From the studio in the Chattanooga Public Library this week we have a session featuring two gifted singers and songwriters, Michelle Malone and Sarah Peacock. In town to play a show at Songbirds, they were gracious enough to stop by the studio to play a few songs each.
Michelle Malone was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, by her mother and grandmother, both professional singers. From age four she sang in a church choir and later learned to play saxophone, guitar, and drums, which she played in her first band when she was twelve.
By the time she was a teenager, she was writing her own songs. She’s still writing more than thirty years later.
The music she makes is described in her bio as “ingrained in the sounds of the south, mixing the rebellious stomp of roadhouse rock & roll with the raw grit of blues, the holy-rolling rasp of gospel, the slow-motion swagger of country-soul, and the organic warmth of folk music.”
Like Michelle, Sarah Peacock grew up in a suburb of Atlanta. She also grew up singing in the church before she began writing and singing her own songs. When she began writing, she was also discovering a world of music she didn’t know existed. As her bio puts it, she has a “bedeviling way about her, particularly in the way she harvests such influences as Brandi Carlile and Heart. She even filters heavy metal band Metallica through a rootsy, acoustic lens to emerge with a silky, sticky musical web of her very own.”
