I Watched Jay Malinowski Get Drunk and Have An Existenial Crisis In a Small Town

Last night in the sleepy little cottage town of Bayfield, Ontario, Bedouin Soundclash frontman Jay Malinowski and his new band the Deadcoast played a hodgepodge hybrid of chamber-folk/pirate-pop music to a packed town hall. He also got really drunk and had an onstage existential crisis. His new album Martel is a concept-record/novella/Twitter account based on the true history of the demons and violence in Malinowski's family tree. Last night in Bayfield, those demons exorcised themselves through a stumbling, mumbling hour-plus onslaught of drunken nihilistic dread.

And it was awesome.

"I didn't expect this place to be so quiet," Malinowski said like, six times. He wasn't wrong though: the Bayfield Town Hall is an ornate, stoic country playhouse, in past lives a hub for village government but nowadays a venue for weddings and locally run concerts and celebrations (I remember my shitty high school band convincing punk celebs Fake Problems to play at the hall to 40 enthralled kids in like '07). It's this quaintness, along with the efforts of local promoters like the Bayfield Concert Series, that's attracted a litany of Juno-approved "Adult Alternative" artists to swing on down to the sandy shores of Lake Huron and play for the rural cultural elite. We've had Joel Plaskett, Ron Sexsmith, Jason Collett, and more, including Canadian singer-songwriter Basia Bulat, who remembered the town fondly when we spoke over the phone.

"Places like Bayfield are amazing because you basically know everyone in town by the end of the show and then you can all have drinks together after," she says. "It kind of feels like a little house party, though the Bayfield Town Hall is this amazing little venue with a lot of history. The energy is definitely different. Everybody's ready to welcome you like family very quickly."

Family in all its mutations and manifestations is the very thing Malinowski has been and was actively wrestling with on Wednesday night. The album Martel tells a complicated story, half involving a distant relative from France who fled to the New World after his mom got her head chopped off by Louis XIV's people, and the other half is Malinowski negotiating his feelings of grief and anger brought on by the ancestral baggage in his blood and the recent death of his grandfather. Before he died, the man (who Malinowski repeatedly purported was an honest-to-goodness pirate) left Jay a bunch of "books and maps of his life in the Maritimes, our lineages of rope tied back to France, the Old World, and the thick blood of Atlantic brine." Check out the prologue for the record below for added context:

Needless to say, this existential weight made the man a mess. He showed up without a guitar and had to bum one from a local. He slugged back Carlsbergs, slurring and cracking through songs while dropping his pick and fumbling between that borrowed guitar, a piano, and some harmonium apparatus he picked up in Iceland. He'd ramble on with goofy asides about renting a puppy for a couple hours in Japan, then switch gears and drop shade on his mom, and ex-lovers, and the music industry, and the audience ("You don't get it. You don't.")

This isn't to say the music was terrible; hell, it was pretty spectacular. Backed by Vancouver string trio The End Tree and Patrick Krief from the Dears (who performed some solo stuff with a harmonizing/howling Malinowski on back-ups), the songs were vibrant, knotty, and lush, one moment rushing and rising in tense crescendos while in another swaying with a drunken sea captain's swagger. Malinowski looked the part, conducting his found-sound nu-world-music symphony like a direct descendent of both Shane McGowan and Paul Westerberg. Fittingly, Malinowski stopped mid-song during a solo encore no one asked for and reassured us the set was "never as bad as the Replacements."

The thing is dude, I totally get it. You're surrounded in darkness, and the man doesn't want your self-described sad-sack music, they want "the night to keep feeling your song." But as an artiste who makes bank spelunking into the nether regions of your soul, all you have are these fits and convulsions that make your literal and inherited blood boil.

Those are called feelings, and you're confusing them with thoughts, maaan. So preach on about how we're all inherently vicious animals made of bones and skulls from the past and there's nothing we can do to change the tides of violence and pain, when really you're just bloodletting and justifying your fear of the void instead of trying to crawl out from it. Maybe this is you trying to crawl out from it. But time is a flat circle, and all these discoveries you're making have already been discovered (were you even paying attention in that second-year Intro to the Enlightment elective?) and will continue to be discovered again and again by self-hating intellectuals worldwide unto infinity. Whatever man, trust us, you might not get yourself yet, but we get it, and we get you.

The graphic novelist Seth (born in my hometown, the nearby Clinton, Ontario) spoke at York once and said that being an artist means 50% of the time you think you're a genius and the other 50% you think you're the worst piece of shit ever. Malinowski seemed to be treading that line, balancing between "serious artist" egotism and ghastly, fear-soaked self-deprecation. Pascal said "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" and hell, it's got to be even harder when you have to deal with your shit in front of a bunch of kind and patient Southwestern Ontarians who have to work the next morning.

But man, in the post-mallcore/Drizzy Drake musical landscape, where over-emoting means demystification, it felt super real to see this decked-in-mourning-black rockstar archetype have a genuine Wednesday night meltdown. He invited the violin player and his sound guy up for a final singalong of "We've All Got To Be Somewhere" from his first solo release Bright Lights and Bruises, and from the title to the song's content, it looked like a cathartic moment for Malinowski. "I had a bad day," he finally revealed to the crowd, as if we couldn't tell. We could, but heck, he bared the darkest depths of his shitty violent soul to us; I suppose he felt we were all family (woah).

"In the end the greatest encounter we will ever face is the encounter with oneself." - Jay Malinowski

Good luck with that dude.

Ivan Raczycki (@beerscanada) is an unlicensed practitioner of internal psychology.