Danny Malone will open for Blue October on Sunday at Wichita’s Orpheum Theatre.
That the prodigiously gifted Nashville-based musician has landed such a prestigious slot may not be a surprise to some, but knowing the path that it took to get him to this current moment in his life and career does make it remarkable.
In the early 2000s he earned acclaim as a formidable singer-songwriter within the Austin, Texas, music scene. And despite comparisons to the late Elliott Smith, he proved that he had his own remarkable voice and a knack for transforming simple details into the profound.
But then, as he tells it, he began to slide into a world of addiction that would rob him of precious years as an artist. For roughly 12 years, he found himself in a tailspin.
“I thought I was burning bridges left and right,” he says during a late September visit to the KMUW studios. “And I was — I was messing up opportunities.”
Although there were some friends and others in his professional circle who held out hope that he’d return to his former self, Malone continued to slide deeper into the darker side of life.
He’d given up music, pawned his instruments, and was on the brink of death, he said. Family members were able to intervene, and Malone soon found treatment through Ibogaine, a powerful psychoactive drug used to treat a range of issues, including post traumatic stress disorder, brain injuries, and addiction. After the initial treatment, he realized that he needed to move out of Austin.
He made his way to Mexico, where he lived in an apartment on the beach and tried to piece his life together over the course of two years. Despite his intentions to stay there and stay away from music, he returned to Texas, where he cared for his ailing mother. Back in the familiar environment of Dallas, where he’d grown up, he soon found the stress overwhelming and relapsed.
Eventually, he says, he had a realization.
“I thought, ‘I’m not going out like that,’” he said. “I got in touch with a therapist and decided to do the Ibogaine treatment again with a newfound determination. I did the treatment in Mexico, and for some reason a much more mystical event happened. I exploded with creativity and realized that I wanted to write songs again.”
He returned to Dallas, then Austin, then Nashville, and began playing shows again.
His latest single, “Burning Hills,” was the first song he wrote when he emerged from his treatment — the first he’d written in eight years.
Other pieces of his life began to fall in place, and in September, after reconnecting with longtime friend Troy Campbell, he visited Wichita as part of Campbell’s House of Songs.
The night before we spoke, he had performed with several Wichita musicians, including Madi Laughlin and Joey Henry, debuting material he co-wrote during his stay in Wichita, which is where our conversation began.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I heard you perform a new song last night with some other musicians for the House of Songs performance, and you used the word “shooketh.” Can you remind me of the context of that word in the song?
‘Even though my faith was shooketh/these are not the eyes I look with…’ It was something my [former] girlfriend would say offhandedly for different things. She would say she was shooketh. I thought that was a beautiful phrase, and I thought that song was a beautiful moment to use it. I guess that’s what I do in my life, I’m never not a songwriter. I’m always kind of listening to people, the things they say, their energy, seeing if there’s something that I can piece together out of it. It’s like my body of work is a life collage of my body of experiences. ‘Shooketh’ is a heavy word for me and so it’s part of the collage of my life.
What I appreciated about it was that it’s an unusual word but then it’s juxtaposed with something that’s extremely relatable. If it were just the word thrown in there without that it would feel like novelty but instead that pairing makes it feel novel and genuine.
Cool. It’s hard to dissect when things are genuine and why, but I guess that’s because I was having a genuine emotional experience as I’m saying it, because I’m remembering her and the way that she would say it.
That’s also a circuitous way of me telling you that I think you’re a great writer. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] Thank you. I find deep meaning in things that are maybe easy to overlook, but I’m always looking for the nuggets of something to hold onto. Memories or experiences.
Part of the music you’re making now reflects the fact that after years of struggling with addiction, you’ve reframed your outlook on life. I’ve known people who got lost in that world, and the story is often remarkably the same. Maybe at first you know that they’re dabbling, and then one day, you say, “You know, I haven’t seen Dave in six months.” Then you see that person, and it’s like they can’t get away from you fast enough.
Exactly.
It’s almost like there’s a shame with it.
For sure. At a certain point you’re ashamed to be seen in public because you know you’re not hiding it anymore. People know. You’re acting strange, and you’re just so riddled with shame that you can’t be yourself in front of someone, so you can’t have a meaningful conversation or experience. It becomes very isolating.
It’s difficult because there have been times when I’ve had to say, “I can’t be a witness to this.” Other times I’ve said, “I love this person so much that I want them to know that I’m here.”
For sure. I will say that from my experience, there’s merit to both — leaving the person to go through with whatever they need to go through, and just letting them know in a non-judgmental way that when and if they want help you’re there, and not to enable them but to be a grounded sort of [person who can say], “When you want help, just let me know.” There were people like that in my life, and it was super meaningful. I would ignore them in the moment when I was using, but it would stick with me for months and months and I would be thinking about they said. Those little moments stacked up over time, and they were the fuel that [showed me] that there are people who will still care, and it will be meaningful to them if I get clean even if it’s not meaningful to myself. When I first got clean, it wasn’t for me. It was for others. The first time. The second time was for me, and that’s why something really mystical happened.
I would guess that writing a song after a long period of not writing anything gave you a renewed sense of purpose, and I wonder if there was a kind of rush to that. Was it equivalent to maybe the first time you finished a song?
It felt like the first song I ever wrote more than the first song I ever finished. I knew what I wanted to say and I said it. It was like the spirit world came to me and said, “Here’s the gift of songwriting. You should do this to stay alive.”
Wow.
Yeah, it felt mystical. I had never written anything like that. Maybe one of the reasons that I had quit music was that a lot of my older music had darker themes. While there’s merit to that, I didn’t want to perform it anymore. I didn’t want to say these incantations of these darker themes that I was trying to escape. When I suddenly remembered that I could write a song or that the music was moving through me, I thought, “I could say something positive here. That could be the incantations of my life and then that could be the whole batch of my life moving forward, this positive [thing].” Music and words are spells that you’re putting on yourself. Especially if you’re performing them over and over and over again. I thought, “What if I just continued to put this positive spell on myself?” It’s working.
You’re doing this run opening for Blue October.
They’re a great band from Texas. I went on tour with them about 11 years ago, which was a great time, right before I fell off the face of the earth. It wasn’t long after that that I did. Justin [Furstenfeld], the singer, remained a friend of mine. He was checking on me here and there. He was one of those people who knew how to sensitively handle someone in addiction. He was non-judgmental but there as a sturdy friend, and when he heard I was doing well, he reached out and asked me to go out on this tour. It’s a meaningful tour. It’s the first sober tour of my life.
