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With its pressed tin roof, scuffed wood floor, and the sort of chairs that make you glad the lights are dim, Cincinnati's Northside Tavern looks an unlikely spot to see the world's 65th-greatest living songwriter. It's two hours past the posted showtime, and Mallonee sits on a chair near the door and tunes a duct-taped guitar as the sun falls behind the scruffy mix of vegan restaurants, Somali groceries, and Buddhist centers outside.

"Are you here to see Bill?" I ask the only woman who appears to be waiting for the music.

She looks toward the bay window that serves as a stage, a mirror ball dangling improbably overhead.

"Who's Bill?" she replies.

In June 2006, Paste magazine ranked the hundred finest living songwriters and put Mallonee at 65th place—ahead of Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, and Michael Jackson. Mallonee gained some prominence in the 1990s as the lead writer and singer for Vigilantes of Love, but these days the brutal economics of the road have stripped him of a backing band; the entire tour operation now consists of Mallonee, his wife, and their black Scion.

At the Cincinnati bar, only a handful of patrons pay attention to the music. But Mallonee sings in signature style anyway, eyes closed and throat shaking out the words as though each syllable must first be wrested from the bone. Veins bulge on his neck, tendons pop on his arms.

He performs an abbreviated set interspersed with stage patter, playing the room as though an invisible audience fills the bar and benches. In reality, the clientele bellies up to the bar, talks, and drinks. A few applaud after songs, then go back to their beers.

Mallonee's songs about mental illness, marriage, Vietnam vets, loneliness, and the whole "cloth of life" are woven through with a skeptical but stubborn faith. At the Northside Tavern, with almost no one listening, a deeply personal verse about grace suddenly mingles with the clink of glassware:

But the Cross is big enough
When your sins reach to the sky
Hope the arms are wide enough
To embrace one such as I.

The goal isn't to win converts, but to make art worthy of the name by witnessing to the whole crazy quilt of human experience. And preferably to do it for more than five people.

While Mallonee's manner never shows anything less than gratitude to his tiny audience, these gigs take a toll on a musician who has struggled to make it for two decades and now sometimes struggles to pay the bills.

"It breaks your heart by slow degrees," he admits later with a rueful half smile.

In an industry notorious for bowing at the altar of youth, Mallonee stands out for not having picked up a guitar until he was 31. "A late bloomer by every stretch of the imagination," he calls himself. Mallonee found his self-described "instrument of healing" after years as a teacher and then a stay-at-home dad, and it unleashed a flood of words. In that first year, more than a hundred songs poured out.

Athens, Georgia, a college community with a music scene that has birthed bands like R.E.M., was fertile soil for Mallonee's vision to take root, and he tilled its clubs and bars fronting the Vigilantes of Love (VoL).

The band embarked on a decade of gritty touring during the 1990s—180 shows a year in "dirty little dingy clubs," $150 paychecks, 7-11 hot dogs, and days spent in a van. VoL churned out records with alarming frequency, toured obsessively, and stayed on the road until everyone was beat up and broken down—then returned home and did it all again.

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October 2008, Vol. 52, No. 10