The Music of Monallo

Apr 21

“I'm always happy to play anywhere really. As long as you got an outlet for me to plug my speaker into … or even not, I'll just play acoustic.”

The Beach Maniac Island Music Podcast (audio):

The Beach Maniac Island Music Podcast (video):

He overcame a near fatal car accident in his teens and serious vocal cord issues in his 20s that left him wondering if he would ever be able to talk again, much less sing. Now Monallo is fully recovered and one of today’s rising Trop Rock stars, having been named the 2024 Horizon Award winner by the Trop Rock Music Association. With hits such as Moonlight, Sunrise Vibes, He’s Gone Coastal, Live by the Sea, and Everything’s Beachy, Monallo is solidly one of today’s top Trop Rock singers and songwriters.

In this Podcast, Monallo tells the stories behind his biggest hits and shares insights on his songwriting, performing, production and marketing skills.

Above all, he says, he just loves creating and performing.

Reels …

Monallo tells how G-Love contributed a surprise verse to his latest Trop Rock release 'Moonlight'.

Monallo tells the inspiration and message behind his latest release ‘Moonlight’.

Monallo tells how he got seven other Trop Rock artists to contribute to his hit song Everything's Beachy, written by Bryan Ruby.

Highlights:

Monallo was born in Tennessee but grew up in Pennsylvania and attended the University of Pittsburgh (“Pitt”) where he got an environmental science degree.

In college he played rhythm guitar in a band. After he graduated, he decided to pursue music on his own but worked himself so hard he damaged his vocal cords, leading to surgery to remove nodes from his vocal cords. Despite fears that he would never sing again, he recovered.
He now lives in Cape Coral, Florida, with his wife, and they are expecting their first baby in May (2025).
Monallo transitioned into Trop Rock music only a couple years ago but has found it a great fit for his music.
Monallo’s latest release, Moonlight, is about “escapism and having a good time with your friends.” He is excited that he was able to get G-Love, one of his all-time favorite artists, to play harmonica on the track - and contribute a verse.
The name Monallo came from mashing together the names of the three rivers that come together in Pittsburgh - the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio.
He and Mark Mulch put together the song Sunrise Vibes remotely after meeting at a songwriter festival and staying in touch, then discovering they both independently had embraced Trop Rock.
Last year’s hit song Everything’s Beachy was pitched to Monallo by Bryan Ruby when they were performing together on stage. Monallo loved it but it is unusual for him to sing songs written by others, so he texted several of his Trop Rock friends and asked if they would join him in recording Everything’s Beachy. He got these artists to participate: Bryton Stoll, Aubrey Wollett, Donny Brewer, Jonas Lorence, Sunny Jim, Bryan Ruby, and Alan Jax Bowers. They each recorded their parts in different locations, and Monallo put it all together at his home studio. “Probably one of the wildest things about that song that not many people realize is there were no two people that were in the same room for that song. Everybody recorded that wherever they were.”
His song He’s Gone Coastal is a quintessential Trop Rock song about “a guy who had just grown up landlocked his whole life and all he wanted to do is leave everything behind and just go drink some rum while he sails around the gulf and just live his days down there.”
The songwriter in Monallo likes to perform in the smaller, more intimate settings, and the musician in him likes to perform for larger audiences on the big stage. “But I just feel really fortunate that people have listened to my songs in both settings and have allowed me to continue to play in both settings. So I just love them both.”
He loves what he’s doing and appreciates all his fans for making it possible. “This is the best position I've ever personally felt in musically. And we're just writing some of the best songs I feel like I've come up with and everything is kind of just getting better and better because I'm learning as I go. But so as long as people are just on the ride and having a good time, that's huge though. Any sort of support is welcomed here at Monallo.”

Full Podcast transcript:

Thanks so much Monallo for being a guest on the Beach Maniac Island Music Podcast.

Absolutely, thank you so much for having me, Bill. I appreciate it.

My pleasure. I want to talk about you and how you started and your journey into Trop Rock music. But first I want to jump right in and ask about your latest release, Moonlight, which is getting a lot of play on Trop Rock stations and getting some social media buzz as well. For those who maybe haven't heard this song, give us a visual of what the song is about.

So we're excited about this song. It's called Moonlight. It's got one of my musical heroes, G-Love on it. To paint the picture, I wrote this song with the daily grind going on lately. It's so hard to get ahead. It's all about taking that step back and realizing that sometimes everything you need is right in front of you.

I always have such great memories of going down to the beach with my friends when I was younger and having a little bonfire and just hanging out at nighttime around the fire with a couple friends, listening to music and having a great time. And sometimes we've got to take a step back and get back to basics and just take a breather because everything's getting crazy out there. So that's kind of where the song was born.

I went to high school up in Erie, Pennsylvania, a little town called Northeast right outside of Erie. So those images of those Lake Erie beach fires were always kind of really good memories to have that I called upon for this song. So it was nice. It's brought back some good memories and hopefully it's just a great summertime “hang out with your friends” song. That's what it was kind of born into.

So that was kind of the inspiration for this song. You wrote it yourself? Is that right?

Yep, yeah, I wrote that song. Wrote it myself. The only part, you know, G-Love surprised us with adding a verse of his own to it. So that was really cool. So he wrote that verse, but the rest of the song was written by me.

So tell me how that comes about. You write a song or most of it, and then where does G-Love fit in all of a sudden? You think of him and give him a call or run into him somewhere? How does he get involved?

Yeah, so I was in the studio. You know, I work with Alan Jax Bowers a lot from Mudcut Studios, Mudcut South. You know, he plays drums in Monallo and he's just a good dude, an amazing producer, an amazing artist. And so we were working together on this song and it's just gonna be me and him. This is back in like December. And we just want to put out a couple of new tunes this year that had him more firmly established in Monallo beause he played on most of the last album songs, but this was like collaboration and I wanted everything to be kind of recorded at his studio. And so we had almost finished the song. We're like, all right, what are we going to do with this lead part? Do we want to get a guitar player? Do I want to play lead guitar organ, whatever we wanted to get. And I was like, man, I could really hear some like harmonica in here. I was like, one of my favorites is G-Love and I had met him before a couple times after his show was down here in Fort Myers and I had kind of opened the door and said, hey, you know, I'm a musician as well. We have a couple of mutual friends. Maybe sometime we could work on something. And, you know, he's polite and he said, yeah, you know, just let me know whenever you got something. That was a couple of years ago. So I told Jax, I was like, you know, I got a Hail Mary of an idea. And the worst that can happen is he says no and, you know, get out of here.

And so we sent him and his team the song and we asked if he could do harmonica and he said yeah. And so all we were expecting was him to just play harmonica throughout the track and do a big harmonica solo for us, and then when he sent the files back, he sent me a little text and he said, hey, just heads up, I dug the song so much that I wrote a verse and threw it in there, too. He said you could use it wherever you want and we're just like, my god like yeah, we're gonna use, we're gonna use this guy's verse, and then we listened to it and it's like yeah, it's awesome. So that's kind of how it happened. man, it was just so cool and such a like mind blowing moment for me. I have listened to G-Love for, you know, at least 20 plus years, you know, a lot of my guitar playing and musical styles derived from guys like him and Jack Johnson and Donavon Frankenreiter. So to be able to like have a song with him, that's out in the world that is actually gaining some traction is like really cool.

So does he then come down to Mudcut South Studios or do you do this all remotely? How is it all put together?

So his part was done remotely. His tour schedule, that man is on the road a lot, so his tour schedule didn't allow anything to come down to Florida, but he has a quick setup up in Boston, like near where he lives. So when he was home for a couple of days, he happened to just be able to go into his studio and they cut his parts and sent it back down to us here at Mudcut. And so we patched it right in. It's pretty wild how these days you can do stuff like that and it's seamless. It's pretty neat.

All right, and what is it about Moonlight that makes it a Trop Rock song?

For me, you know, Trop Rock is all about, you know ... I don't consider myself like full blooded Trop Rock. I think I'm very inspired by it. And I think a lot of my imagery is the same that is shared with Trop Rock. And so I'm very fortunate to be considered a Trop Rock artist and be in the Trop Rock family because I love playing my songs for people that want to hear them. So this song, it kind of deviates from this standard Trop Rock like kind of formula or instrumentation.

But for me, it's all about the visuals and the message. It's all about that escapism and having a good time with your friends. And this happened to be along the shore even. it's just having a good time with the people around you listening to good music. And so that's what I think brings this particular song into the Trop Rock genre compared to some of the other ones I've written that are much more Trop Rock kind of focused.

So the song actually is a little reminiscent for me of one of my all time favorite songs, Dancing in the Moonlight by King Harvest. Do you know that song? That's an old, old song from the 1970s. And it has kind of the same imagery of, you know, a full moon up there, you're out on the beach or wherever, and you're just dancing and enjoying it.

Yeah, yeah, I do know that song. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the same kind of imagery right there. And that's what we were trying to bring to the table. So I'm glad you drew those parallels. That's cool.

So tell me a little bit more about yourself. You're from Erie, Pennsylvania?

Yes and no. I was born in Tennessee and ended up moving up to Pennsylvania. That's where most of my family lives and I graduated high school from up near Erie, went to University of Pittsburgh for a couple years, got an environmental science degree from Pittsburgh, from Pitt, and I just lived in Pittsburgh for, man, probably 10, 14 years total. I can't remember exactly how long I was there. 10 years, 10 years in Pittsburgh and when I was in college, I was just playing rhythm guitar in a friend of a friend's band. And we started doing that a lot more in college. That was awesome because I just got to kind of cut my chops at something and I'd never really performed or played music live in front of people or anything. So it was primarily a cover band with some originals and I did backup vocals and rhythm guitar for them. It was just a lot of fun through college.

Once I got out of college, I thought maybe I'll start writing some of own stuff and maybe I could actually do something with music before the real world starts calling and I go to this environmental science job I got lined up. And of course, I'm just practicing so much, just pushing myself and trying to get better and better. And I ruined my voice, and I had to have vocal cord surgery. So I had to have a bunch of nodes and stuff removed from my cords and, you know, coming out of that, they said, well, you know, if you talk again, it might not even be a normal talking. We don't even know. We're not even worried about singing. We're just going to worry about talking at first. And so I was like, well, all right, well, I'm done. I'll just go to work and whatever. So I kind of shelved music for a while and did my job. you know, a couple of years later, I was just like, man, you know, like I'd lost my voice again and then it came back and I like, ah, let me just see if I could start writing some songs again and just kind of take it easy and work my way back into it. So that was 10 years ago now. I put out my first self-titled as my real name, a little EP, 10 years ago and I haven't looked back since. So it's been, it's been great. So I just continued to push and get better, but eased myself into it since then.

And so Monallo was born about 2019. I needed a band name and I was living in Pittsburgh at the time and there's three rivers in Pittsburgh. I don't know how familiar you are with the geography there, but there's the Monongahela River, the Allegheny River and the Ohio River and they all meet right there in Pittsburgh. And so I kind of scrambled the letters up from those rivers and I liked the sound of that - Monallo. And so that's what the band name is.

So some of the original Monallo people call it “Mon-Al-Oh “still because the al-egheny. Those Pittsburghers hit that sharp A-L. So there's a little debate on how it's pronounced, but over the years it kind of got rounded off to kind of rhyme with Mahalo. So yeah, then here we are. A couple years ago, I got into Trop Rock and it's been off to the races since then, it's been great.

All right. So Monallo is the name of the band or are you referred to as Monallo personally? Both?

Yes. Both. I'm a huge fan of, there's one of my favorite artists is called Bahamas and he's from Toronto, but he is Bahamas and his band is Bahamas. And it's always been the same, the merch is the same, the songs are always Bahamas. And I love that. And that was a big part of when we formed Monallo. I was playing by myself, I was playing in a duo, we were playing as a seven piece band. And it got weird trying to market each event as a different group because we were playing the same songs, but just in a different arrangement. And I was like, this is nuts. I want one word and that's it. And so, as I kind of moved further south, that band kind of disintegrated, but I kept Monallo, and so for years it was just me, solo being Monallo. And now we're kind of bringing back some new band members like Jax Bowers and we've got Pete Robertson and at Music on the Bay, we had Dave Freeman and Aubrey Wollett with us. So it's Monallo. It's all the same, whether it's just me or the whole group. So it's just one easy word.

Right. That's a great name for a band and for an artist. It works well. And where are you living now and what else can you share about your personal life?

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It's been working out for us. I live now in Cape Coral, Florida. So a couple hours south of Tampa. Moved here a couple years ago, kinda as a backend of all the pandemic shutdown stuff. We were living in Virginia at the time near Washington, DC. And we're like, why are we living here and all this traffic when we should be down somewhere we wanna be. So that brought us down here to Florida. It's been great for me. That's when, you know, I kinda started pursuing music a lot more and fitting into circuits down here and finding my way to Trop Rock. I've been living here for a couple of years and married for coming up on nine years now and Baby Monallo is on the way within the next month. I've been keeping busy and we're about to get little busier, I think. So yeah, but things are good.

(Laughing) Baby's name gonna be Monallo Jr?

Yeah, that's what's funny because people, you know, a lot of people don't even know what my real name is. So we just say Baby Monallo and it'll be perfectly fine, you know.

Okay, do we want to share what your real name is?

Sure, yeah, my name's James. Anybody can call me James or Monallo. My head'll spin to both, you know, but it's funny playing. There's so many Jameses in the Trop Rock world that it's kind of nice being Monallo because it sticks out a little bit. But, you know, the first time I was hanging out with Sunny Jim, you know, everybody calls him James and everybody kept saying, James, James. I kept like whipping my head around. It's not me, it's not me. It's the other one everybody knows. So, yeah.

And you and James White (Sunny Jim) and Alan Jax Bowers, you all live kind of in the same area down there in Southwest Florida. So you probably get to see each other a lot.

Now and then. I'm the furthest away. Jax and Sunny Jim live pretty close together. I'm about an hour south of them. Not distance wise, but just the way these Florida roads are and the water and stuff. It just takes a while to get out and around. Yeah, we're all kind of in the same region down here, which is nice. It's nice to be able to go up to hang out with Jax, go to the studio kind of whenever the schedule allows. And then yeah, there's so many great musicians that live down here year-round, it's kind of cool to always kind of catch somebody somewhere, which is nice.

Right, right. It's a great location for trop rockers. No question about it.

Exactly, exactly. This is kind of, yeah, the bread and butter down here, you know.

So how much of your time is spent on the road and what's it like traveling as much as you do and how do you balance that with your personal life?

That's always, always the hard part. So last year I was on the road quite a bit and quite a bit for me is about every other month. I was gone for at least a week at a time or two weeks at a time. I always try and schedule them as smart as possible to hit as much as I can. And when I schedule a road trip, I'm busy every, you know, I'm going to make the most of my time being away. So I think, you know, for example, I went out to Texas and back last year from here. I played 10 or 11 shows in 14 days or something like that. So it's, it's a lot of staying busy. But that's kind of the gig, you know, and this year I'm not hitting the road as much and doing a couple more like fly dates in and out of places. Just got announced that we're doing the Music City PHiN Fest, the first Trop Rock Festival in Nashville. So that'll be cool. But yeah, I'll just fly in and out for that one and less time on the road this year.

But that's kind of the balance. The next year we'll probably get out on the road a little bit more. Yeah, it's just a balance of when you're out working, you work, and then you come home and enjoy your time at home. But it's never easy, that's for sure.

Right, right. And then with a baby coming, it's going to be a little more challenging.

Gonna be a little trickier to leave, but yeah it's all good things you know

But you have a lot of gigs in the area too that you can continue to perform without having to do too much traveling.

Yeah, this is the first, like, since I moved down here a couple years ago, this is the most I've ever played near where I live, which is kind of funny because a lot of people come out and they're like, man, we've never heard you before. Where you been? I like, well, I've been, I've lived here, I've been on the road for the past couple of years. Because even just in Florida, it's a big enough state as it is. But when you're playing up, you know, Tampa, Sarasota, Jacksonville, or the East Coast a lot, you know, it's still a couple hours away from home.

So it's funny playing, you know, down the road from my house now. People are like, man, you know, we never heard of you before. I’m like, yeah, well, I'm here, so maybe I'll see you again sometime.

So we talked about Moonlight. I want to ask briefly about some of your other songs. A few weeks ago, I had Mark Mulch on the podcast and he talked about his collaboration with you on Sunrise Vibes, which is one of my favorite recent Trop Rock songs. Tell us about Sunrise Vibes and how you and Mark Mulch got together for it.

Yeah, so Mark and I, very funny, like we had met here in Fort Myers outside of Trop Rock. Neither one of us had been in Trop Rock yet. We didn't even know what it was. We hadn't heard of it. We were doing a songwriter festival here in town for BMI does a festival here every year. And it's called Island Hopper Festival. And so it just pairs a bunch of different songwriters up and you do songwriter rounds over a week period. And so Mark and I happened to get paired up for back-to-back nights, which is kind of uncommon to be paired up with the same person back-to-back, because I like to switch it up. And we just kind of hit it off. And by the second time, we were a little familiar with each other's songs. We were playing with each other, playing on each other's songs and stuff. And it was pretty neat. And so we just stayed in touch that way. And then I saw him and Kirstie (Kraus) put out a song together, they were hanging out in the studio or something before their song came out.

I texted Mark, I was like, what the hell, man? I was like, you just gonna slide into Trop Rock and not tell me now? And he's like, I didn't know you were here too. I was like, I guess we both kind of snuck in, I don't know. So we just kind of saw each other more. Then at Meeting of the Minds a couple of years ago, the first year it was in Gulf Shores, I was playing and Mark was on a break and he came over to my show and we're talking and we're like, man, we should write a song together sometime. We just gotta figure out what we're gonna write.

My wife was driving across the bridge to work one morning, took a picture of the sunrise and sent it to me. And I posted on Instagram, pretending that I was awake that early, you know, and, and, and I just hashtagged it sunrise vibes. And like within a couple of minutes, Mark had texted me, he's like, that's the song we're going to write right there. And so then we just kind of send each other some videos and sound clips back and forth to how we wanted kind of the melody to sound.

It took a little bit to nail the lyrics down and we hopped on a Zoom and did a Zoom. And then I went up to Nashville and we cut the song. So it was pretty cool. But yeah, I enjoy that song a lot. I actually just used it this morning for a picture I took of an owl down the street from my house. It was, yeah, it's a really cool, really cool song, but I’m very happy I got to work with Mark on that. And yeah, just a funny way that we both kind of found our way to Trop Rock somehow.

Perfect. And then there's Everything's Beachy, your big hit from last year. That recording's so cool because it has so many Trop Rock artists on it. And I have a list here, if I have it right. Tell me if I miss anybody. Bryton Stoll, Aubrey Wollett, Donny Brewer, Jonas Lorence, Sunny Jim, Bryan Ruby, and Alan Jax Bowers and yourself. Did I get them? So how did that song come about and how did you get so many great artists together to do it?

You got them. You got them all. You got them all, yeah.

A lot of luck. But that song, kind of that same festival, the Island Hopper Festival here in Fort Myers was paired up with Bryan Ruby, the writer of the song, two years in a row. And so the first year we had a great time. Bryan's a great dude. He writes a lot of good songs. He's based up in Nashville. And the second year we were playing on some rooftop downtown Fort Myers and he was like, man, you got this whole like beachy vibe going on and was like, oh yeah, man, like it's, you know, living in Florida now, I kind of embraced it. And he was like, I got a song you can have. I was like, oh cool. And, we're on stage. We're on stage. We're not like talking privately. He's like, I got a song you can have. I was like, oh, that's awesome, man. He's like, I'm gonna play it for you right now. I was like, oh, we can talk about it later. He's like, no, I'm gonna play it for you right now. And it was that song. And I was like, that song's pretty catchy, man. Yeah, I think we could cut it. So he'd given it to me and then we were working on my album Songs From the Sand. I was like, man, that's a perfect fit for this album because it's supposed to be all kind of beach stories and songs and just kind of fun and a little more in the Trop Rock vein. And I don't really record songs I don't write or that I haven't written. So it's kind of a new thing for me to take somebody else's song and cut it. And so I was like, you we're just going to have fun with it.

The seven other people that you listed are people that I had met over the past year of my first year in Trop Rock. And I'd either shared the stage with them at some point or played music with them or joined them here or there. So I kind of knew them and had, they had either seen me play or I had played with them. So we kind of knew that we were serious about everything. And there was a lot of mutual respect, I hoped. And then I just fired off a bunch of text messages, you know, like, hey, I'm doing this song, I'm trying to make a big thing. If you got a couple minutes, you know, I just need you to record this and record that and record that. And probably one of the wildest things about that song that not many people realize is there were no two people that were in the same room for that song. Everybody recorded that wherever they were. Yeah, so that song was recorded in seven different rooms for eight people.

I was wondering about that, yeah. Wow.

And I mixed that one here myself and that was honestly fun for me. I really enjoy the engineering side of music as well and the mixing side. I'm learning as I go, but that was pretty cool that everybody did such a great job on their own that we could make it sound cohesive. Like we were all in the room together recording it. But it was a really fun song. It was a great way to take something that I wouldn't normally do like record somebody else's song, but just have fun with it. And people seem to really dig it. And it was a great summer song for last year. And even this year too, I don't know. You go to the beach, it's a good beach song.

Right, always, always. So you have some sort of a studio at your home where you can do some production?

Yes, some sort of studio is a good way to put it. You know, it's, I've done a lot of home recording over the years and it's gotten a little bit more sophisticated as we've gone, but it's really just a simple setup. You just kind of have to know your limitations of the room that you're working in and roll with it. But yeah, that's where I'm sitting right now. Actually, it's kind of my office slash half a studio. So it works. It works all right, you know, but yeah.

That's great. So one more song that I want to ask you about is, and I know it's one you like to perform, He's Gone Coastal. So what is that song about and how did it come into being?

Yeah, that song just came out of a cool guitar riff that I kind of come up with. I was like, man, this is kind of funky and very cool. Again, looking to kind of work on these Songs From the Sand album. And I wanted to take some more Trop Rock sounding songs with me to Meeting of the Minds my first year that I played it. And so I was just like, man, you know, it'd be fun to just kind of escape my own writing process even and just write a purely fictitious song. It was fun to just think about a guy who had just grown up landlocked his whole life and all he wanted to do is leave everything behind and just go drink some rum while he sails around the gulf and just live his days down there. And I was like, you know, I'm just gonna have some fun with it.

A perfect Trop Rock song, right?

Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, so I just kind of took that and ran with it and, and, you know, changed some things around over the course of a couple months it took me to record it ,and I remember playing that one down in Alabama, and Eric from Radio Trop Rock came up and he was like, that's one of the best songs you've ever written so far. And I was like, oh, thank you. So, so I just went basically, as soon as he told me that I went home and recorded it within like two weeks. I was like, I'm gonna start, I'm gonna start getting this one out there then. And that was fun. That's, that's one of the only songs that Jax is not on from the album because it was just, I did it myself before I knew there was going to be a full album behind it. So that was just a really fun single that kind of just started out with that funky little guitar riff and I thought it was really kind of groovy and ran with it.

Awesome. So I had the pleasure of seeing you perform that song and some others recently, a couple of times actually in the last couple of months. First with Nashville singer Anthony Michael at the Riviera Bar and Grill in Punta Gorda, Florida. And that was a great set on a beautiful day along the water. I was kind of in heaven listening to you guys that day.

That's a great spot to play right on the water there. Yeah, it doesn't feel much more Florida than kind of back in the mangroves along the water there. Yeah.

Right, with the boats coming back and forth behind you all day. Then I saw you again at Sunny Jim's Songwriter Series at the historic Venice Florida Train Depot. And again, in both cases, these were small venues, great performances. I love the big stage and the festivals, but those more intimate settings really give me as a Trop Rock music lover, a chance to really hear the music and appreciatew what you guys do most. As a musician, what do you prefer? What are the advantages both of performing in those more intimate settings and in the larger settings such as Meeting of the Minds or Music on the Bay?

I'm a huge fan of both, honestly, and I love a good balance of them, but the songwriter side of me loves the small intimate shows where I can kind of tell the stories and, you know, some songs of mine or anybody's really, if you listen to them, you can just be like, man, what is this about? Like, it's kind of, I don't even know what he's talking about. But if we go, you know, it's such a specific story that if you go to a songwriter show like that, you're like, my God, that's what it is. It was so simple, I just didn't put two and two together.

It's just so cool to interact and have people who want to hear the words and hear what you've written in a very cool setting. So I love those type of shows for that. But the big stage shows are just so much fun. The energy and just being able to kind of crank the volume up and jam with some other guys, kind of is, the musician in me likes those, the songwriter in me likes the intimate shows, but I just feel really fortunate that people have listened to my songs in both settings and have allowed me to continue to play in both settings. So I just love them both. So I'll keep doing them both as long as I can.

Yes, they each have their own appeal. Are there certain venues that you particularly like going back to repeatedly that you just love playing at for some reason?

I don't know if I have any of those particularly. Anywhere I play is always great. I just enjoy performing. So I don't know if I have, I'm always happy to play anywhere really, you know, as long as you got an outlet for me to plug my speaker into and or even not, I'll just play, you know, acoustic, whatever. You got a little corner for me to sit in or something, but I've been very fortunate to play a lot of cool places and I hope to just keep adding to that list as it goes on. So that's all I can say about that I guess.

All right, we talked briefly one day about how being an independent musician, you're also a business person and you have to do all your own promotions and social media. Tell me a little bit about that end of it. How much of your time do you have to devote to that or do you have help doing it or what's all involved in that?

It's a whole thing, man. That's something I've been trying to get better at the past couple years because, you know, there's so many times that, you know, comparison is awful and social media is such a gift but also a curse at the same time because you see all these things and you can kind of get down on yourself really easily and, you know, it kind of was born out of me saying I'm tired of waiting.

You know, like everybody seems to be just waiting for something to happen and well, I just start learning and I'll just start doing and so I started learning about promotions and videos and editing. I, you know, I edit most of my own videos. I, you know, mix a lot of my music except, you know, Jax has worked on the new songs and, but you know, I, I learned, I just learned, you know, I just learned how to do stuff and it does take up a ton of time, unfortunately. And it's, you know, doing your own booking and planning out your trips. It's one thing to book a show but how's your travel working out? You staying in a hotel, you staying with somebody, how's that budget work out? You don't want to go on the road for two weeks and come back in the red, that's a waste of a couple weeks you know you might have had a great time but if you're losing money out there you can't keep doing that month over month or whatever so there's all these different things you kind of have to learn and kind of one of the biggest lessons I've learned is when you get to a point, you need to ask for some help. So lately I've been asking for a little bit of help here and there with different things on the business side because my own personal knowledge can only take me so far. And if I want to keep moving and grooving, you got to kind of call in for some help sometimes. So I started working with some other people who know business side of things a little bit better than I do. And they've started helping us out in January with the release of Moonlight.

It seems to be kind of paying off a little bit and also gives me more time to focus on getting to the studio with Jax or doing more writing here at home or even just spending time with my family. Even in recording, you know, instead of me mixing all these songs right now, you know, I'm working with Jax who what might take me two hours takes Jax 30 minutes, you know, because he's a pro and he's got a better ear than I do. And so that means, you know, I can hang out with my wife at home here. I'm sitting there like, man, I feel like I should be doing something. Like, no, it's done because I had a professional do it. You know, so it's just a balance of that, of what you can do by yourself and kind of picking up that mantle and saying like, hey, nobody's gonna work as hard for me as I'm gonna work for me. But then at some point you kind of need to go to the experts too, to bridge some gaps in your knowledge. So yeah, a little mixture of that, but it's always a learning experience.

A lot of work. So how can fans best support independent artists such as you? Is it downloading, streaming, attending festivals? What can they do to show their support?

... To me, as long as you're listening to the music and you're telling your friends about it, doesn't matter where you listen to it. Cause you're spreading the vibes and that's, that's the biggest thing is, is growing the, growing the family, growing the fan base and telling your friends who might really enjoy it. They might have a friend that enjoys it. Next thing you know, we've networked out to places we've never been, but, um, merchandise, coming to shows, showing up. Downloading is always better than streaming. But really, you know, I hate asking people for stuff as long as you're enjoying it you want to hear the music, just listen to music wherever you can. And that support in itself, you know, it's amazing that people are listening. And sometimes it blows my mind, you know, I've been doing this for about 10 years now. And it feels like we're still just getting started. So it's pretty cool.

This is the best position I've ever personally felt in musically. And we're just writing some of the best songs I feel like I've come up with and everything is kind of just getting better and better because I'm learning as I go. But so as long as people are just on the ride and having a good time, that's huge though. Any sort of support is welcomed here at Monallo.

Great. And what do you have coming up? New releases, big events?

We're taking a little bit of a break here. I have one last show tomorrow, which will probably be after this airs anyways. Then I'm taking a little bit of a breather to kind of hang out with family and arrival of the baby. But in June, Jax and I are playing the A1A Beach Bash up in Fernandina Beach which will be really fun. They do a great event up there. This will be our first time playing it. So we're very excited for that. And in August, I'll be doing the Music City PHiN Fest. It's the middle of August. And then the end of August, I'm doing the Forgotten Coast here in Florida is putting together a Jimmy Buffett weekend up in East Point, Florida. And they got a great list of musicians playing all kinds of venues all over town that day. So I'll be there as well.

Where is East Point, Florida? Not familiar with that.

It's up on the Panhandle. You know Apalachicola? Right across the bay. So yeah, so the whole event goes from, it's in Apalachicola, it's in East Point, there's all kinds of venues over there. So that'll be really cool. I think I'm playing like five times over that three day period. Like each artist is playing like five sets spread out over these different venues and stuff. So that'll be a fun one. And then we get into the fall time, which I'm not really sure what that looks like yet, but we'll have new music coming out probably in August will be our next song coming out right around the time where I start getting back out there and start playing more shows in front of people so we can help push the song a little bit better. But that's what we got. And we'll have more songs coming out throughout the year too, hopefully. So it'll be good.

Awesome. Is there anything else that you would like to add that people should know about Monallo?

Just follow Monallo. M-O-N-A-L-L-O. Tell your friends.

All right, well, thanks again Monallo for joining me on the Beach Maniac Island Music Podcast. I wish you all the best of luck and continued success and I hope to see you again soon.

Thank you so much for having me Bill. It’s been great talking with you, and I hope to see you again soon too man, take care out there.

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