Photo credit: Steven Sebring
Jesse Malin
There’s a lonely and wistful beauty inherent throughout Sunset Kids, the latest studio effort by Jesse Malin. With his ninth solo album, the former D Generation frontman threw in his lot with old friend Lucinda Williams, who produced this 14-song outing with her husband-manager Tom Overby helping out as an executive producer.
The idea of Williams producing this project came after Malin accepted an invitation to watch her open for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the Hollywood Bowl in what would be the late Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s last concert.
“I had dinner with Lu and Tom (Overby), and I threw the idea of her producing my next record. They seemed really up for it, so I told them to let me send them more music before I let them decide. I did that, and a week later Petty passed away, sadly. Then there was that Vegas shooting, and it was a really rough time, so everything kind of got pushed back,” Malin says. “We decided to try and put our toe in the water to try and do it around Christmastime 2017. Lucinda and I decided to try and beat the holiday blues by working through Christmas. Why not? It sounded like a fun idea doing it in L.A. with no snow.”
By the time mastering and mixing took place in August 2018, the loss of Petty was augmented by the passing of a number of people close to Malin, including David Bianco (who engineered Sunset Kids), longtime friend and D Generation bandmate Todd Youth and the Queens native’s father. Understandably, these losses reverberate throughout Sunset Kids.
“Sunset Kids was also a thing about life being for the living. Not to be morbid, but there is a thing with music and art that can keep the spirits of these people alive,” Malin says. “Songs like ‘Shining Down’ and even ‘Meet Me at the End of the World’ are about finding a way to keep going on through gentrification and whatever is going on in the world—climate change and politics and things that people might not agree with me on. There’s all this negativity, and we’ve got to find a way to live each day like it’s our last or best.”
Having recently entered his early 50s, Malin is at a crossroads in life where introspection and these kinds of personal losses have yielded some truly deep and meaningful art. The jangly aforementioned “Shining Down” reverberates with lines about “keeping alive the spirits of the ones we’ve lost,” while the world-weary, ethereal twang of “Room 13” and its couplets about “Thinking about love / And I walked away like those others do” echoes with the kind of gorgeous melancholy you hear on a Williams gem. (No surprise here, given that she co-wrote this song with Malin and Overby.) Elsewhere, “Promises” carries a “Wild Horses” vibe to it, while “Chemical Heart” is a pop earworm punctuated by perky Farfisa organ runs, as nods to Ike and Tina Turner, Bernie Taupin and Jake LaMotta are liberally sprinkled throughout.
Malin is nothing if not a fighter and, more importantly, a survivor. Born and raised in Whitestone, Queens, N.Y., Malin joined hardcore band Heart Attack as a vocalist-guitarist when he was only 12. By the time he was 15, he’d run away to live in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was the first time he felt a sense of belonging.
“It was a place where it was OK to be different and that there were other people out there like you,” he recalls. “When I got to downtown Manhattan, there were all these bookstores, record stores and people. I didn’t get beat up for being different, which is what happened in Queens a lot.”
By 1991, Malin and four other friends formed D Generation, a quintet that was a nod to the ’70s glam and punk of The New York Dolls and The Dead Boys, an era that the D Gen members missed out on. Throughout the ’90s, the band released three solid albums and brought back the downtown vibe of 1970s Manhattan by opening the punk-rock club Coney Island High and regularly hosting Green Door NYC, a long-running party night hosted by Malin and D Gen bandmate Howie Pyro. (“We tried to create a little mini-scene. I took my publishing money and did those two things. I didn’t know what I was doing.”)
“From the early frontier days of hardcore in New York to all the punk rock and singer-songwriter touring, it’s all been about survival and reinvention,” Malin said. “I wanted to make an open-sounding record with the space to tell these stories. I like to write about characters and people I meet along the way. The dreamers, schemers, hustlers, romantics, lovers, leavers and believers.”
Jesse Malin performs at Shank Hall on Monday, Nov. 11, at 8 p.m.
