Blister Soul 30th Anniversary Pre-Order

I am glad you’re here! I’ll get to the point.
Blister Soul. 

It’s one of the best sounding albums I’ve ever made. 
The songs continue to feed my heart, challenge my walk, and sometimes haunt my thoughts.
Uplifting in it’s textures and impact.
A wonderful raw-ness pervades. Never over-thought. Just stand and deliver. 
The album’s themes were Life affirming even in the caverns of darkness and sadness where we tend to inhabit and live out our days. It was ever stoking the fires to stay warm; waiting for Grace; Gospel hoping. 
This album made my heart dance. It made my soul smile. 

It still does.

Albums are sometimes “snapshots” of moments freeze-framed in time. 
I love that image. 
Who knows what they’ve become when years down the road they “thaw?”
What is the “residual” that’s left? 
I’m 30 years and 85+ albums down the road that rock & roll has taken me. 
It has been a strangely lonely and uncertain journey. 
During and after the making of Blister Soul, I began to feel those things more and more. (You start to see vestiges of it in almost every real artist and musician you meet.)
It’s the stuff they don’t tell you upfront. 
Me? I kept writing. “Songs keep the devil away.”

A few of these songs live only on these takes, having never being fully integrated into the band’s “live” set. Which is kind  of sad. One “wants the best” for their children. 
Others became undeniable entries into the VoL “canon.” 
It’s all here. It was comprised of radio anthems, mid-tempo rockers, post-punk snarlers, plaintive folk-rockers and ballads. 
Honestly? I still get chills and these “lump-in-the-throat” moments when I hear them. I don’t know why.

John’s Keane’s production and the band’s song sensitivity paint these songs with colors and nuances that breathe when they needed it. Muscularity and attitude when that was called for it. Our Southern roots shown on every page. And like a boxer never far from the ring, they move in different ways every time they enter the room. Once tasted, I have always wanted such musical transcendences to go on forever. 

Perhaps I chase it still. 

But, I will remember how rag-tag and temporary it all felt; if I could have kept this line-up together for subsequent tours leading to another album? Oh, how I wished. Oh, how I prayed…
To this amazing band of remarkable people and players who treated my songs with love, respect and showered them with their talents, I say “Thank You.”

I left the last mixing session feeling like Vigilantes of Love had made a milestone record. The last mix and closing song, Blister Soul (the reprise), still captures and says it all:
the past, the present and all that was to come.

And somehow I found my heart had grown larger…and it, and I, stepped out of the studio and those sessions into a gathering autumnal cold. 

I began to get the feeling on subsequent tours that it was through this album that I was connecting with a commonality within myself that was shared by everyone; by each of us living in the same “similar skin.”

These were experiences and “unnamed things” that were perhaps bigger than dry academic concepts themselves. Things beyond words, but still needing our bedraggled and tattered nomenclature to give them shape. Experiences that we hold forth through art, song and music in an attempt to make those unnamed things visible…first to ourselves, and then to all.
I think that’s what the making of this album gave back to me.

Joy On The Journey, Friends,
Bill Mallonee