Booking & Press Contact: mal@malachigraham.com | 971-645-7527
Caretaker
album release date 1/19/2024
announce date 10/18/2023
A hymn for the exhausted. A moody, dense, lyrically sophisticated album exploring the obsessive caretaker.
Portland songwriter Malachi Graham’s new album Caretaker is what comes out when a bad breakup opens your eyes to pathological behavior all around you - and in yourself. She is embracing a rockier sound to chart a rockier road, and using her deft, sometimes blunt, lyrics to examine codependency, unraveling love, chronic pain, grudges, flings, addictions of all sorts, and the boundaries of the self. The emotions she dredges up cover a spectrum from bitter humor to gentle despair, and the music similarly ranges from delicate to raw. As she wrote these songs different anxieties rushed out like a breath she didn’t realize she was holding in. It is certainly her most mature, emotional, resonant, vulnerable work.
Graham has been writing and performing for ten years as one half of the hooky synth-pop outfit Small Million. Her earlier solo songs had an observant, literary flavor, full of empathy and poetry. “Those felt like more of an intellectual exercise. These are the first songs I've written that are like, ‘Oh! this is actually scary to sing in public’,” Graham says of her new work. “The songs aren't all about me, but they are all about situations and people I was involved with.”
Her lyricism – frank, ever-curious, and at times devastating – prods at the confines of relationships from many sides: from the eyes of a woman trying not to care about a casual affair, or a wife remaining in a dead marriage, or a drunk fuckup tired of being ‘fixed’—and there at every turn is another facet of what it means to be a ‘caretaker’. Taking care of the wrong priorities. Taking care through a field of relationship landmines. Taking care where and when you can find it. “There's a lot of egotism in being a caretaker. I think when you’re a problem caretaker you're not treating someone as your equal, you're assuming that you’re superior to them,” Graham explains. “In my experience it’s the way something sweet and domestic and loving sours and becomes a cage.”
Graham co-produced the album with her father Philip Graham. “It may seem weird, but we work together at our day job in the music gear industry. When he saw me go through some of my hardest stuff, and heard the songs that came out of that, he offered to help make them into an album. I think he hoped it would be cathartic.”
She enlisted a host of musicians from the Portland scene to help her craft a wide range of musical accompaniment, from the crunchy guitars of rocking opener “We Made a Home”, to abstracted drones (dual-wielded screwdriver on guitar) on the haunting psychological study “As Is”, intensely spare acoustic guitar on the funny-until-you-sit-with-it “Montreal”, and lush analog synths powering the stunningly complex closer “Spare Me”. The arrangements grew and changed, sometimes drastically, as she worked with all her collaborators to find the feel for each song. The result is wide-ranging sonically, but the whole album travels an emotional arc that feels like a slow-dawning awareness of, if not joy, then at least relief.
Together for the Kids
[Official Video]
first single release date 10/18/2023
"What’re they waiting for? We know we were an accident."
The sadness piles up in a moody, rumbling swell until we can’t take it any more. Then it crashes down hard with a terrified plea.
Sometimes the caretaker doesn’t even remember what it is they’re tending to. Even the most bleak relationships might have started as a great love. That’s not exactly comforting. When everyone knows it’s as dark as this, sometimes you just have to yell to break the spell. This was recorded in one take in a basement because the longing and tension were just so right.
Credits: Written by Malachi Graham. Produced by Malachi Graham and Philip Graham. Recorded by Philip Graham. Mixed by John Askew at Bocce. Mastered by Amy Dragon at Telegraph Mastering. Vocals, guitar: Malachi Graham. Bass, guitar: Jamie Stillway. Drums, guitar: Shawn Michael Thornhill.
BIO
Malachi Graham is a songwriter from Portland who twines her incisive lyrics and inventive sounds around the complexity of personal relationships. Her newest songs explore codependency, unraveling loves, chronic pain, grudges, flings, and the boundaries of the self. Her music centers on her clear, emotive voice and empathetic lyricism, layered within spacious and swirling collaborative instrumental arrangements ranging from snarling electric guitar to contemplative synths to mournful fingerpicking.
She loves collaborating to find the right instrumental context to bring each song to its most powerful form. On her newest recordings she improvised some arrangements with friends in the room, sent other tracks to friends around the country to fill out, pulled an entirely different band into a studio for one song that needed a rockier punch, and worked with a longtime collaborator on synth parts that needed to be just right. Many of her songs change arrangements radically as they evolve into the right emotional feel for the lyrics.
Graham has spent the last decade immersed in Portland music, songwriting and performing in genres from country/Americana to alternative pop. She is the lyricist and vocalist of the synth pop phenomenon Small Million, a duo formed with long-time collaborator Ryan Linder. Her debut solo EP, ‘Selfish,’ produced by Dustin Hamman (Run On Sentence) and engineered by Mike Coykendall (M. Ward), highlighted her powerful, straightforward voice backed by a seasoned rhythm section with a classic country feel. Offstage, Graham co-founded and manages the microphone workshop Ear Trumpet Labs with her father, Philip Graham, which has become one of the most distinctive microphone brands in the folk, bluegrass, Americana and jazz world today.
UPCOMING SHOWs
PRESS
“[Together for the Kids] represents something real, something authentic. It speaks to your soul and breaks through the opium of fluff.”
— The Wild Is Calling
"Malachi Graham knows how to tell a good story, and her 2015 debut, Selfish, is full of them... Plus, her voice is just plain awesome. If you could sing like Malachi Graham, you’d want to start an Americana band, too." — Willamette Week
"Graham's sound is neo-nostalgic and melodic, bluesy and moving, with rolling rhythms and soulful acoustics. Her lyrics are thought-provoking, complex and wry." — AXS
"Selfish sounds like a lonesome western confession right before the shoot-out begins." — Anna Tivel
New Single “We Made A Home” Out Now
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In the first single off her upcoming album, Malachi Graham pits codependency against cohabitation, with hooky, doom-laced alt-rock.
