“Healing Soul” Print
This 3-color hand cut block print was created by Kreg Yingst as the back cover of the vinyl edition of Blister Soul. The 8″x 8″ image is printed on handmade tan Lokta paper, and comes matted in black with a finished size of 10”x 10.” This is a limited edition of 25, and each piece will be signed and numbered by the artist!
Yingst talks about his concept behind the print here:
~ Bill Mallonee, Certain Slant of Light
Blister soul (sole) describes the weariness we sometimes feel as we journey this life of faith. The longer the miles, the more the blisters. In this block print, I’ve presented this “soul” troubadour as a modern-day Elijah; beaten and bruised and wanting out of the game. But through his discouragement, God meets his needs, restores his energy, encourages his faith, and sends him back into the battle.
This album (Blister Soul by the Vigilantes of Love), for me, captures the reality of the day-to-day grind while offering hope. From the song Skin, about Vincent Van Gogh and his weariness with the religious establishment, “sew your heart onto your sleeve, and wait for the ax to fall,” to the Emily Dickinson titled, A Certain Slant of Light—“gather up these weary bones, another day to muster, yeah twisted wreckage spent, held in strictest confidence. . . as I drift beneath the waves,” we’re reminded that the struggle is real.
Songwriter Bill Mallonee is at his finest: honest and sincere, but not without a slant of light. There are too many songs and lyrics that I could quote from Blister Soul that paint this picture—all is not well in Disneyland. Listening to it again thirty years after its initial release, I believe these wounds might never have fully healed, making it just as pertinent today.
There is a balance in navigating life’s joys and sorrows. We can ignore our reality (“yeah the thing that’s hard to speak of, but the secret we all know, oh this blister soul”), we can be so immersed in it that we drown (“In this mood for awhile, I collapse like a small child”), or we can be honest while still holding onto hope, as Bill makes clear to us and Elijah in his “Parting Shot”:
Your empty cup and I’ll fill it again. . .”