%, and put your heart in it, and I felt like the music we made was consistently good, I can truthfully say that out of the 25 albums and probably the 1,500 songs I’ve written that there’s not a single one that’s filler. I am so heavy with the self-editing that by the time it gets to a record, you’ll find that the records are extremely conceptual from beginning to end. Over the last couple of years I’ve started to make records that have only 10 or 11 songs on them just because I want the concept and the themes to be really strong and I think that the average listener has more of an ADD personality now.

Our attention spans are a little bit less than they used to be. The idea of listening to a 60 or 70 minute record, it’s like, I can hardly hang with it anymore when people put out records that long. So I just keep thinking make something really concise and if it’s a pop record, get in, get out, say it in like 44, 45 minutes, kind of like records were in the ‘60’s, really. You had 10 or 12 songs and they all clocked in at about 38 minutes and that was your record, whether it was Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys or Sgt. Peppers by The Beatles, they were both actually, time-wise, pretty short albums, so I try to keep it kind of that way, it’s just a way of continuing to make real consistent statements.

But again, I wish that the records had all gotten a proper kick-off because they’ve all gotten great reviews whenever there was any press there that was willing to take a chance and listen to it and review it. We’ve never hired the killer publicist who was going to put it on the right desk in front of the right people to say the right things about it and I think now, American rock journalism, if it’s guilty of anything, it’s primarily guilty of writing infomercials for people that have already got labels and resources to make sure those things perpetuate and continue on. I’m just convinced that that’s kind of the way it works. Not that there isn’t some real artistry going on, but there’s also a lot of making sure; there’s a great deal of turf guarding and gatekeeping that’s going on so we were never really able to break into much of it. I think the Christian thing actually hurt us over the long haul.

• How do you try to incorporate your faith into your art without falling into Christian clichés?

I think you just write from your perspective. That’s a whole interesting topic and again, I think Catholic novelists and artists and writers and musicians over the centuries, if you want to go back that far, have a far easier job of making work that stands versus CCM. CCM has always just struck me, and I didn’t come up with this term, the first time I heard it was Mark Heard, as the “ghetto” of contemporary Christian music and it seems to be something that’s kind of dictated, the output of it, the vertical and the horizontal of it, seems to be dictated by youth pastors. Yeah, you can change the dress and it can be whatever it’s going to be, you know, grunge or West Coast crunk or folk, or whatever it’s going to be, pop or whatever, but at the same time, it’s got to have pretty much the same message in it from decade to decade to decade. In some ways, after a while, if I were a kid, I’d feel heinously insulted after a while, because the stuff doesn’t really speak to every issue of life.

Now, the older you get, that doesn’t work the same way, but it seems like these artists keep coming up and they keep coming up; now what’s happened though in the last five years is that because there’s such a huge cross over, those people who grew up with their favorite CCM bands have now got kids. You’ve still got CCM bands with Christian overtones, it’s just that Christians have gotten hipper at veiling it. You end up with these bands like Arcade Fire that everybody wants to embrace and the sense of ownership. That’s what I come back to, the sense of ownership that Christians have with, quote, their band, is unbelievable. Every artist should be that kind of fortunate to have that kind of fanbase.

But my question is: “Do you like the band?” Are you into the band because they’re saying the right things and because it’s cool to have a band that’s cutting edge or because; and I pick on Arcade Fire because I think all their songs tend to sound the same even though I think they’re a good band. The hipsters won’t say it! The hipsters are looking over their shoulders to make sure everyone sees them listening and I understand hip, I’m from freaking Athens, Georgia and grew up in the hippest scene in the world, you know. I think that anyone can make a record, but if you’re going to make the same good record again on your second and third one, then, where’s the artistry? Where’s exploring deeper issues and topics?

I think that sense of ownership that contemporary Christian music fans have with bands that they perceive as “their own” is huge. It worked a little bit more in the late ‘90’s and early 2000’s than it did for us when we were coming through. I don’t know really why that is, I just know that there’s artists out there that are sort of like that. Many artists are very, very careful if you start pinning them to the wall about what they think and feel and believe about things. They get real liquid about it.

For me, my stuff is Americana. It’s always been sort of straightforward. The homage that I pay is to people like Dylan and Neil Young, that pretty straightforward kind of stuff. Springsteen maybe on a lesser scale, we get compared to R.E.M. and Tom Petty and things like that. I’m real happy with the output of it but I don’t know how to play the game where it gets inside the skulls of the leading people and they say “You know man, he’s one of ours and we need to support this,” that’s fine but I would rather just people react to the songs because they interface with it, not because of something I’m saying or not saying that’s lining up with their theology.

Roman Catholics have, I’m not evading the question I just got lost, imagine that, me being tangential, but the Roman Catholic church has had a tendency to just let its artists and writers do what they do and view grace and the power and work of the Cross in people’s lives and just let it be what it is. It’s a more fully-orbed approach to things. The Catholic Church has been full of artists who have struggled with everything from alcoholism to homosexuality, consistent faith, any of it and yet they still created great work, whether playwrights or writers, it’s all there, whereas, if somebody struggled with those sorts of things in the more succinctly defined, narrowly defined CCM market, they wouldn’t have an audience.

• Can you speculate as to why Catholic artists have traditionally been more open about their struggles than Protestant artists?

I don’t know. It seems like, by the time you’re 30 years old, y