Running Into Luck: Roshan Maloney

This article was published on 08/23/2011 on http://eugenedailynews.com/2011/08/23/running-into-luck-roshan-maloney/ and is re-posted here with permission.



Nancy Glass – EDN

Most 10-year-old boys like getting toys.  You know, something to play with; Tonka Trucks, toy cars or maybe a toy gun; something to spur the imagination.  Not singer/songwriter Roshan Maloney.  But then again, Roshan Maloney was not your typical 10-year-old east Indian born boy. Born in 1986 in Hyderabad, India and relocating to the United States, to Eugene in fact, when he was a few weeks old.  At the age of 10, his parents got him a piano.   Maloney says ” It was fun for about a month, then it became a chore.  I absolutely hated it.  After completing high school,  I started playing piano again, and never put it down.”  Growing up as only child, Maloney says, his childhood was “pretty normal” and he never really got into any trouble. “I was kind of lonely kid- I usually dealt with it by escaping into my imagination. That’s probably why I live in my head so much as an adult” he tells me.  In addition to piano, Maloney learned to play the guitar as well as the melodica, and he’s working on a cool way of incorporating it into his shows.

Roshan Maloney

With the unenviable position of being the guy all of his friends came to as a sounding board, Maloney says music was/is his form of therapy.  “I was always the friend that friends would confide in.  Yet I could never really talk to anyone, or share how I really felt about things. When I found music, it was like a whole ‘nother world opened up for me. It definitely started off as a kind of therapy.”
With The Black Keys in his iPod today, Maloney likes all kinds of music depending upon his mood.   “I feel like I go through different seasons of genres. Weeks will go by and I’ll just have hip-hop on my iPod.  The next day I’ll start feeling “socially conscious” with a “stick-it-to- the-man” attitude, so I will spend a few weeks listening to indie rock.  Then I’ll spend some time digesting the empty calories of whatever is top 40 at the time.   But at the end of the day if I’m humming a song after hearing it once on the radio or in a friend’s car…that song is definitely making it on the iPod.”
From such songwriting icons as Smokey Robinson and  Stevie Wonder, Maloney draws inspiration from his heroes consistent ability to write incredibly powerful songs.  “Those guys were churning out hits that were decades ahead of their time.”  He also is in profound awe of today’s current artist Bruno Mars.  “He is doing crazy things right now.   He’s writing hits for himself, but more impressively he’s writing hit records for other people. He wrote Cee-lo Green’s “Forget You”, he wrote Matisyahu’s “One Day”, he also wrote “Wavin’ Flag” for the world cup last year. He’s really an Incredible songwriter.”

Bryan Thompson, Jeremiah L. Scott with Maloney

The elusive element of inspiration is often times a curse for musicians; however, not so for Maloney.  “I pretty much write songs about how I feel at any given time. With that being said, usually the best songs have come from a place of heartache or during some difficult time. Take, for example, the song off his latest EP, “The Black Dress“  “Mr. Entertainer.”  Maloney explains; “I wrote Mr. Entertainer after a string of failures. That song has an air of arrogance to it,  but it’s inspiration was quite the opposite.“  Having thrown away a couple of really big opportunities, he was feeling like he had really blown it.   He recalls, “I invested all my emotion into these opportunities and after continued heartbreak I started to build these walls so I wouldn’t care anymore.”  Like all of us when things don’t go our way, or when failure’s fingerprints end up all over us somehow, Maloney found himself going through the motions; never feeling like he was good enough. In his own words, he says “it was a poisonous way to think. I didn’t want to live my life like that. I had to either change the way I was thinking or choose a different profession!” So on drive home one night he wrote the story of “Mr. Entertainer“, a song about believing in yourself even when you have no reason to believe.  Keenly, Maloney ever so slyly tells me “until you believe in yourself and believe in your own potential it’s hard for anyone else to.”
Getting it out of your head and down on paper isn’t as easy as it sounds.  Not only is inspiration critical, you have to just let the feelings and emotions bare themselves without the nit-picking element of self-criticism.  Maloney tells me how he goes about writing a song, and how, most of his songs are really, never finished.   “I usually start with an idea of what the song will be about;  a feeling that it should convey. Then I start playing around with different chord progressions until I find a sound that I like.  With incoherent lyrics I start scatting out melodies. Once those pieces are put together, I pick up the pen and start plugging in lyrics.  Then I spend the next year picking apart the song.  I never consider any of my songs done.  Even after they’re on the album, I hear things I still wish I could change.”

The Black Dress EP

Yet new material is ever-present with the singer/songwriter.  “I’m constantly writing. I have a lot of songs on deck and on paper.  But for the time being I’m really focusing on this album, “The Black Dress” EP.  Released in May of this year, this EP contains 6 original songs, including the piano driven title track.  The song “Mr. Entertainer” illustrates Maloney’s (apparent) ease with being in the spotlight.  You’d never believe this man ever got “butterflies in his stomach” before his performances.
Stage fright is something almost all musicians find ways of overcoming.  Thankfully, Maloney got some good advice early on in his career that really works for him.  ”I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get nervous before shows. I had an acting teacher in college tell me that everybody gets butterflies, but the trick is to make those butterflies fly in a row.”
And making those butterfly’s fly in a row is exactly what Maloney does on stage in his live performances.  Full of energy and engaging he hopes his songs will connect with someone in the audience,  “When I get an email from someone I’ve never met, telling me that they made a connection with one of my songs, it makes everything else worth it.”  The quintessential show man at heart, Maloney claims to maintain a measure of truthfulness to what he does… a sense of undeniable honesty in his songs.  And much like a freshman in the school of the music industry, one of his biggest hopes is “That it’ll always still be “me” up there.  The moment when I’m on stage playing and I’m completely transparent and whoever is listening can see me for what I am…that’s a cool moment. It makes all the other uncertainty worth it.”

Maloney at work behind the camera

Not only an accomplished musician, Maloney is also recognized as an accomplished actor.  He explains “I think music and film go hand in hand. They’re both storytelling and at the crux of who I am…I’m a storyteller. When I was kid I got to play in the yard and make-believe cops and robbers. Now, as an actor, I get to do the same thing.  I was always interested in art.  I used to draw all the time.  I would make home movies out of clay characters that I would create.  That reminds me, I need to ask my parents for those tapes…and then burn them so they never make it onto YouTube!”
While Maloney may be worried about clay characters hitting YouTube, he’s quite content on the bigger, silver screen.  It was his work as Hayden Levit, in the film short “Balloons Float to Heaven,”  which garnered him the Best Supporting Actor award at the 2010 Fox Film Festival.
Not so surprisingly, it was through his connections as an actor that his music video “Run Out of Luck” got made.  After shooting a pilot last year for a web-series called “Planning to Fail (Spectacularly)” he became good friends with the team that put it all together.  At the time, he was tossing around the idea of making a music video to Bryan Thompson, the director.  “He heard the song and loved it.  He and his team, Revolver DMS, made the video. It helped their reel and I got an incredible product.  Very much a  win/win. We were lucky enough to cast Portland model, Jillian Rabe of Jillian Rabe, LLC as the girlfriend and the rest was history. The concept and the execution was all Bryan.”

Maloney and his band

With a schedule that would make the workaholic look lazy, Maloney is always on the go.  “If I had free time I would sleep more. I daydream of sleep.”  But if he were to sleep at all, he tells me one of the scariest things would be ” I’ll wake up, look back, and realize that I wasted the best years of my life chasing an impossible dream. Or that one day I’ll have done everything I can do to climb the ladder just to realize that it was leaning up against the wrong wall the entire time.“  A fear that we all can relate to regardless of our age or our profession.
Maloney believes that life should be lived with passion and a love for the people around one.  To that end, he’s a consummate professional in that he believes “in whatever you do, do it with all of you.” He adds, “my hope is that when people come to see me perform they can hear that in my music, and see that when they see me.”Despite the fact that it’s only his name on the posters these days, his band is critical to his success.  ” I’m fortunate to have really great musicians for friends and band mates. His band, consisting of Kyle Cunningham plays lead guitar, Ryan Charboneau on bass, Stephen Temple on drums and David Smith on guitar is a like a family.  “We all grew up together in church, fight like brothers, and genuinely have a strong bond with one other.”

 Vowing if he couldn’t do music or act, he “would probably go somewhere tropical and sell bananas” Malone isn’t about to stop creating finely crafted well written songs, engaging music videos or dramatic acting roles anytime soon.  If you’ve not seen him yet, he’s playing next at “Flock the Village 2011” at Crescent Village on Friday, September 9th, the huge kick off party for the 2011 Oregon Duck Football season; Roshan’s hometown team.
You can check out his website at  www.roshanmaloney.com