About the Artist
Michelle Malone has been making records out of Atlanta since the late '80s, when her first band signed to Arista and the label told her to be more like Joan Jett. She left, went independent, and stayed that way through seventeen albums. Her songs keep circling the people and the land she comes from, including Georgia ground her family has held since the mid-1700s. She currently plays in three bands, coaches beginning songwriters who work up the nerve to email her, and has started showing her paintings alongside the music.
Michelle Malone
About the Episode (Episode 142)
Michelle Malone: Seventeen Records and a Quiet Brain
Host Jason English caught Michelle Malone at the 30A Songwriters Festival, a festival she has played at least ten times, including the first year, when the beach stage was cold enough that she and the Indigo Girls played in fingerless gloves. She had just come off a fifteen-minute showcase in New York, playing other people's songs with a band she started for fun during lockdown, a project that now pulls more attention than her own catalog. Seventeen albums in, she is openly weighing whether an eighteenth makes sense, and just as openly building things that have nothing to do with records.
Key Conversation Points
Doing it backwards. Canyonland started in 2021 as a lockdown livestream of Linda Ronstadt songs she already knew from her mother's records. It grew into a working band that flies to industry conferences. "I'm doing my career backwards 'cause I've never had a cover band."
The math on albums. She walks through what a record costs against what it brings back, and she is not convinced the answer still works. Spotify's policy of paying nothing on songs under a thousand streams pushed her to pull most of her catalog. "That kinda just tanned my hide."
A second way to make something. After decades of songwriting, she picked up drawing and painting and found something music had never given her. "My brain gets really quiet, which is rare. My brain's always going 90 miles an hour."
There is also a story about a green room at Lilith Fair in 1997, a song she learned at summer camp when she was eleven, and what Emmylou Harris did with a guitar once the room emptied out. Malone still gets emotional telling it almost thirty years later, and she will tell you exactly what it changed.