Tina Malia: Heart Wide Open
Tina Malia is a visionary musical artist. Her sonic creations span sacred chant, world, dream pop, and folk music genres. A prolific singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, and sound engineer, Malia expresses her radiant inner landscape through song.
Tina’s mother, a renowned concert pianist and opera singer from South Korea, was the driving force in Tina’s classical musical education. It was her father, however, who bought her a guitar when she turned 15 and encouraged her to follow her musical passions.
Tina Malia all-encompassing musical and spiritual perspective has led her to the studio and live performance with a vast array of iconic artists including Kenny Loggins, India. Arie, Bonnie Raitt, Bassnectar, Deva Premal and Miten, Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary) Peter Kater and Joanne Shenandoah
An Interview with Tina Malia: Heart Wide Open
Interview by Kara Johnstad
To listen to the full interview of Tina Malia by Kara Johnstad from Voice Rising on OMTimes Radio, click the player below.
I am delighted to have with me in the studio the prolific singer-songwriter Tina Malia. A visionary musical artist, Tina expresses her radiant inner landscape through song, and her sonic creations span sacred chant, world, dream pop, and folk music genres. Tina is a beloved pioneer in a growing community of people around the world dedicated to residing in harmony with the Earth and expressing it through art, health, education, and music. So welcome, Tina Malia, and thank you so much for taking time to deepen the conversation on voice and vibrational healing.
Kara Johnstad: Would you like to share with us something from your childhood, a memory, which role did music play while you were a kid growing up? Was it a natural thing to be in the field of music?
Tina Malia: Music was my whole world as a child. My mother was a concert pianist, so I lived and breathed music from the time I was in the womb, considerably. My mom would practice the piano seven hours a day. I love telling this story because it’s my first memory on planet earth; I liked to be in my car seat which of course would make me a perfect candidate for traveling musicians my whole life. She would put me in my car seat underneath the grand piano, that is how I got babysat, and she would practice for hours and hours.
I would hear all these songs, and I still remember them in detail, note by note, these concertos that she would practice. So, Music has always been my life, and then my mom started teaching me when I was pretty much old enough to talk and old enough to request it, and it was my first language. I learned how to read music; I was learning how to read and write and everything else.
Kara Johnstad: But when you’re performing you perform a lot on the guitar; so, you’re fluent then also in piano, and I’m sure you play.
Tina Malia: Piano was the first instrument, I learned classically which, if there are any classical musicians out there, it’s quite a jump. Not for everyone, but it mentally is a jump to go from classical music on an instrument to writing free flow on that same instrument. I can hear the voice of my mother standing over me. However, guitar, I just always found it a lot easier to just let this other exploratory part of me come out. So, it’s easier to carry a guitar than a piano around.
Kara Johnstad: No, I love that because my mother was also a classical pianist prodigy, and so it was my grandmother. That’s very beautiful, this feeling of finding a fresh, maybe a fresh instrument to express that very deep, beautiful poetry that you have within. What was the turning point in your life when you realized that you want to dedicate your life into being a musician and being a songwriter?
Tina Malia: Well I kind of always knew I would make music, I remember being 11 and declaring to myself that I wanted to be a singer, and I just was clear about that. I always must include my mother in this conversation because she was just part and parcel of all my musical training and everything that led up to that. She wanted me to be a classical pianist, so I was very much being trained to do that, but I loved to sing. My mother, who’s passed now, she was from South Korea.
So, all the stories you hear are true about Korean parents and how they are with their kids and how they make you practice hours and hours and hours per day, and it’s very serious. So that was that side, and I would like to add I was very grateful for that discipline and to have that level of training. My father who is American was much more laid back, much more kind of a hippie attitude so he was the one I went to for a guitar and he helped me, encouraged me to sing and be a singer, the school play and all my choral parts and everything like that. So, I started to develop this love for singing and there’s just something about it, to have your instrument inside of you, there’s no other feeling like that on Earth. It’s the euphoric thing besides mantra meditation that I can do.
Kara Johnstad: You’re going into your seventh album, so I know the other six albums, and one of my very favorites is your Silent Awakening album. I found it very enchanting and poetic, and this is my curiosity as another, as a fellow singer-songwriter, that album was full of much poetry and much original material that was coming directly from the heart. In the last couple of albums you’ve made space to honor the Sanskrit or the mantras, I guess your other albums also had chants in other languages, I was just wondering as such a talented poet what your reasoning was behind that, or if you find yourself being drawn back to expressing your truth in your own words? I guess I so much enjoyed that album and I love all, but I also loved what you wrote directly from your heart. Are you planning to do that on your seventh album?
Tina Malia: I am; this next album will be another album in English. I know I live kind of in these dual worlds so to speak, I mean music, the creation of music, the language of music, the music itself is what moves me and so the words and the language, in a way, they all touch me similarly, you know. The Sanskrit and not only the Sanskrit, the Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Spanish, all these different languages they all have their different flavors, and they touch me very deeply in different ways.
I have found the mantra chanting to be an incredibly effective tool, and I know many people are very deeply in that world and use music in that way. So, I love to offer that space, and then I also know I have this whole other litany of fans that don’t connect at all with the mantra. I have people that just straight out say that to me, “When are you going to stop with this mantra thing?” You know like, well, never. I also have a deep love for poetry. I remember Sarah McLachlan saying that once in an interview, and it shocked me, she said writing lyrics for her was like trying to scoop water out of a stone.
I couldn’t believe that she said that because I always considered her poetry to be so prolific and you just assumed that it was very easy for her, but similarly, for me, that is a process that is– those songs.
Kara Johnstad: We continue to meditate, we continue to chant, we continue to sing, we continue to work for the planet, and yet sometimes it’s just dedication. On Your later albums, you are singing beautiful mantras and beautiful chants, and they’re there to heal us and guide us back to wholeness, have you found personal healing through your life and of recording mantras, living mantras, singing mantras? Your chanting practice is also a personal healing journey.
Tina Malia: Absolutely, I started chanting mantra with a man whom you may know, and you probably do, his name is Jai Uttal, and he was one of the first Westerners that went to India along with the Krishna Das and Ram Dass, and he met a man named Neem Karoli Baba. Jai Uttal is a huge influence on bringing this practice over to us Westerners. I sang in his band when I was 18. To make a very long story short, I was singing in his band, learning these mantras and they were very beautiful, but I was going through a very deep personal crisis, truly going through the night of my soul, and felt very lost here on Earth, so depressed. Depressed really isn’t even the word for it, I like to say my cells felt like they were on fire, like every cell felt like it was burning and in so much suffering, and to the point where I was starting to plan how to end my life, because I just couldn’t take it anymore, I was 24, by the way.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Tina Malia
