Malachi Graham

NEW ALBUM: Caretaker
out NOW

New Interview via The Bluegrass Situation

Malachi at BGS on the similarities between miniature making and songwriting, what the ICU taught her about breathing, and how Lemierre Syndrome and brain surgery turned the meaning of her new album Caretaker on its head.

Single: “Spare Me”out now!

Thought it was love, but I guess it was grief.

Single: “Wonderful Life”out now!

There’s enough of me to go around, until there’s not.

About

Portland indie songwriter Malachi Graham twines her incisive lyrics and inventive sounds around the complexity of personal relationships. With a long history in the synth-pop duo Small Million, her newest solo 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.

Her 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. 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.

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 drinker 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 danger 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 has spent the last decade immersed in Portland music, songwriting and performing in genres from country/Americana to alternative pop as the vocalist and lyricist of Small Million (Tender Loving Empire). 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.

Together for the Kids

WE MADE A HOME (2021)

Selfish (2015)

Purchase digital download or CD on Bandcamp. Also available on iTunes, CD Baby, and Spotify.