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Life in an out of the way place carries universal import, and people everywhere seem to understand what David Mallett's songs are about. Although they are rooted in place, they speak to the essential things that move us all.
If you grow up in a small rural town, as Mallett did, you can't help but learn its stories. He knows about the people who shouldn't have stayed, but did, and those who shouldn't have left, but did. He knows the factory work, the field work, the memories of summer dances, the loves and losses, and the stunning incidents of courage and despair.
Raised in a musical family, by the age of ten he was touring with his older brother Neil, singing at grange halls and county fairs. In his early twenties he started his solo career, writing his own songs and eventually performing them across the US, Canada and Europe. His songs have received international acclaim, and one of them, "Garden Song", has been translated into several languages and is one of America's most popular folk songs. Other singers who have recorded Mallett's songs include Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Hal Ketchum, Pete Seeger and even the Muppets. The source of this well-traveled music is life in a small town in rural Maine, where there still is a main street, and you can still find old barns and tall trees.
The songs Mallett writes and sings are filled with passion, evocative imagery, and a sense of the inevitable passage of time. The loss of American towns and rural landscapes is the subject of many of his songs, as are the issues of wilderness preservation and the struggle of the common man. When he is not touring, the place where he makes his songs is in his writing room in an old farmhouse with a view across the field and a tintype of his great-great grandfather on the wall.
"I like to keep reaching out to touch the past," he says, "to connect it with what’s going on now. To me music is one of the few things that is timeless ... human emotion is one continual chain."
In the millenium edition of The Bangor Daily News, in his home state, he was named along with Marshall Dodge, Andrew Wyeth, E.B. White, Stephen King, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others, one of the most memorable "Mainers" of the twentieth century.
Mallett's most recent honor comes from the readers of FOLKWAX who voted him 2003 Artist of the Year, and his 2003 album "Artist in Me" 2003 Album of the Year.
Text: Susan Shetterly/Linda Bolton
copyright 2007 David Mallett & North Road Records. All rights reserved.
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