Jesse Malin is the kid with the butterfly net, running down Bleecker Street, snapping up cabs and standpipes and butts of cigarettes. He’s the guy with the shoe box under his bed that's filled with skipping stones from sunny days and bottle caps from bad breakups. He’s the guy who can pick out each individual coin in a Central Park fountain and tell you the wish of every last person who let it fly from her hand.

So his music would have you believe.

Jesse Malin gets people. He can sift through all the strands of their stories and pluck from them just one thread that will tell their tale in its entirety. Then, stringing it along the neck of his guitar, he’ll tune it, strum it and share it with us all.

That’s what makes Malin great. Not billboard advertisements, his name in lights on the marquee, the late night appearances, the radio play --- he's got none of that, which is why you probably haven’t heard of him.

But consider this: At the "Light of Day" benefit show last fall, Malin ran into a man to whom he had often been compared, Bruce Springsteen. Malin passed along a copy of his CD. A week later the phone rang. It was Springsteen. He wanted Malin to join him for a Christmas benefit concert in Asbury Park.

 

Malin was thrilled by the invite but even more so as the details of the gig became clear. “I thought he’d want to play some covers or something,” Malin says. In fact Springsteen and his band learned three of Malin’s tunes, which they performed at the show.

What Springsteen saw in Malin is what you'll find on his CDs: a grounded life. That's why he can take a place as grand and vast as The Big Apple and whittle it down to its core — not the perfectly-lit skyscrapers reaching for the heavens, but the thin-soled pedestrians who pound its pavement. “A lot has happened here, like [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani selling it out to Disney and all this gentrification,” says Malin, who credits films like “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver” for his inspiration as much as anything else. “That ongoing change is its own kind of heartbreak and romance.”

It’s not just New York either. While his grasp of his hometown helps him focus on what really makes the city hum, his powers of observation apply outside of the boroughs as well. “If I write about New York or America or London, it’s something I hope people can connect to,
something human,” he says. “I like characters.”

On "The Heat," Malin's characters are post-9/11 New Yorkers of all shapes and sizes, right down to the corner prostitute in “Arrested” and the abused daughter in “Basement Home.” And sometimes he takes a more direct route of storytelling and draws on his own past. One such story seems to fit him perfectly. He’s a mover. He spends his days hauling other people’s crap around. But one day, he’s hauling Barbra Streisand’s crap. Her bed, to be precise.

Malin tells these tales to the tones of lightly distorted guitars and straight-ahead rock and roll drum beats. The usually-strummed guitars of "The Heat" receive the occasional interjection of arpeggiation, and give way entirely to piano on "Basement Home," where the weight of his protagonist's life depresses the keys almost as much as his fingers. Over it all, he croons with a nasal East Village whine (think a young Bob Dylan bumped up an octave).

 

Of all his images, the image of Malin hauling Streisand’s bed is especially telling. There's something appealing about a guy who sweats on her mattress as he slings it on his back and wrestles it into the service elevator and then to the loading dock. What's even more appealing: He turns out to be a guy who can see a story in that situation --- a guy who can spin a song for Everyman.

 

--- Mike Hume, Guest Butler, writes a weekly music feature for the Falls Church News-Press in Northern Virginia. His pieces have also appeared in National Geographic Traveler and ESPN the Magazine.

 

To buy "The Heat" from Amazon.com, click here.

 

To buy "The Fine Art of Self Destruction" from Amazon.com, click here.

 

Copyright 2006 by Head Butler Inc.