Meet the band: mallory

The band mallory - Jim Cunningham, Mat Arnold, Dan Heir - formed in 2000 (Credit: Provided)

Soon after mallory first started playing together back in 2000, they rapidly gained, so to speak. They were quickly embraced by the scene, as drummer Mat Arnold puts it, gaining the support and friend ship of local bands that they liked and admired and were opening steam for nationally touring acts like Interpol, Clinic, T.V. on the Radio, and Forget Cassettes.

They were also nominated for a number of awards and won the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards Album of the Year for their debut “The First 100 Years” and even got an offer from a New York record label.

But over the past few years, they “sort of disappeared,” says Arnold. But the band never stopped playing and they are back on track with a new album. Arnold talks to us about their second release “Before It Grows” and the sexiest song he’s ever heard.

First things first, why do you spell your name with a lowercase ‘m’?

I think that’s probably more than anything aesthetics; we like the lowercase m. But it’s also not Mallory, as in the girl’s name Mallory. Of course we get a lot of the Mallory Keaton or where did that come from, but Jim, the singer, he writes all the lyrics and he was also a Literature/English major in college. He’s really into words and where they come from. And I’m probably going to do a poor job, I should probably do this better, but mallory means many things in different languages. I think it was the French interpretation, and I think with one ‘l’ in[the] German [spelling], it means captain or something like that. But the one thing was at the time—it means ‘the unlucky one’ or something to that effect, in French, it’s some sort of French translation. At the time, when we were starting the band, there was a lot of kind of crazy things going on. You know, one is that our house caught on fire, the space where we practiced, and there was just a string of—everybody at the time seemed to be having a lot of bad luck. And it was ‘the unlucky one mallory.’ And sort of fit at the time and I think early on we had a sort of tag line: ‘Bad Luck Looks Up.’ It was ‘Mallory: The Unlucky One, Bad Luck Always Looks Up,’ which was something that Jim had conceptualized. We don’t use it anymore because I think we felt pretty lucky after a while.

Tell me about your upcoming album

Our song writing, I think, is pretty strange. … With all the new material that we’ve had over the last however many years not producing anything, we could have spools and spools of CD-Rs with just ideas. And the way we write songs, Jim will just come in with an idea and we’ll sort of jam in our basement.  And over the years, we were just playing in our basement—jamming, for lack of a better word—but we never seemed to finish or structure anything into a final song. I think that we just, in a sense, had been away for so long, it was part, I think, that it didn’t feel like there would be expectations anymore. There was no pressure. And things just sort of came to fruition. I mean we just started coming up with complete ideas, things flowed into each other. And I think it just took off once that hit again. Some of the songs, though, we’ve had for years—but some of them are brand new—but years as in we never recorded them. It was kind of like we’d been playing with an idea for years, and then we finally finished that along with some new ones that just came up.  It was kind of like a temporary wellspring in a sense.

What is your favorite song from the album and why?

Hmm. There’s one on there called “Kopvriet”—there’s two on there that are close to each other in terms of my favorite, but there’s one called “Kopvriet.” In parantheses, it’s called “(Eating Head),” That actually is another Jim word fascination.  I think it’s Hungarian. It’s like kopvriet basically means eating head, in the sense that you’re constantly chewing ideas. I think it came from a guy that was in prison, who was writing about it. You have nothing to do but sit there and sort of chew on your thoughts. And the reason I like that song is that one: I just like it and it’s fun to play, but also I think that one really encompasses, in general, a lot of where we go with songs in terms of our general structure. , you know, we get a lot of comparisons and they seem to always be different. And that’s like where that is a good representation of where we are kind of out there, but at the same time, you can still listen and grab on to it. It’s not that I like it because it’s accessible; it’s just because that one feels well executed, in my mind, in the terms of what we’re trying to produce. And I like it and it’s a lot of fun.

Changing the mode of questions, when was the time you were embarrassed?

Oh man. Um, [laughs]. I can’t remember. It’s hard. I'm so out there, that I’ll pretty much say or admit anything, that it’s hard for me to be embarrassed. Um, it’s probably not the best question for me, [laughs] just because if you call me out on something, I’ll totally be like, ‘Yeah, I did that.’

In that case, when was the last time you embarrassed someone else?

One thing that people say about me is that I have no filter. So, I’d say an example would be my girlfriend, or it doesn’t matter who’s around if somebody does something, I’ll say it out loud. So it’s more I can’t really think of a specific example. It’s just my general demeanor and how I am. I think people who understand or know me, know that if I have something on my mind I will just say it, not always conscious of the consequences. Sorry that’s not a very good answer!

OK, changing gears again, what is the sexiest song that you’ve ever heard?

Um, oh man. There is—I can’t remember the name of it—a song by Serge Gainsbourg.

‘Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus’?

Yes, I think that probably sums it up. There’s—I don’t know why but, I’d say, I mean that one [‘Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus’] is more explicit, but Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne.’ I don’t know why, but I find that song extremely sexy. I don’t think it’s necessarily meant to be like that. But I’d say [it is] maybe not my first, but a close second. But the Serge Gainsbourg is more like an obvious one.