While Danny Malone has been making music for most of his life, FLOWERS PT. 1 is, in some ways, the Texas-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s debut album – a remarkable fresh start following a near-decade-long hiatus that saw him disappear into a life of addiction and then emerge better than ever with his most indisputably cathartic collection thus far. Songs like “Human” and the optimistic album-closing “New Life” are simultaneously melancholy and affirmative, Malone’s spare, naturalistic approach heightening and underscoring his exploration of angst, loss, and existential malaise. Fraught with impossible sadness and transcendent beauty, FLOWERS PT. 1 sees Malone reckoning with grief and self-recrimination, moving past the trauma and bitter regret towards renewal and resurrection as someone altogether new. When last we saw him, Malone’s career was on an upward trajectory, releasing a string of increasingly acclaimed albums and touring North America and Europe to a growing fanbase. Alas, a growing drug problem lurked in the shadows, the secret fuel behind much of the dark thoughts which gave his songs such power. As drug problems so often do, Malone’s eventually spun out of control as amphetamines, opiates, and benzos turned to more hazardous substances like heroin and fentanyl. “The addiction got so bad that I was embarrassed to be seen in public,” he says. “I was just a shell of myself. The hard reality of it came when I started selling my instruments, and of course when I had no instruments, I couldn’t play music anymore.” Malone spent much of the next half-decade blocked off from the outside world, living deep in his addiction, though members of his family and a number of friends he’d made as a musician continued to hold out hope for change before it was too late. “I was just basically in a haze for years. I was assumed I would die, and I guess I was fine with that in a way. Eventually, my closest siblings started making pleas, and I realized that I was not just hurting myself, I was hurting other people around me through hurting myself, and that’s basically what gave me the courage to want to stop.” Despite Malone’s desire to quit, traditional methods to treat opioid abuse disorder proved unsuccessful. Desperate, he learned of an experimental treatment using ibogaine, a plant-derived psychoactive compound with a powerful capacity to rapidly reduce withdrawal symptoms and cravings after a single session. “It was kind of a Hail Mary,” Malone says, “but I was willing to try anything.” Though ibogaine is currently unapproved by mainstream medical regulators in the US, Malone connected with treatment facilitators and began the process, first lessening his habit with short-acting opiates that “kept me right on the edge of withdrawal, not feeling good but not feeling great either.” Ibogaine was then administered, an intense two-day psychedelic experience that would ideally reset his perception and help heal his troubled soul. “It just changes everything,” he says. “It opens your mind to the possibility of self-examination, to examine your own psyche and your own issues. The trip was very sort of chaotic. I did not know what was going on. I was focusing on my withdrawal and there was so much imagery that I was not latching on to certain things. But it shattered my ego. I felt so raw emotionally. Whatever I had built myself up to be in my mind, it was just obliterated and I was a whole new, completely naked human being with no identity.” Given the chance to rebuild himself from the ground up, Malone sold his house in Austin and moved to San Pancho, a small village about 50 km north of Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s west coast. He found an apartment for next to nothing and began healing his mind, body and spirit, one day at a time. “I lived an incredibly slow, peaceful life, or tried to, down there,” Malone says. “I knew that I wanted to change, and so I stuck to the plan, focusing on myself and learning how to not use. It took some time before it started to settle in, where I was like, okay, maybe I am going to make it through this. Malone eventually began feeling the weight of his self-imposed solitude and realized that in order to move forward he needed more human contact and a boost of “good karma.” He returned to Texas to be close to his mother, sadly burdened with Parkinson’s Disease and increasing dementia. “There were wonderful healing parts about that,” he says, “of seeing my mom in a new light and letting go of the baggage of the past. But watching my mom decay and decline started to be really stressful and I eventually relapsed. I continued taking care of my mom but I knew, this is bad, so I decided to do another ibogaine treatment to finally get rid of the addiction once and for all.” Determined to liberate himself once and for all, Malone traveled south of the border to IbogaQuest, a highly rated treatment center in Tepoztlán, near Mexico City. “I don’t know why, but this second treatment was just such a different experience. I had a truly mystical experience where a girlfriend who had died by suicide eight years previous showed up in the trip, and in a single moment, entered my body and cleared the energy that was causing addiction in my life. I’ve never used again from that moment forward.” Malone almost immediately began writing songs at a feverish pace, as if a dam had burst inside him and opened the floodgates on 10 years of pent-up creativity. “Burning Hills” was followed by “Human” and “Better Things,” all capturing his committed determination to live a clean, fulfilling life and befittingly, the three songs which now open FLOWERS PT. 1. “I did not expect it,” he says. “I literally just asked if they had a guitar around and the songs started coming faster than I could write them down. What I realized later on is that the first time I did the treatment, it shattered my identity. And then the second time, it gave me my identity back. I was like, okay, I have to start playing music again, I’m going to make an album and just figure it out.” With “Stay Calm,” Malone encapsulates his fall into addiction and then the shift required to pull himself out, reminding himself that “you’re only who can save you.” Other songs in the cycle, including the tender piano ballad, “Some Love,” refer lyrically to his late girlfriend, Madison, who died by suicide eight years previous and whose haunting presence he recognizes as crucial in his recovery. “We weren’t together at the time of her suicide,” he says, “but we were still very close. She is the spirit from the afterlife that came to me in the psychedelic space and saved my life, so I do want to credit her for that. Despite it all, she is actually somehow a positive in this.” Malone soon started playing shows again, placed his mom in a memory care facility in Austin, moved into a tiny house nearby so he could see her every day. He began traveling to record with his old friend, singer-songwriter Anthony da Costa, at his home studio in East Nashville, enlisting Russell Durham, a composer and multi-instrumentalist known for his work with Fleet Foxes, Feist, Andrew Bird, and Cory Chisel, to create sparse yet strong string arrangements. After years of turmoil, things were finally looking up until tragedy struck Malone’s life once again. Sadly, his beloved brother, best friend, drummer and occasional co-writer Teddy died by suicide in Malone’s Austin home while he was playing a festival in Northern Arkansas – an event for which Teddy had only just helped him pack the van the day before. “The new me was able to survive,” Malone says. “I don’t know if the old me would have been able to. The fact that this album dealt with a suicide in the past of someone really close to me, it’s almost like it prepared me for my brother’s suicide. Almost like a premonition. I was playing a show that day, and even though I had just heard he died, I continued to play the show. The songs that I was singing fit the situation perfectly. Like it prepared me spiritually for how to handle such a devastating loss.” Heartbroken but not brought down, Malone immediately moved lock, stock, and barrel to Nashville, where he could continue to put the pieces of a new life together in earnest. “It was just too heavy to be there in that city with the specter of my brother floating around,” he says. “I got in touch with my friend Cory Branan and asked if he knew of anyone with a room. He gave me Bobby Bare Jr’s number. I moved in and now I’ve become really good friends with Bobby. It’s funny, there’s like an allure to his house, some magical quality that I can’t quite put my finger on. Several artists who weren’t known before they lived with Bobby became very well-known after living here, like Justin Townes Earle lived here. Malone was putting finishing touches on FLOWERS PT. 1 when another old friend, singer/guitarist Justin Furstenfeld of Houston, TX rock band Blue October, reached out to ask if he’d join them as support on their upcoming 20th anniversary world tour, a powerful show of faith from a fellow artist that only served to strengthen his commitment to sobriety. “I was like, ‘Wow, of course. Yes. I want to do that.’ I had toured with them just before my life totally spun out of control. Justin, like Anthony, was one of the people who checked in on me in my missing years. Every once in a while, he would be like, ‘How you doing?’ And either I wouldn’t respond, or I’d be honest and say where I’m at and stuff. But he kept on. Finally when I actually got clean, Justin was so proud of me and then offered me the tour, I think I actually shed a tear because I hadn’t realized that maybe people really did care about me.” Letting go has allowed Malone the freedom to embrace the entirety of his identity as an artist and musician, finally at peace with his past and present while also looking towards a different future. Indeed, his songwriting continues to flourish, if not quite at the quicksilver pace that followed his recovery. As its title promises, FLOWERS PT. 1 will indeed be followed by a second volume, an even more stripped-bare collection comprising four-track cassette tape recordings of his newer songs, many of which are informed by his brother’s passing. Having reached the proverbial crossroads and made the right choice, Danny Malone is eager to walk that path on his own terms, healthy, engaged, and ready for what’s next. “I want this music to convey the deep, psychedelic transformation that occurred in me that saved my life, saved me from addiction, and will hopefully guide my life out of the darkness and into beauty,” says Danny Malone. “ And I hope it can be a guidepost for others to catch a glimpse of the direction that helped me, once I saw where I needed to go. I feel so proud to stand in front of people and tell my story. I feel like I’m doing something good.”