The Persistence of Rachel Mallin
by MacKenzie Reagan | @MacK_Reagan
Rachel Mallin slips into frame looking every bit a college sophomore in her hoodie and jeans. It’s early spring, a month before she turns 20. Taking a seat, she apologizes — in between studying for school and prepping for SXSW, free time is in short supply.
Wait, what?
“I got invited last week to play at this coffee shop at SXSW,” she explains with Midwestern demureness.
OK, slow down.
The Kansas City, Mo. native has been playing music since she was a child.
“Both of my brothers were drummers, so our house wasn’t ever quiet. But I just wanted to be a different kind of obnoxious and loud person, so I picked up guitar,” she deadpans. She began taking lessons at age 8. At 15, an instructor introduced her to blues guitar, an influence keenly apparent in her current music.
Around the same time, Mallin formed a “two chick lead singer alt rock band” dubbed Faithful Distortion. The quintet played such venues as the Uptown Theater in Kansas City, giving Mallin her first taste of success and getting her foot in the doorway of the local music scene. (Around this time, Mallin began producing, too).
Mallin started writing songs at age 10. “My inner monologue started bubbling over with angstiness and sassiness,” she says with a laugh. “So I channeled that into writing songs, and that evolved over time with the influence of different life experiences and artists.”
She uses the word “evolved” with great frequency which proves telling of her understanding of her burgeoning career. Despite her ever-rising profile in the Midwest, she refrains from being complacent and considers herself to be always learning and fine-tuning her sound. As the conversation flows from gushing over her influences (Death Cab for Cutie, Billy Joel and Robert Frost, to name a few) to weighing the challenges of the school-music balance, her speech, like her success, is rapid.
She punctuates her sentences with profanity, yet she is impeccably polite. Her Missouri upbringing has clearly ingrained in her a sense of humility; just months later, she’d open for Metric, the Juno Award (the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy)-winning synth-rock band, yet she’s bashful when she’s asked about the moment she felt she “made it.”
Her manager, Ethan Wilson, “[initially] thought [Mallin] was going to be pretentious … or really stuck up when it came to her music, but she wasn’t at all.”
Wilson first met Mallin when the two were students at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo. At the time, he worked for Greenlight, a music management group formed by a handful of MU students. In addition to designing the artwork for Mallin’s debut EP, “The Persistence of Vision,” he helped craft her sound, a blend that’s equal parts Halsey and Florence + the Machine. While the two have both left MU and Greenlight to pursue careers in the music industry (Wilson spent a summer interning at Interscope Records and was heavily involved with Interscope’s spin-off label, Cherrytree Records), Wilson remains Mallin’s manager and one of her close friends.
“We still talk to each other as much as possible, but sometimes it’s a little difficult since we’re both so busy. Whenever I ask her a question through text, she’s usually like, ‘Wait, are you asking as my friend or are you asking as my manager?’” says Wilson via email from Los Angeles.
Spencer Westphalen, a founding member of Greenlight and Mallin’s ex-bandmate (and ex-boyfriend), also played an integral role in Mallin’s musical development. Westphalen served as the drummer for Dangerfield, a “classic-rock, indie-pop fusion” band for which Mallin sang lead vocals. (Dangerfield would go on to tour the Midwest for a year and a half before its band members parted ways in the summer of 2015).
Westphalen remains close friends with Rachel, calling her “an amazing, kind-hearted person.”
Yet despite her rosy demeanor, the now- 20-year-old Mallin is honest and level-headed when it comes to the pratfalls of being a starving artist.
“You spend lots of money on recording, equipment, cigs and coffee [as a musician],” she says, shifting her tone from youthful excitement to mature realism. “Money is the only thing that’s ever made me question being a musician.” She pauses, then adds: “[Up-and-coming] musicians aren’t paid shit.”
In the spring of 2015, Mallin decided to leave MU to pursue music full time; she’d previously considered transferring to a school in Nashville, Tenn. to study music production.
“There are so many pros and cons to both ways … school would’ve been [one] way to get my foot in the door [of the industry],” yet even with a degree, many students “can’t get a damn job. I’d hate blowing 30 grand with no job,” she explains.
Yet every time Mallin performs with her live band, Rachel Mallin and the Wild Type, and connects with the crowd, all her toiling away into the wee hours of the morning, all her meticulous recording and re-recording, all her drafting of lyrics, all her tweaking of melodies, all the nights she’s made pennies for a full set, “it [makes] the past 10 years worth it.”
“That’s what music’s all about, making connections. That’s what’s so damn beautiful about it. You put all your emotional shit out there and the audience is like, ‘That’s so fuckin’ true!’” she says, the excitement once again surging in her voice.
She’s currently touring relentlessly and working on her next EP (She released her newest single, “Something Wicked,” last September, right around the first anniversary of her debut EP’s release). With the unfettered dreams of an amateur and the insight of a seasoned pro, she continues to make her mark in the music world.
“I don’t think [Mallin] needs a lot of advice,” says Dave Kemper, a fellow ex-Columbia, Mo. music scenester and onetime collaborator. “She was 18 when I first met her — you usually don’t meet someone as talented as a musician that young. She’s extremely sure of herself.”
“At the age of 20, I’m ready to put all my eggs in one basket,” says Mallin.
