The Daily Times

A funny thing about singer-songwriter Michelle Malone’s song “Restraining Order Blues” getting placed in a recent episode of HBO’s hit vampire series “True Blood” — Malone and her friends, who gathered to watch the episode, missed it completely.

To be fair, it wasn’t hard — “It was in a bar scene under dialogue, pretty far in the background, so it wasn’t exactly featured,” she told The Daily Times this week. And really, the show itself, which chronicles life in a small Louisiana town populated by witches, werewolves, fairies and vampires in addition to all manner of quirky and morally bankrupt humans, isn’t really high on Malone’s watch list.

“It kind of freaks me out,” she said. “I think it’s really cool, and I’ve seen it a couple of times, but vampires and werewolves and witches are a little too freaky to think about for me. I think it’s well done, and it’s pretty cool to have a song in what’s listed as the No. 1 show (on cable). People sure seem to love it.”

Likewise for Malone, who returns to Knoxville for a show on Friday night at The Square Room. She hails from Atlanta; while in college, she met Amy Ray and Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, but she left school to pursue a career in music and released her first solo album in 1988. She formed a couple of bands early in her career — Drag the River and Band de Soleil — but she’s always functioned best as a solo artist.

“Debris,” released in 2009, is her 10th studio album, and it’s earned rave reviews. It’s straight-up rock ‘n’ roll, tempered with some heaping spoonfuls of the blues and a sassy dose of Southern attitude, circa the Rolling Stones from the “Beggar’s Banquet”/”Sticky Fingers”/”Let it Bleed”/”Exile on Main Street” era. Malone hasn’t turned in her membership card from the guild of Southern female singer-songwriters who make bittersweet, melancholy music, but neither is she living by its guidelines either.

For Malone, music doesn’t have to follow a formula. Just because she’s a singer-songwriter doesn’t mean she has to play music best enjoyed by the coffeehouse masses, the disaffected and downtrodden who hang on every word as if Malone is playing the soundtrack to their emotional angst.

“Songwriting goes in and out of different phases,” Malone said. “‘Sugarfoot’ (her 2006 record) was very sexually oriented, very angsty, I think. ‘Debris’ was a little more transitional, even though there was a lot of that on there, too. I was moving toward more introspection. Now, it seems to be more introspective and serious. I’ve been avoiding a lot of issues for a long time. I haven’t written an introspective record in about 10 years.”

Not that fans should expect a moping weeper of an album the next time she has one to release. For one thing, given the rough-and-tumble blues anchoring her last few albums, it would be too jarring for her to record a solo guitar songwriter album that addresses spiritual and emotional ruminations that may be on her mind these days. Nor does it mean that her yearning to grip an electric guitar like a lover’s hand on a roller coaster ride will water down whatever seriousness may emerge from such introspective songwriting.

“It’s just about basic human things as we grow and change and move on, and there are a lot of emotions in there that are serious,” she said. “I just decided it’s time to take stock of them and write about them. I don’t always avoid them; I just don’t always write about them. Generally, when my life sucks the most, I write the happiest, craziest, most fun songs I can because it makes me happy.

“It’s my outlet; I can control what’s going on in my mind even though I can’t control what’s going on outside of it. So I write songs that make me happy and are fun and energetic. But now I’m two records past that, so I’m writing about things that need examining.”

And sometimes, she added, songwriting can be the wrong medium in which to address such topics. She doesn’t feel like she’s built for writing a book, but neither can she always contain her thoughts and self-analysis to a simple verse-chorus-verse. Of course, she’s been writing songs for so long, breaking that habit is easier said than done.

“I’ve been writing songs for so long that I’ll write in rhythms and phrases; I’ll hear rhymes in my head,” she said. “It’s definitely dug a rut in my brain.”

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