In Conversation With Colin: Michelle Malone

Michelle Malone has been a mainstay of American roots music for more than three decades, mixing roadhouse rock ‘n’ roll with blues, folk, and country. Inspired by her home in Atlanta and after more than a dozen studio albums, she continues flying a flag for Georgia on her new studio album appropriately called Southern Comfort. Newport City Radio’s Rock Show has been showcasing tracks from the latest release for the past month and from her home in Atlanta, Georgia our very own Colin Palmer caught up with Michelle to chat about her new album.

“I’m very much a southerner,” says Malone, “Georgia music is all about music and community and less about the business and fame and fortune. I briefly lived in Nashville for about six months and unless you were signed or had a publishing deal people didn’t really want to talk to you because you couldn’t help them, it’s a lot like Hollywood. And that’s why Blackberry Smoke are still here and Zac Brown is still here and I feel we’re a little more rooted in the dirt.”

Southern Comfort has a long guest list of southern all-stars. Michelle Malone is part of that select group too. That hometown pride didn’t stop her from also finding inspiration in places like Colorado and the Florida Keys, where she co-wrote nearly half of the album’s songs with Dean Dillon. “It was a little serendipity” explains Malone. “A friend of mine who was helping me out in 2022 was working at a festival that Dean was performing at and they happened to run into each other in the green room backstage, and my friend suggested that he write with me. Then Dean went and checked me out, played his show and said ‘yes, I do believe I will’ and my friend put us in touch.

“He’s done the Nashville thing for so long and he told me that he just needs some new stories. So I flew out to Colorado and honestly, I didn’t know who Dean was and when I started googling him I got more and more frightened”, she laughs as she remembers her trepidation. “I usually write with people I already know, it’s a comfort level thing and I enjoy writing with people who are in Georgia because I really like to tout Georgia music. It’s kind of an unsung thing we got going on down here even though we’ve had everyone from James Brown and Ray Charles to The Indigo Girls and The Black Crowes come out of here.”

Michelle also plays drums and says she is very rhythmic with her right hand on guitar because she started out playing solo acoustic and for her rhythm is very important not just on guitar but in life. “It’s the most primal thing to me,” she confesses. “So I always try to keep in mind the rhythm and the beat of a song when I’m recording and I think if you can grab someone’s ass and make them move first then everything falls into place. When we got in the studio I was trying to find a groove on ‘Undercover Mother’ and I immediately thought of T.Rex and ‘Get It On’ and it’s whatever you can do to the track to get people to feel it most.

“The first song we wrote was ‘I Choke On My Words’, I was writing on the plane, I was just writing down things and I showed it to Dean on my phone when I got there, and he’s in a swivel chair with his guitar, strums a few things turns around and says ‘what do you think of this’ and he plays the majority of the song, and that’s how fast he works, we had that song in about twenty minutes. ‘I Want To Be In That Picture’ is very much a heart breaking Dean story, and we wrote that the 2nd time we got together and that was down in Key West in the Florida Keys. I met him down there and we wrote ‘Like Mother Like Daughter’ and ‘One Track Mind’. He works very quickly but if you’re writing and start to get hung up on something then just take a break, I don’t like to sweat a song because if you work it too long you’ll work the heart and soul out of it.”