SPILL FEATURE: THIS WARRANTS A DIFFERENT OUTLOOK MUSICALLY – A CONVERSATION WITH JAY MALINOWSKI

THIS WARRANTS A DIFFERENT OUTLOOK MUSICALLY

A CONVERSATION WITH JAY MALINOWSKI

Jay Malinowski of the JUNO award-winning musical duo Bedouin Soundclash is set to release a new solo album titled Under A Landslide Of Stars. Under the solo moniker MALINOWSKI, the upcoming album is his first solo album in over a decade.

“As I’m writing songs all of a sudden, I’ll be like, ‘Okay, we are out of Bedouin Soundclash territory, and we are now going towards solo territory,’ so that’s what kind of defines it,” Malinowski explains. “With this one, it’s also because I had a family, and I think there is a lot of thematic stuff that happened in my life where I was like, ‘I think this warrants a different outlook musically.’”

Under A Landslide Of Stars sees Malinowski drawing from church hymns, with many songs, such as “Mountain,” featuring a large choir. “I don’t come from a highly religious background, but the school I went to, we sang hymns every Monday and Friday, and I loved them,” he says. “I think it really affected me later in life. If you listen to ‘When The Night Feels My Song,’ it’s like a four-part Anglican church hymn – the crux of that song is the choral part. I don’t know if it has been ingrained in me, but whenever I hear a song, I am always like, ‘What kind of choir can you put on this?’ but instead of trying to keep doing this with Bedouin, I’m gonna lean into that aspect with my solo stuff and just try to work with as many choirs as possible.”

Lyrically, the album is about love and devotion. Some songs are about the deep love Malinowski has for his wife and son, which he juxtaposes with the characters he created in his mind who express their love in extremely violent ways. “We live in a pretty colliding world right now of a lot of different ideals, and it’s so clear now that one of our biggest problems is understanding each other,” Malinowski says. “If you go anywhere in the world, people have the same feelings towards family, but culturally we can be extremely different, and we can have very little in common, and I think that has to be understood, for better or for worse… If you have travelled enough, you do know that people are different. By saying that, fundamentally on a very deep level, I don’t think we are. That’s where the family part for this record comes into play. I think if you asked people, ‘Describe to me the feelings you have for your son, your daughter, your wife, your mom, your dad, or your siblings,’ we’d have a very similar language to describe those things. On that level, love, compassion, and care look the same. As you start to push that out to greater and greater concentric circles, it seems like it gets twisted into these crazy places. All of a sudden, people feel warranted because ‘If my love comes from this divine source, whether it is the divine source of I know how a government should run, or I know God, and you don’t know God, therefore, it is warranted that any kind of violence is okay.’ Somehow, on a large level in this absurd comedy that we live in, people can commit violence out of love. I think that is one of the craziest intellectual acrobatic moves that you can make, but we see it so often now that it’s not even weird.”

PURCHASE/STREAM UNDER A LANDSLIDE OF STARS

“Deeper Than Blue” is a ballad that Malinowski wrote about the deep love he has for his son. “‘Deeper Than Blue’ is probably the softest song I have written just in terms of tenderness for the love I have for my son,” he says. “I think when I am having a hard time relating to people, it is easier now to be like that person used to be a little kid, because if I look at them that way, it is way easier to try and find some compassion and some understanding. I think that comes from, like, I have a son now, and you feel the sense of protection for that person.”

Alternatively, “Son of a Gun” is an example of a song that Malinowski created a character for. “That was actually the first song that drove me to this choral thing, like I had that ‘Yeah’ that blast of choral stuff in a demo form,” Malinowski states. “That one definitely had a bit of a psych rock feel to me. Lyrically, I thought it was just like a funny play on words, sort of like born out of violence, I’m a son of a gun as opposed to ‘I’m a son of a gun.’ So, I am the son of a gun and born from violence, more likely to commit violence. It was sort of an allegory on a larger global level. The character who is the son of a gun is saying he is done with history, but he is the son of a gun, so the likelihood is that it’s what keeps carrying on.”

For the track “Shipwrecks,” Malinowski asked his close friend Aimee Allen (also known as Aimee Interrupter) of The Interrupters to feature on it. “I love Aimee’s voice so much,” Malinowski says. “It had a bit of a Blondie vibe to me, and in a strange way, I really correlate the two of them together. I know they sound different, but there is just something about them. I think Aimme and Blondie should do a song together. There is just a nuance in the chorus where I was like, ‘I need a female vocalist,’ and I love her grit, so she agreed to do it.”

Two legendary rock bands were huge influences on the song “Rain-Maker.” “That desert tone that the Edge used on The Joshua Tree for sure was a huge influence on that track to me,” Malinowski comments. “I love early U2. I think U2 is great… I was sort of oscillating between that and The Clash/Joe Strummer vibe, sort of a ‘Straight To Hell’ Joe Strummer vocal delivery.”

“Die For Love” is a standout song from the album, featuring an incredibly compelling, catchy guitar riff and a sing-along chorus. “We were doing a tour in the UK, and I started just messing around with that on stage in a soundcheck,” Malinowski recalls. “I had that for a bit, and I had that chorus for another song, and I thought, ‘Let’s try to put those two together.’ It has that kind of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons vibe to me. I was trying to juxtapose a jangly banjoey part with a sort of soul chorus. I thought it really worked. It worked sonically and also with the subject matter of the song, where I was juxtaposing a guy who was taking two ideas, like love and death and putting those two together. I thought, ‘Hey, this is a good sonic use of the song.’”

The title track ends the record. “It encapsulated the general overview of everything, which is all these things take place under a huge landslide of stars, and all of the things we do we do under the backdrop of this hugely unknown vastness that none of us really understand,” Malinowski reflects. “I thought putting it all into perspective, all the problems that you have when you sit out under that, if you go out under the stars on a summer night, far away from the city, and you look up and see this huge mystery that we are sitting under, we just all forget about it. We are just going out and doing these wild, crazy things to each other, and yet there is this huge mystery we know nothing about. I get so worked up about stuff, and under that, it seems to not make much of a difference in a good way.”

Under A Landslide Of Stars is set to drop on April 3. “It has been a decade since I put out a solo record, so it is always a success to get it over the line, and I’m just excited to go play it,” Malinowski smiles.

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Photo Credit: Piper Ferguson