Folkstage

David Mallett As an acting student at the University of Maine, Mallett discovered the music of singersongwriters like Gordon Lightfoot and Bob Dylan and soon began writing his own songs. "Up until that point, I thought of myself as a singer," he said. "In college, everybody that was singing also wrote. I realized that that was what I wanted to do. I was a theater major. I felt short-changed that I had to speak someone else's words. I felt that, if I became a singer-songwriter, I could sing my own words." Honing his craft as a soloist, Mallett increasingly expanded his repertoire with original tunes. "When I was in my twenties, playing in bars," he remembered, "I would sprinkle in a few of my own songs. They blended in pretty well. By the time that I was 26 or 27, I was singing all my own songs." Touring the folk circuit for ten years and moving to Nashville in the late 80s Mallett continued to record and write new songs. Named one of the most memorable "Mainers" in the millennium edition of The Bangor Daily News (along with Marshall Dodge, Andrew Wyeth, E.B. White, Stephen King, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others), Mallett's songs are filled with passion, evocative imagery, and a sense of the inevitable passage of time. The struggle of the common man and the loss of American towns and landscapes are the subject of many of his songs. When he is not touring, the place where he makes his songs is in his writing room in an old farmhouse with a view across the field and a tintype of his great-great grandfather on the wall. "I like to keep reaching out to touch the past," he says, "to connect it with what's going on now. To me music is one of the few things that is timeless�human emotion is one continual chain."

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