with Jesse Malin

By Mike Hume

Jesse Malin is the kid with the butterfly net, running down Bleecker Street, snapping up cabs and standpipes and butts of cigarettes. He’s the guy with the shoe box under his bed, holding on to skipping stones from sunny days and bottle caps from bad breakups. He’s the guy who can pick out each individual coin in a Central Park fountain and tell you the wish of every last person who let it fly from their hand.

So his music would make you believe.

Jesse Malin gets people. He can break them down, take their life, sift through all the strands of their story and pluck from it just one thread that will tell their tale in its entirety. Then, stringing it along the neck of his guitar, he’ll tune it, strum it and share it with us all.

That’s what makes Malin great. Not billboard adverts buzzing in neon, nor his name in lights on the marquee in Madison Square; not the late night appearances, nor the radio play. In fact, there’s none of that, which is why you probably haven’t heard of him. But that grounded life is part of the reason why he can take a place as grand and vast as The Big Apple and whittle it down to its core — not the perfectly-lit skyscrapers reaching for the heavens, but the thin-soled pedestrians that pound Gotham’s pavement.

“A lot has happened here, like [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani selling it out to Disney and all this gentrification,” says Malin, who credits films like “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver” for his inspiration as much as anything else. “That ongoing change is its own kind of heartbreak and romance.”

It’s not just New York either. While his grasp of his hometown (born in Queens, then transplanted to Manhattan) helps him comb through the canyons of concrete and focus on what really makes the city hum, his powers of observation apply outside of the boroughs as well.

“If I write about New York or America or London it’s something I hope people can connect to, something human,” Malin says. “I like characters.”

His talent has been vetted. At the Light of Day benefit show last fall, Malin ran into a man to whom he had often been compared, a fellow lyrical expert on the human condition — Bruce Springsteen. Malin passed along a copy of his album and a week later the phone rang. It was Springsteen. He wanted Malin to join him for a Christmas benefit concert in Asbury Park. Malin was thrilled by the invite but even more so as the details of the gig became clear.

“I thought he’d want to play some covers or something,” Malin says. In fact Springsteen and his famed band learned three of Malin’s tunes, which they performed at the show.

Convinced now?

Springsteen isn’t the only musical mogul with whom Malin rubs elbows. He often tours with Ryan Adams and has opened for Counting Crows. If that’s not enough to authenticate his ... well, authenticity, you’ll have to wait to hear his music. He already sports two critically acclaimed albums in The Heat and his debut The Fine Art of Self Destruction. Next he’ll be kicking out a new CD in early fall on Adeline Records, Green Day frontman Billy Joe Armstrong’s label.

If you can’t wait until then, or even until his appearance Tuesday, May 16 at IOTA in Arlington, take a taste of The Heat’s vignettes that detail the lives of post-9/11 New Yorkers of all shapes and sizes, right down to the corner prostitute in “Arrested” and the abused daughter in “Basement Home.”

Sometimes, Malin takes a more direct route of storytelling, and spills out some of his own past to the audience. One such story seems to fit him perfectly.

He’s a mover. He spends his days hauling other people’s crap around. But one day, he’s hauling Barbara Streisand’s crap. Her bed to be precise.

Stop right there. The story goes further, but that’s not important. That’s who Jesse Malin is — the guy that hauls Barbara Streisand’s bed. He’s not the dashing gent whose arm she holds during champagne toasts before ascending to the penthouse. He’s the guy who sweated on her mattress as he slung it on his back and wrestled it into the service elevator, destination: loading dock.

Most of all, Malin is the kind of guy who sees the merit in a story of such a situation. He’s a guy that can spin a song for the everyman as well as Elton can compose for a princess just past.