The Mallett Brothers Band Has Learned What 17 Years on the Road Can Teach You

After years of clubs, endless highways and a changing music business, the Maine band arrives at Rhythm & Roots with a new album, a deeper sense of home and no particular interest in fitting neatly into anybody’s genre.

There was a time when The Mallett Brothers Band could measure progress by where their name appeared on the poster.

Third band on a five-band bill. A little rock club. Beer on the floor. Load the gear, play the songs, get back in the van and do it again somewhere else.

There was a certain charm to it, Will Mallett admits. But 17 years after the band formed in Portland, Maine, the rooms have gotten better, the crowds have gotten bigger and something unexpected has happened along the way.

They’ve realized this thing actually worked.

“We’re so psyched that we’ve been able to keep this thing going this long,” Will said, “and we’ll keep it rolling as long as we can.”

That long road brings The Mallett Brothers Band to Rhode Island for the Rhythm & Roots Festival with a catalog that has grown alongside them and a particularly prolific stretch of new music behind them.

Their latest studio album, Higher Up in the Hills, doesn’t sound like a band desperately trying to figure out what it wants to be.

Perhaps that’s because they’re no longer desperate to figure it out.

Luke Mallett said some of the album’s songs existed for years as unfinished sketches in notebooks. Meanwhile, life kept happening. The band’s personnel changed. Its members grew older and started families. COVID disrupted an industry already notorious for instability, forcing working musicians to relearn how to survive in it.

But something else changed.

“I think that 15 years into this band, we’ve moved away from a sense of urgency that we need to make something work and grown more confident in the idea that it is working,” Luke said.

They know what kind of art they want to make now. And after records born from periods of uncertainty and chaos, Luke describes Higher Up in the Hills as something different: comfortable and confident.

What Does Maine Sound Like?

Tuckerman Brewery, Conway NH. Photo: by Adam Libby a.k.a. Hotdog the Merch man.

Ask somebody to imagine the birthplace of American country music and they’re unlikely to picture Maine.

The Mallett Brothers would like a word.

Will calls the idea that country and American roots music somehow have to come from the South a “false narrative.” He points toward musicians from Maine and neighboring Canada, including Clarence White, Dick Curless and Hank Snow, while acknowledging the stew of Irish and French-Canadian influences that has long existed closer to home.

For Luke, the geography is unmistakably part of the band’s identity.

“Our ties to the Northeast and more specifically Maine are always prominent in our music,” he said. “Something about growing up in this place seems to leave a larger imprint on people than would be the case in some other places.”

But staying home wasn’t how they learned to make Maine music.

Leaving was.

Luke considers the band’s decision to tour heavily around the country during its early years one of the most important things they ever did as musicians and writers. “We are just witnesses to the human experience,” he said, “and that experience is never the same for any two people in two different locales.”

That tension between home and highway runs throughout Higher Up in the Hills.

“Simple Country Livin’” began after Will moved into an old farmhouse in central Maine and decided to try making maple syrup.

It did not go particularly well.

He spent roughly a week and burned about a cord of firewood to produce approximately one cup of syrup.

Still, there was something about those warm March days, snow melting, debris emerging from winter, dogs outside and sap bubbling that found its way into the song.

“Dogs and Horses” came from Luke’s life at home. His wife runs a horse farm in Gorham, Maine, while Luke handles maintenance and repairs when touring doesn’t have him somewhere else.

One day an old Massey Ferguson tractor wouldn’t start.

“Sitting on 16 yards worth of gravel and the starter on the tractor fails,” popped into his head.

“I’ve never written anything more true,” Luke recalled.

The song became a tribute to his wife and the strange bargain they’ve made with their respective lives: she works outside with the animals seven days a week through every Maine season, while supporting a husband who routinely disappears for a week to play music hundreds of miles away.

Then the song picked up another passenger.

Chuck Leavell.

The band had gotten to know the celebrated keyboardist through filming for his PBS series America’s Forests. When “Dogs and Horses” began taking on a Southern-rock character in the studio, somebody suggested they should “Allman” it up.

Why not ask the man who had actually played with The Allman Brothers Band?

Leavell agreed.

“I think he actually changed how we heard the song before he even played a note,” Will said. Hearing Leavell’s piano and organ parts afterward “really tied the room together.”

The Song Their Father Left Behind

New England Outdoor Center, Millinocket Maine. Photo by: Bethany Hayes Chute

Music was never an exotic profession in the Mallett household.

Luke and Will are the sons of acclaimed folk songwriter David Mallett, but Will remembers that when the family lived in Nashville, many of their friends’ parents worked in music. Dad being a musician felt almost ordinary.

The magnitude of what their father could do revealed itself gradually.

Will remembers attending one of David’s shows on the Maine coast when he was a teenager. His father began singing “Summer of My Dreams.”

It knocked him out.

“Real cool memories,” Will said. “Real good stuff.”

David Mallett died in December 2024 after a battle with cancer.

His presence inevitably changed the meaning of some of his sons’ music.

Will originally wrote “Nothin’s Working” as a catchy love song. Its narrator tries one thing after another in search of something that will fix what isn’t working.

During David’s cancer treatment, the elder Mallett would sing the chorus with the dark humor his son remembers well.

Suddenly, the joke wasn’t quite the same.

“These days that song makes me think about the old man,” Will said, “and I kind of think of it as a tune for him.”

The song itself had come to Will in a dream. Beneath the heartbreak surface, he says, it was always about something larger: the futility of chasing fulfillment through booze, drugs, money or whatever else promises to fill the hole.

Other family fingerprints appear in unexpected places.

Luke’s “Caffeine” spent years unfinished. He wrote the lyrics in about 20 minutes, spent a year trying to fit them to a melody and another three unable to settle on the rhythm.

Coffee, too, reminds him of his father.

David seemingly always had a cup of black coffee in his hand. For Luke, years of waking early after late shows only to climb back into a van and drive again created their own emotional attachment to the stuff.

The family inheritance isn’t simply a collection of songs. It’s a way of looking around, noticing something small and realizing there might be a song hiding inside it.

The Road Doesn’t Feel Quite the Same

The Mallett Brothers Band still loves touring.

They just don’t sleep on as many floors.

“We still feel the romantic pull of the open road, for sure,” Will said.

These days, though, families have to be considered. So do logistics. Comfort isn’t quite the dirty word it might have been when they were younger.

The road has matured along with them.

Crossing the Atlantic

Folket Hus ( People’s House), Uddevalla, Sweden. Photo by Fran Stanhope

This past spring, that road led The Mallett Brothers Band to a place they hadn’t been before: Europe.

They toured Sweden, the band’s first time playing in Europe, something they had thought for years belonged on a bucket list but would likely never happen for a band self-managing the expensive and exhausting ordeal of moving musicians and equipment across an ocean.

Friends in the Americana music community helped make that possible. Will credits musicians Ward Hayden of Massachusetts and Dylan Earl of Arkansas – both friends of the band who have toured Europe extensively, particularly in Scandinavia – with first recommending the band to Swedish promotional group Rootsy. Rootsy books American bands to play in Europe all the time and took care of lots of logistical stuff, like procuring a van, transporting the band all over Sweden, and arranging gear rentals.

“Shout out to Bjorn and Roger from Rootsy and to our booking agent Dell for facilitating this whole thing,” Will said.

Sweden also knew a thing or two about the band. The band had seen Scandinavian streaming numbers and the occasional European review crop up on its radar before heading over.

“Scandinavia has always been receptive of our music,” Will said, “so Sweden seemed like a great place to make our European debut.”

Perhaps the most interesting twist in the whole story isn’t that a band from Maine crossed the Atlantic to play music. It’s that they brought 15 American fans with them.

For two guys who played countless shows as the third act in sweaty bars, watching fans follow them across the world is about as real as it gets for measuring how far the road will take you.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on the old Interstate 95 over the years and we love being on the road wherever it leads.”

This time it took them a lot farther than I-95.

But Will can still name the places embedded in the band’s memory: Quixote’s in Boulder, the P&H Café in Memphis, cruising along the Mississippi River, picking songs beside a campfire. Those experiences became part of “Outer Limits,” a song written during the strange stillness of 2020, when touring stopped and nobody knew when, or whether, the highway would open again.

The band’s education happened out there, too.

They learned from groups they admired in Portland, then from musicians encountered on the Red Dirt and Texas country circuits. Will remembers opening for Charlie Robison at the Rev Room in Little Rock, Arkansas, and experiencing a quiet revelation.

There wasn’t one particular trick to steal.

It was simply: “Oh, this is how it’s done.”

And then there are the lessons that probably aren’t taught at Berklee.

Sometime around 2015 or 2016, the band had a night off while camping at Lake Catherine State Park in Arkansas. Free tickets to a Randy Rogers show appeared. They went. A good night became a very good night.

Then came the thunderstorm.

On the way back, a fallen tree blocked the road to their campground. Some retreated with the van. The others decided to walk the remaining couple of miles to their yurt.

They’d been warned about Arkansas’s wild pigs.

So sometime around two or three in the morning, members of The Mallett Brothers Band found themselves walking down a dark mountain road in the pouring rain carrying whatever anti-pig weaponry they could scavenge from the van: a meat cleaver, baseball bat and large knife.

“That image just always kind of sticks in my mind as representative of what those days on the road were like,” Will said.

“Pretty rugged, pretty awesome.”

From Groton to the Ocean Mist

Prescott Park, PortsmoutH NH. Photo by Adam Libby a.k.a. Hotdog the Merch man.

Southern New England has been part of that road almost from the beginning.

Around 2010 and 2011, the young Maine band was accepting virtually any out-of-state gig it could find. New England and the Mid-Atlantic were natural places to start.

Ironically, Will remembers their first shows in the Rhode Island orbit happening on the Connecticut side of the border, at the now-gone Side Pocket Café in Groton.

Those gigs introduced the band to people who stuck around.

Fans followed them to the Met Café in Pawtucket and the Ocean Mist in Matunuck. There were shows at the Knickerbocker Café and Askew, along with festival appearances and friendships that survived the miles and years.

One Rhode Island fan, remembered affectionately as Joe the Firefighter, even brought homemade soppressata to the band’s big hometown show at Portland’s State Theatre, only to run into some difficulty convincing security of the importance of his cured-meat delivery.

The Ocean Mist eventually became something more than another stop on the itinerary.

It became a song.

During soundcheck at the beachfront Matunuck venue, Will started playing a strumming pattern that reminded him of an Irish tune or something by The Waterboys. That led him toward a familiar Ocean Mist saying about the building’s pilings running “straight down to hell” with the devil holding on.

From there, the band built “The Ocean Mist,” a traveler’s tale filled with mysterious gifts and a touch of the supernatural.

Next comes Rhythm & Roots.

And anyone encountering The Mallett Brothers Band there for the first time shouldn’t expect the opening song to explain everything that follows.

That’s been one of the band’s problems for years.

They aren’t quite an alt-country band. Or a rock band. Or a jam band.

Luke admits that once frustrated them. A new listener could hear one song, assign the band a genre and completely misunderstand what the next song might bring.

Eventually, they stopped worrying quite so much about the box.

“We appreciate the songwriter tradition, and try to let the song dictate what style or genre the finished product is going to fit into,” Luke said. “We try to play the songs in a way that makes them fun and interesting to us.”

Maybe that’s another privilege earned after 17 years.

You don’t have to spend quite so much time explaining what you’re trying to become.

You can just get onstage and play.

The Mallett Brothers Band performs Friday, September 4, at the Rhythm & Roots Festival in Rhode Island.

This sponsored feature was produced in partnership with The Mallett Brothers Band.

Note: Featured image Brighton Music Hall, Alston MA, Photo by Dave Thompson.