NYLON - October 2007 - (Page 108) THE BALLAD OF JENA MALONE As the twang of bluegrass fills the room, Jena Malone asks: “What’s the point of doing anything without music?” Although meant to be rhetorical, it’s a damn good question—and one she answered two years and a few thousand miles ago while filming a movie in Spain. “I was so bored with my job as an actor that I needed something,” explains the 22-year-old, who is impossibly friendly and enthusiastic for someone who stepped off a plane from Australia just hours ago. “I hated it so much I started singing to myself. I’d be walking around singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ in Spanish. I then started working with [music software] GarageBand and I created all these tracks with loops and I thought, ‘I can actually do this.’” Today, however, she finds herself in an eerily desolate, quaintly compact version of New York, on the Paramount Studios back lot in Los Angeles. Casually smoking a cigarette and staring into the front window of a faux beauty shop, Malone improvs the song “How Much is That Virgin in the Window?” to the tune of the well-known canine bartering ditty (she’ll do this most of the day, and anything in the immediate area is fair game for a quick lyric). Music, it seems, has become something of an obsession—not that she’d ever use that word—and Malone has thrown herself into it with a breathless abandon. “I went back to Tahoe [her hometown] and kind of hid myself away,” she says. “I got ProTools and a keyboard and I taught myself basic guitar.” Soon enough, she gathered up a band and took the first steps towards road-testing her songs. “It was really fucking hard,” she says, sighing. “I became the band manager, the roadie, the publicist, the lead singer, the writer, everything. It almost killed me.” Not that this is out of character. After all, this is someone who legally emancipated herself from her mother at age 14 so that she could manage her own career. “It’s like, if I run a kitchen, I want to be able to do every job in the kitchen, you know? Clean, scrub the stove, cook the burgers…so when I hire a dishwasher and he’s working long hours for me, I’ll be like, ‘I was there. I know how hard it is.’ And I’ll respect the job so much more.” After a booking agent set her band up headlining Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge—an experience Malone still relates with wide-eyed incredulity—she began Actress Jena Malone isn’t sure where her DIY music career is going to take her, because she’s making it up as she goes along. By Eric Alt. Photographed by Robert Hamada pounding the virtual pavement on MySpace and YouTube with the newly christened Jena Malone and Her Bloodstains. “I originally wanted the band to be called Of Wild Animals and the Loss of Her Sister, but it was too long and confusing, so I decided on something kitschy, something a little bit more weird and personal. But every show I’m like, ‘We’re Jena Malone and Her Acne,’ ‘We’re Jena Malone and Her Bad Deodorant Smell.’” It’s almost easy to forget that Malone is, first and foremost, an actor (Donnie Darko, Saved!) and she has no plans to push that aside. She’ll next be seen in a small but pivotal role for director Sean Penn in Into the Wild, an adaptation of the Jon Krakauer novel based on the tragic true story of a young man who abandons post-collegiate life in favor of “tramping” his way to Alaska. Malone plays Carine McCandless, the protagonist’s sister and the narrative voice of the film. The story so touched her that she took it upon herself to orchestrate her own audition. “I have this camera so I just taped myself doing this little piece of voice-over and I sent [Penn] a DVD. Four days later he called me back and said he usually never hires anyone without meeting them, but could I do it? Literally, I would wash the floor for him. I just respect every part of what he’s done with his career.” Although genuinely excited about Wild, Malone is also anxious to get back to her home in Lake Tahoe. “L.A. is just not a spiritually provocative landscape for me. It’s like staring at
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