ATL icon releases experimental new album, T.T. Mahony Is French People

Arts

Jan 28

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T.T. Mahony identifies, in the most true and unflinching sense of the word, as a Weirdo. “I've always been the weird kid, a little off to the side. I felt that way even long before puberty, so when sexual identity stuff came into it, it fit pretty naturally into what I was already about,” he confesses. “I ain't running for president, so I might as well do everything extra, and I mostly have!”

Atlantans are likely familiar with Mahony as a local musical celebrity: the organist at Edgewood’s famed Sister Louisa's Church for Organ Karaoke and Preach-it!; The Earl's annual Charlie Brown Christmas; performing piano on various Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave tributes; organizing Bowie In Sweats around “the icon's parinirvana”; original “jokes” bands The Standard 8 and Guyliner. Like a fine art, Mahony has had a studious yet intuitive knack for entertaining audiences within the cosmos of cover songs.

“The analogy that springs to mind is cooking a dish that people have had a million times before. The advantage of recording a song you already know people love is that the ‘appetite’ is definitely there. But the other dimension of this analogy is that it's easy to bore the shit out of people,” Mahony laughs. “If you're making coq au vin, you know people are going to compare it to every other one they've ever had--and there are likely to be some heavily freighted and treasured remembrances there, so it'd better be good. From that point of view, better not to cover a song--why fuck with someone's cherished memories or associations? But if you have your own really personal angle on it, if you're sure they've never had coq au vin this way--go for it.”

Mahony’s parodies and portraits alike muster a certain queerdo energy, but after extensively complimenting the works of others, he stepped towards something else altogether: the “solo act”. T.T. Mahony Is French People presents his own smorgasbord of experimental sensibilities, a merry-go-round of mastery. The man behind the best of ATL’s reenactment realm reveals himself within the wilds of genre-less bliss, which, without a doubt, sparkles with the perfected theatrics of Mahony’s comfort onstage. In and of itself, French People is brilliantly orchestrated and actualized, much thanks to quarantimes.

“Given that I'm trying to do the right thing for my own health and everyone else's, my life has become quite concentrated. Not that I'm incredibly disciplined now (though much more so with many fewer distractions), but my life is 95% lived out in my 700 or 800 square feet in Cabbagetown--four walls,” Mahony shares of his current remote work. “When you're in the room with people, you tend to feed off what's happening. Making things to be consumed somewhere I can't see or imagine throws me back on my own imaginative resources--I end up going with ideas I've had floating in my head for a while, but never acted on.”

Undertaken around the March 2020 lockdown, configuring cohesion between different songs written over a decade found a new story altogether as French People tours through Mahony’s many moods with ease. The fearsomely gorgeous “Four Angels” encompasses ritualistic esoterics, segwaying into a heavily saturated cover of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, and yet, worlds apart, flow and follow. Largely composed with Logic Pro X, computronic sonics are utilized to enhance avant garde New Wave nods, with accompaniment from friends. Above all, French People is a testament to trusting the process, letting ideas breathe to, in turn, create a wonderful unique output of one’s own true flavour, in Mahony’s case a mashup of Divine meets Tchaikovsky.

All of this began as a gut feeling: “Everybody knows that thing in their body they could never put into words, but wishes they could. For me, that's how a song starts. And I try to take a page from good writers--start with details. Start sketching something small, trying to capture just that, and work outward. Most often, you find out the thing isn't going to be at all what you planned, but you just keep going. At some point you recognize this is a thing--kind of like the first time a really small kid shows you their character. You're like,’Oh! OK. Well nice to meet you.’ Whereas before they were kind of a baby. From there (song and person), I just try to honor who and what they are, and allow it.”

The self-released record is available on Bandcamp, Soundcloud and CD.

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Sunni Johnson is the Arts Editor of WUSSY and a writer, zinester, and musician based in Atlanta, GA.

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