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"Spiritually, emotionally, physically, we were kind of wearing out," Mallonee says now, "and there was no strategy behind it."

The band found itself too serious about faith for the secular market and too elusive for the CCM scene. Routinely asked whether VoL was a Christian band, Mallonee would respond, "Well, no. I'm a believer, and I can witness to something that I would call historic Christian faith. But it's not an agenda and I don't have a Christian record deal and I won't have a Christian record. That makes it propaganda."

1999's Audible Sigh was supposed to be the breakout record, with Emmylou Harris on guest vocals, a label behind it, and a band at the height of its powers. The album made waves on the British charts, but struggled to gain publicity in the U.S. Mallonee depended on publicity from No Depression, an influential alt-country publication, to at last propel VoL into the big leagues, but the magazine didn't even review the project. The album's very first word, "failure," began to seem eerily prophetic.

Mallonee never got over the episode. Late last year, when a No Depression editor explained that long-ago decision on a blog, Mallonee responded with such sarcasm and anger that one of his own fans wrote in a follow-up post, "It pains me to see you so bitter."

But the missed opportunity came at a crucial time. When the band's next album, Summershine, appeared only two weeks before September 11, 2001, discouragement set in. A subsequent U.K. tour was disastrous—it had no radio support, and the band was robbed of thousands of dollars of gear in Scotland.

Back in Athens early the next year, the band gathered at Mallonee's house to see if anyone wanted to continue. No one did. Instead of breaking through, VoL broke up.

Mallonee, now 53, still grinds out a living by playing 140 solo shows a year in bars, coffee shops, churches, private homes—anywhere that people will listen. It has meant an existence at or below the poverty line for the last few years, trouble paying the bills, and rocky personal relationships. Yet Mallonee still calls his work "an absolute joy."

For Mallonee, music isn't so much a means of employment as it is a necessity. He grew up in an alcoholic family and had a faith experience as a young man, but soon found that it "wasn't doing any good. When it came right down to finding anything like an identity or power or strength," he says, "I was absolutely on every level being undercut by these tapes that were playing in my head."

Music became a way to process those voices, but his songwriting goes beyond personal therapy. "It's my experience, but it's everybody's experience, or it wouldn't be resonating with people," he says.

Always a "words guy," Mallonee is flattered when his lyrics connect with listeners, but has no desire to be anyone's lifeline. After four or five letters from suicidal fans who said his words saved their lives, Mallonee now says that music is "too flimsy a thread to hold onto the world with."

He gravitates to books about fractured saints, so it's no surprise that Frederick Buechner tops his personal reading list. A Presbyterian minister who has written powerful novels about the patriarch Jacob and religious con man Leo Bebb, Buechner himself could have penned the lyric, "No saints to be found in here / Only debtors, bankrupt, screw-ups, broken, bested dearly."

Failure haunts Mallonee's songwriting, especially on the solo disc Locket Full of Moonlight ("What is the illusion and what can you lean on? / There's a sword called 'coming up empty' that I have fallen upon"). As he wryly remarks, you "can't sell that to youth-group kids."

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October 2008, Vol. 52, No. 10