Saw this review on NetRhythms:

Georgia’s Bill Mallonee appears to have more than his home state on his mind with the release of Dear Life. Never one to make his listeners feel completely at ease, he has produced an album that delights, perplexes and disturbs in equal measure.

It may be that all roads and experiences have led him to this point. If Summershine was his ‘happy’ album then Dear Life is his most personal to date.

It’s impossible to listen to a single track without relating it back to the man himself. The trademark Mallonee references - the depression of the 30s, Woody Guthrie - are all there but on Dear Life it’s how they impact on him, rather than the world at large. Few albums will finish with such a feeling of finality as this. I Will Miss You is uncomfortably private while Songwriter (Numb) is the song of a man who has taken stock and is not entirely happy with his life’s work. It is one of the most poignant and saddest songs written.

There’s a different kind of energy driving Dear Life, instead of the raging, passionate guitar rock of Blister Soul or Extreme North of the Compasss, Ready and Red Eye is just one track that is fuelled from within. Mallonee appears to have reached a point where he realizes that what he feels compelled to say is as important, if not more so, than how he says it. Undoubtedly this is a brilliant Bill Mallonee album, the devastating use of lyrics and melody is a gift that will surely never leave him but Carol Merrill shows the reflection of a man at the crossroads.

His greatest gift is the ability to turn the harsh light of his talent on to the listener, by the end of the album it’s not just his life that’s in the unforgiving glare.

In whatever form and in whatever context, listening to Bill Mallonee is never less than compelling and always absorbing. Here, with long time colleague Jacob Bradley, the messages are just as strong, just as uncompromising. The unsettling thing for fans is what it is he’s saying. It is impossible to read too much into Bill Mallonee, he reveals just enough to intrigue but not enough to fully explain.

I would just add that around all of the aforementioned “reality check” view of this “dear life” shines the halo of grace. For example, in “Where the Light Does Fall” Bill pulls no punches in his self-assessment:

coming up empty falling down short
another disturbing progress report
that you wrote yourself in the drought’s fine dust
there’s a different standard in which you must trust

But notice that last line…we need to change our standard from striving for self-mastery to the standard of grace. Sometimes God’s grace shines on us most clearly through the agency of another human being. In Bill’s case, his standard metaphor for this is his wife Brenda:

oh these seasons with their reasons known only to them
defenses and my senses crumbling
saw you in a photograph later face-to-face
you’re a study in amazing grace ~”Who Do You Love?“

Or again in “I Will Miss You Girl,” in which Bill imagines what he would say to Brenda if he were close to death:

you were by my side when i got full of lies
and lost myself in sin
but your love was the light
that brought me home again

My own LSW knows the truth of that for me!

Finally, I’ll leave you with a big helping of the absolutely stunning confessional “I Will Never Be Normal (After This)“:

now everyone’s a junkie
and since daylight’s such a pain
we’re all looking for some darkness
to stick into our veins
for some of us it’s lust
for others it is power
for some of us it’s playing songs
and drinking after hours

yeah you’ve gone and upped the ante
in this game that we all play
gotta wake up and believe
that love’s the better way
and people can really be healed
there are even some of ‘em you can trust
but first you gotta take a risk
and tell ‘em where it hurts

what if it’s for a purpose
what if we used our battered faith
they say God He doesn’t make junk
and Jesus never makes mistakes
He has never given up
on anything that He has made
He will chase you like a lover
right through heaven’s gate

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2004 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.