Welcome to Grass Shorts, a new Homedrone feature where we sit in the grass (or somewhere equally pastoral) and just, like, talk about stuff with a local musician. Today, we’re straight chillin’ with Nicholas Mallis.
Mallis moved to Athens in 2010 with several members of his band, Yo Soybean, an earnest, folky collective that’s gone through a few lineup changes since they arrived. Mallis is the lead singer and guitarist.
Nicholas Mallis: I’m in a couple different bands now. I play bass in Sam Sniper. I just started playing bass with the Viking Progress. I love that guy [Patrick Morales], dude. His songs are so good.
I’ve been writing lately, like writing short stories. I haven’t chiseled anything so much to where I’ve submitted it yet, but I’ve been studying my old creative writing books and trying to put together some short stories.
I’ve been getting involved with the Athens Clarke Heritage Foundation. I put on this [benefit] last year called Tin Roof Music Festival. It’s nice to be able to give them money. They do a lot of cool stuff to keep this city what it is. It’s funny, they always want to have all these committee meetings and everything to be so cut and dry. I feel like I’m back in church almost, but with cool people.
It was great last year. I’m doing another one in September at Little Kings. We had a bunch of bands this year, and then a bunch of bands dropped off, you know how it is. It’s tough to keep everybody straight in this town.
I’ve been booking for Go Bar. I did sort of a summer acoustic series for them. We had shows out on the porch and it was really fun. I did them pretty much every Wednesday this summer. When they were good, they were really good, because it was like what everybody was doing that night because it was Wednesday, you know? But booking’s just stressful. I always told myself that I would never be a booking guy because I didn’t like it, and then Tom from Go Bar asked me and I’m like, ‘Of course I will.’
The last thing I did was record songs for a documentary about Civil War reenacters. It’s about all this dispute over the history of the Civil War. The songs are about war and the ghost of the south. Some of them are about fictitious civil wars, not necessarily this one, or one that’s happened. We got all sorts of weird instruments on them, made all these strange arrangements with fife and trumpet; a lot of snare drum. I want to release it, but I want to wait until this film comes out. I don’t want people to hear these songs and think I lost my mind. They’re songs I would only write for a film.
We want to do a release and a screening of some of the film, and maybe like some reenactment battles going on behind us while we’re playing. I just don’t want it to come across the wrong way, you know? You’re walking a fine line making roots and folk music, because you don’t want to sound like just a stupid white boy, or look or seem like one.
I’ve been trying to redirect [Yo Soybean] or maybe even like rebirth it, you know what I’m saying? I’d like to eventually make something a little more poppy and a little more electric, and take it in a little more of a surf, doo wop direction. I envision a project where the music sounds like the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction with a lot of doo wop harmony, but the singers sing with Jamaican accents. And we’re going to rename the project Sister Sangria. No, I mean maybe, but at least the album. Or even separated from the surf thing, [maybe] even just like weird folk songs, like Irish traditional songs sung with a Rasta man voice. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and I was trying to rationalize a reason why it makes sense in my mind. I think when Jamaica was colonized by England, a lot of the [settlers] were Irish, and that voice kind of came out of both of them, so you can hear a crossover in it.
It’s weird with timing. I almost want to make it under a different name if Yo Soybean’s going to release an album that’s called The Lost Cause: Old War in the New South—that’s what the documentary is called—and then release Jamaican surf pop songs.
Flagpole: Are you going sing in a Jamaican accent?
NM: I think so. (laughs)
Yo Soybean plays Caledonia Lounge on Monday, Sept. 10 with Shannon Otto and Four Eyes.
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