Atlanta’s Michelle Malone admits she’s a homebody at heart

The South is in Malone’s blood, and her new album, Southern Comfort, honors both her Georgia-based family and the importance of friends like fellow musicians Rick Richards, Charlie Starr and the late Billy Pitts.

Michelle Malone is a hybrid creature: equal parts clean-cut, radio-ready country and dirty, swaggering blues rock. It’s a signature sound that has served her well throughout her 30-year-plus career and one that continues in her new album, Southern Comfort. 

“It’s all very guitar based,” she says of her unique take on Southern songcraft. “My personal taste has always gravitated toward elements of classic rock, singer-songwriter, blues and jazz.”

The album’s two pre-release singles lean on those polarities: “Simple Life” features the sort of laid-back, mid-tempo reflections on life and good times that evokes comparisons to Faith Hill. On the other end of the spectrum, “Barbed Wire Kisses” is an acidic brawler that comes off like Southern-fried Joan Jett. 

Malone’s trademark combination of a spit-and-vinegar strut tempered with Southern belle sweetness is alive and well, but, taken as a whole, Southern Comfort lacks the alternative rock underpinnings that defined Malone’s early discography. In its place is modern-day stadium country pastiche. It seems unlikely that an established veteran like Malone would make a gambit for mainstream awareness. A more likely explanation seems to be the album’s focus on familial themes.  

“I have a difficult time traveling all the time. I crave a simple life. I’m a homebody,” she says of the song ‘Simple Life.’ She’ll be home in Atlanta for her gig at Eddie’s Attic on October 19.

“I’m very much an earthy kind of grounded person,” she adds. The heaviness of that domestic yearning is compacted by the album’s larger themes of loss, family and kinship.

Malone was born in 1966 to a musical family and parents that named her after the titular Beatles song. “If you know any girls named Michelle of a certain age, you know when they were born,” she laughs. “My parents literally heard the song on the radio, pulled over and decided that’s what I would be called.”

Her upbringing was defined by a close connection to a wide variety of music. “I used to go with my mother to her voice lessons and sit under the piano while she sang Mozart and Puccinni,” she recalls. “And then she had this extensive record collection from Led Zeppelin to Mahalia Jackson.” 

That early exposure to the classics and the cosmopolitan world of Atlanta was counterbalanced by her father’s extended family in the small town of Alvaton, Georgia. “My grandfather’s people have been there since the 1700s. I learned early on about that culture. I would sit on the back porch and shell peas with grandmother. It was just simple and beautiful,” she recalls.

These dual cultures defined Malone’s early life and her experience of Southern life in general. “I experienced it from two different sides of my family,” she explains. “One was slightly more cosmopolitan. They’re the musicians and they traveled a bit more. City folk. Then the other side of my family were country folk. They would eat things the other side of my family would never consider eating!”

Rural life may have been eccentric, but it was regimented. Malone recalls the precise regularity with which the Alvaton family ate Vienna sausage sandwiches on white bread on the weekends and always made it a point to enjoy the TV shows Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk, followed by the news before bed. 

By contrast, Malone’s city family enjoyed a more bohemian approach to time management. “I never knew where they were going to be, when they were going to be home. I guess I gravitate to the simple Southern culture because for me it was more stable.”

Malone describes her early songwriting efforts as “me-centric,” with lyrical themes focusing on figuring herself out. “It was really my therapy for the longest time,” she observes. She sees that initial inclination toward introspective songwriting as maturing over time to encompass a broader perspective. “At this point, I feel like I’m becoming a little more of a storyteller.”

That’s not to say that the album doesn’t have its share of inner journeys — especially as it relates to loss and grief. “There’s a song about my mother-in-law who was just an amazing woman. She passed away last year. I believe she was 96. It’s not as much a sad or sorrowful song as it is just admiring her life and her joie de vivre.” 

The album’s title track is another nod to loss — albeit an indirect one. The song itself dates back to Drag the River, Malone’s first band. “We made a demo of the song and the record label turned it down. But we loved it, and we played it all the time. When our drummer, Billy Pitts, passed away two years ago, I decided to recut the song in his memory.”

The new recording features players that had been Pitts’ friends and collaborators through the years. That impressive roster includes Georgia Satellites guitarist Rick Richards and Blackberry Smoke guitarist/vocalist Charlie Starr, along with Drag the River and Georgia Satellites keyboardist Joey Huffman. 

That reunion of old friends gave the album its title. “It felt like the right thing to do, calling the record Southern Comfort, Malone explains. “It just feels like a very friend- and-family-oriented record.”

In listening to Malone talk about Pitts, it becomes clear she knows family is about more than biology and marriage. It’s about the people with whom we walk a common path in life. For musicians, that path is often with fellow players.

Pitts was the last member to join Drag the River and his strong, powerful grooves became the linchpin of the band’s sound. “He came to me one night at a bar in Atlanta and told me that we needed him,” she recalls. “And he was right.” 

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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.