Jesse Malin, former singer for New York City punk rockers D Generation, will release his first solo album, The Fine Art of Self-Destruction, on January 28th. Produced by Ryan Adams, the eleven-song album was recorded in a one-week span last January at New York's Lo-Ho Studios.

"Going into it I thought I was going to make more of record Nick Cave/Tom Waits-type album -- introspective, with guitar and piano," Malin says. "[Adams] plugged in electric guitars, and we ended up making more of a rock record. That just came from us jamming and having a real good time during the two rehearsals we did before we started recording. Suddenly everything just kind of started to swing that way."

Friends since Malin's days with D Generation and Adams' tenure with Whiskeytown, the rookie solo artist and the first-time producer kept takes and overdubs to a minimum.

"I'd sing a song and he'd say, 'That's it,'" Malin says. "And I'd be like, 'We're doing it live like it's the Fifties!' And when he'd go out to play pool, I'd try to sneak in and re-sing the song, and he'd catch me and erase the track . . . Everything was left live and I thought it was pretty much crap. I was pretty pissed until we went out a couple days later to a friend's bar and turned it up and I really realized we'd captured something."

Recorded with a full band that included Adams sitting in on guitar and backing vocals, Malin's blitzkrieg session was also graced by Melissa Auf der Maur, former Hole and Smashing Pumpkins bassist and current frontwoman for the Black Sabbath tribute band Hand of Doom. "She's a real sweet girl," says Malin of Auf der Maur, who contributed backing vocals to four songs. "We were drinking a couple beers on the West Side and talking about music. She agreed to supply some angelic harmonies. It's a real contrast to what she's doing -- she's into some pretty heavy, dark rock."

The Fine Art of Self-Destruction's twelve songs serve as Malin's thinly veiled musical autobiography. "It's like if you ask Woody Allen about his movies and he says, 'They're not about me,'" Malin says. "It's like, 'C'mon!'" Malin did, however, alter some facts and figures. "You want to protect the guilty."

Malin set out on his own partly because he felt constrained by D Generation, who became as infamous for their teased hair and sneers as for their distortion-heavy sound. "People kinda read the cover and not the book," he says. "We'd try to write these songs, and people would just talk about the hair and the shoes. We would tour around, and it was all about how fast we could play, not the melodies or the lyrics. It was about the mosh pit or hitting yourself with a microphone. I'd be on the bus listening to Wilco, or Bob Dylan or the Flaming Lips and getting into all these other heads, and then suddenly I'd be going out on that stage again. So I felt like it was time to start something new."

The Fine Art of Self-Destruction track listing:

Queen of the Underworld
TKO
Wendy
Downliner
Brooklyn
The Fine Art of Self-Destruction
Riding on the Subway
High Lonesome
Solitaire
Almost Grown
Xmas
Cigarettes and Violets

COLIN DEVENISH
(October 29, 2002)