Jay Malinowski

How it Goes

Jay Malinowski was motivated to write and record his first solo album with the hope of rediscovering something that he had lost. “The whole record is about gaining back spirituality and self-awareness,” he acknowledged recently before a show at The Casbah in Hamilton, Ontario. “The life that is the hardest one to live is when you are making sacrifices, and not just taking the easy route through whatever you’re going through, where you’re losing your spirituality. I lost mine.”

The result is Bright Lights & Bruises, which includes eleven songs plus two bonus tracks that, in sum, spell out a life in transition. Best known as the lead singer and guitarist of Bedouin Soundclash, Malinowski reached a point in which he felt trapped by what the band had become. He needed at least a short-term break. This led to a discussion on the future of the band with bassist and longtime friend Eon Sinclair after returning from a tour of Japan late in 2008. The decision was made to continue. Malinowski resolved that part of the process of returning to write and record in Bedouin Soundclash would be to venture off temporarily on his own.

Early on the record Malinowski sets the scene on the west coast. Much of the album was written on Vancouver Island, and he settled into his hometown of Vancouver to record the songs. On the first track, ‘There’s A Light’, he asks ‘will history please let me go? / Let me go, leave me alone’. That sentiment is quickly followed by the key line in the chorus: ‘There’s a light, there’s a light / Coming down that mountainside’. It is that desire for light and renewed meaning that illuminates the entire album.



At the show in Hamilton, Malinowski put the new material on full display. One highlight was a terrific pack of three songs near the beginning of the set: ‘Songs Never Sung’, ‘Life Is A Gun’, and ‘How It Comes Is How It Goes’. Later he worked in an excellent cover of the Bob Dylan gem ‘Oh Sister’ from the 1976 album Desire, an interesting choice brought to life by Malinowski with the help of his opening acts, Michael Rault and Kinnie Starr. The best moments of the performance came with the last two songs of the night, the intriguing final sequence of ‘Remembrance Day’ and ‘Into Fire’. The gentle pathos of the former, marked by the sense of loss that comes with the collapse of a significant relationship, blended nicely into the spiritual questioning of the latter. ‘Into Fire’ is distinguished by the rush of uncertainty that disturbs our minds when we permit ourselves to ask what is holy.



Malinowski matches the deepening artistic vision that is evident on Bright Lights & Bruises with his changing views on which charitable efforts he should actively support. In the past, he has advocated for the continued existence of Insite, the controversial safe injection site on the downtown eastside in Vancouver. He worries now that supporters of the facility have turned increasingly to publicity stunts in order to be heard. “There is an issue of integrating that community – hopefully before they go beyond the point of no return – into society,” Malinowski says. “If you show them that there is kindness out there beyond force, it could help things. Whether or not they are getting their message across in the public press very maturely – I don’t think so. There were a lot of protests down there, just for the Olympics and stuff, and I just found that a little juvenile.”

In an attempt to focus on something less politically contentious, Malinowski lent his support recently to the St. James Music Academy in Vancouver. It is an organization dedicated to offering free music education to underprivileged children living on the downtown eastside. Executive director Kathryn Walker operates the program in an Anglican Church on East Cordova Street, and Bedouin Soundclash played a show there during the Olympics. “It’s just basically a music program to keep kids off the street,” Malinowski explains. “They give them a meal after school three days a week. I went to their Christmas concert and I sponsored a student. To me, that’s great, because you’re getting kids into music, maybe keeping them out of homes that might not be the best places, keeping them off the street. I can support that.”

The following interview captures the thoughts of an artist determined to grow and allow his view of life and music to mature. Malinowski talks about the benefit he derived from returning to Vancouver to record Bright Lights & Bruises, and the emotional impact that he felt watching The Future Is Unwritten, the film about the life of Joe Strummer directed by Julian Temple. He discusses openly the problems within Bedouin Soundclash that prompted him to work independently. He affirms that the strength of his friendship with Eon Sinclair ultimately kept the band afloat. A new Bedouin Soundclash album is in the works with recording set to begin this May in Philadelphia. It will be interesting to hear how the band sounds this time around in the wake of what Malinowski has experienced.

CI: Bright Lights & Bruises was recorded last year at Armoury Studio in Vancouver. I thought in the first few songs, ‘There’s A Light’ especially, that you set the scene pretty effectively; ‘there’s a light coming down the mountainside’ feels very west coast. How did working and recording in Vancouver really propel this project along for you?

JM: Well, the best thing is just, living in Vancouver, I’m separated from being in Bedouin Soundclash. It is solely where I grew up. I don’t live there anymore. It just gave me breathing room. The whole record is sort of trying to retrace and go back to a simpler time. It helps. It just immediately places me back into a more human form.

CI: On the subject of Vancouver, Bedouin Soundclash played during the Olympics, and you carried the torch as well. What stands out to you most about your experience during the Olympics in Vancouver, and the way that the city was transformed and presented during that time?

JM: It was incredible. For all the people that – I think, across Canada – were not excited about the Olympics, and I was probably one of them, I wasn’t totally thinking it was going to be a great thing, but when you got there you just got so wrapped up in everything that was happening. It was really cool. It had a lot of spirit. As soon as I got there, my Mom picked me up, and she’s got a Canadian flag on her car! That, to me, was the spirit of it. Everyone was so excited about it and being Canadian, so it was cool.

 

CI: The new album has been presented as a way for you to clean out your mind a little bit before going back to Bedouin Soundclash. I know that your original drummer, Pat Pengelly, left the band, and obviously you had to sort things out with Eon. At what stage did the band feel like something of a trap that you needed to get yourself away from, for a while at least?

JM: The band felt like a trap, the band felt confining, since probably 2004. I said in 2004 to Eon, ‘I can’t make another record with this line-up’. But we kept going. Then 2005 hit and we were off to the races. I was able to forget about the problems that I had within the band. Then those things caught up. I think we were in Japan in 2008 – November 2008 – and it was just over. I was sitting in a hotel room with Eon and I said, ‘I’m not acting right, and no one wants to be here’.

I still wanted to write. Eon and I had a conversation, and we flew back and stopped in Nanoose on Vancouver Island. It’s a place that I seem to constantly go back to. I wrote a lot of this record at this place in Nanoose on the ocean. We sat there for three days, and just said ‘okay, beyond our personal problems, beyond our personal problems that we have – me, primarily – do we still want to do this?’ I said, ‘I still want to write with you, and I still want to play music together.’

We couldn’t work with Pat anymore. So we got rid of Pat. We just thought, ‘well, we’ve put so much work into this band that we have to keep going’. So we did. It’s taken a long time to get back, and for me, part of it was writing this record, writing something totally unrelated to Bedouin so that I could just write again and find those reasons to write, find that meaning, before I could go back and say that I was ready to start this thing again.

CI: On the album, ‘Life Is A Gun’ is one of the most interesting tracks. There is a simplicity to it, but that basic idea just stands out that life can be cold and threatening and even potentially useful at times. What do you remember about the origins of that song?

JM: That was written in my apartment. Eon was with me actually right when I was writing it. The lyric I wrote a while before that. We were on tour with Hot Hot Heat. We stopped in New York. My girlfriend at the time was there. We had just a major breakdown. It was one of those days. I remember walking around the streets, walking around Soho, and writing that out. It was a morning where I’d been up all night. Life seemed a little savage at that point!

CI: At the centre of the album are two songs, ‘Remembrance Day’ and ‘How It Comes Is How It Goes’. These were the two that I kept returning to when I listened to the album. It struck me that they compliment one another well, the way that people pass in and out of our lives and how we remember them. Did you sequence the record to have that emotion stand at the heart of the album?

JM: Yeah. There were a lot of things that I was thinking: ‘okay, so we’re in this band, and we do all these things …’. You have all these goals in life that are apparently going to make you happy or make you fulfilled, and they don’t, they just don’t. That isn’t what happiness is. It’s an intangible quality. After all, you look at all the wreckage of something, maybe it’s a relationship, maybe it’s a band, and you have to just become at peace with things. Life is just everything, not just the good things but the bad things too. If you learn from them, there’s a silver lining. The acceptance in ‘Remembrance Day’ – that song is one of the ones that I can still relate to the most. It’s about sort of lying down and accepting things the way they are.

We were just talking about relationships. If you spend so much time, like seven years in a relationship, did that exist? Was that important? You know it does exist, but it’s hard to look at it that way.

CI: As you were saying, you get started and you think certain things are going to bring happiness to your life, whether it’s a relationship or a band or whatever. In some of the press material for the album, there was one thing that stuck out. You said that, at some point, everything started feeling like a cliché because you were around clichés so much. What did you mean in that sense? What became a cliché in your mind?

JM: I think ultimately it gets down to the way people acted, the things people would do on tour, but really it all comes down to selfishness, self-centeredness and selfishness. That’s a band cliché. It’s a writer cliché. As soon as you become more interested in yourself than in other people, you immediately become uninteresting and boring. You’re not going to say anything interesting and you’re not going to do anything worthwhile. When our music had become, in my opinion – and maybe I’m hypersensitive to it – when it had become for the service of our needs, and not for anyone else at the show, but we were doing this because this is what we need, and the show is not important - it’s what we do afterwards, how we get through things, and the fact that we can continue to do stupid shit – that’s when you become boring.

CI: One song that I have listened to many times – and I may be off on this, and feel free to tell me if I am – but the song called ‘Into Fire’ struck me as kind of a modern hymn, especially the line ‘I’m always losing something holy’. Now I am not sure how much your life has been framed by religion or spirituality over the years, but it seems that at the edges of these songs there is some spiritual questioning coming in here. How would you measure that in these songs?

JM: I think spirituality is something that everyone can relate to – God, however you see it. The whole record is about gaining back spirituality and self-awareness. The life that is the hardest one to live is when you are making sacrifices, and not just taking the easy route through whatever you’re going through, where you’re losing your spirituality. I lost mine. It’s not a Christian thing or anything like that, but I think that everyone knows what it feels like to wake up and feel like they haven’t got themselves together.

In that song, you get to that point where everyday you think, ‘man, it’s getting worse and worse! I know that I said I wasn’t going to do that again, and I did it again!’ The insanity is that I will continue to do that until I’m dead. There has to be this point where I’m just going to jump into some – is there some holy baptism, which doesn’t have Jesus come out of it, where I can be cleansed? [laughs] It’s not happening in music, so …

CI: Most of the content on the album is driven by personal experience, but were there any novels, paintings, or films that you were taking in at the time that impacted what you were writing?

JM: Well, in terms of music, I guess someone like Leonard Cohen or Nick Cave. I was in a spot where I wasn’t turning on necessarily happy music. One film, The Future is Unwritten, had a huge impact on my life, the Julian Temple film about Joe Strummer, only because when I watched it, it’s so well done. Anyone in a band - you don’t even need to be in a band – but Joe Strummer, his life was a sacrifice to an idea. … I would watch that movie and my ex-girlfriend would say, ‘why are you crying?’

There is one point in the movie when this Bob Dylan song, ‘Corrina, Corrina’, comes on, and Joe has to get away. He goes away and finally starts dealing with the fact that his brother died; when he was young, he committed suicide. And he’s a full-blown alcoholic at this point, although they never say that so I don’t know if that’s true or not. He just needed a break, but he never got one. He just kept going. That film for me represents, as something that you’ll see in anyone, that point where you’re one foot in and one foot out, and there’s a point when you can’t return. I think a lot of artists could relate to that. I think, to make great art, sometimes you have to do that, but at what cost, and is it worth it? I don’t know, a Hemingway or something – is that happy? He shot himself! Hunter S. Thompson? Shot himself!

There’s that romanticism that struck me about a lot of artists, whether it’s true that you have to be screwed up to make your best art. In fact, the more sober you are, the better you are, but there are so many – even this year, there is a guy, close with a friend of mine, who died from an overdose. He would have been convinced that his best work was when he was fucked, and that’s not true. But we promote that idea. That movie fascinated me in sometimes a sick way.

CI: Is it fair to say that you watched that movie and started spotting the traps a little bit, and wondering what the end destination is in all of this?

JM: Is your life entertainment or is your life yours? At a certain point, your life stops becoming yours. It becomes something that you’re living as much for other people. It’s a tough thing. I don’t know. At the same time, when you have a family and have a real life – I don’t know – that movie is just tough for me to watch. …

CI: Throughout all this transition in your life, changing band members and relationships ending, you still have this core of you and Eon, still playing shows and recording together. Has the friendship between the two of you become more resilient through all this?

JM: Me and Eon are thick as thieves. We’ve always been. That’s our thing – we’ve just been friends. We started this band because we were friends. Everyone who came in after wasn’t our friend, and then sometimes we became friends and sometimes we didn’t. It was me and Eon being friends and saying, ‘oh, you like Desmond Dekker? Hey man, have you heard The Clash?’ That was it! Then I saw him playing bass one time, and we made up some songs, and that was it. When we don’t care about playing music, we’ll still hang out. That’s the only reason why we’re still around, because we’re friends. I still want to play with him. It’s not because we’re anything else. It’s not because we want to open for No Doubt!

Date of Interview: 03/10/2010
Location: The Casbah, Hamilton, ON
Link: www.myspace.com/jaymalinowski