*Thanks to Recky who found this for us!*

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OneEighty North LLF Interview

Ryan Malcolm Takes Flight with New Band and New Image
By: Karon Liu, One80 Contributor

It's an unusually warm January afternoon as Ryan Malcolm sits in the meeting room of his music distribution company, Fontana North, in downtown Toronto. Slouching deep into the couch and sprawling his arms out, he exposes an armband tattoo on his right bicep. He slightly jerks to the side as the theme to Mission Impossible suddenly plays from his army jacket beside him, and he reaches into his pocket to retrieve his cellphone. "It's the bank. I'm not answering it," he chuckles.

Insert has-been joke here. Go ahead. Malcolm doesn't mind. He's heard all of them since his Canadian Idol win back in 2003.

"Some of them are actually funny, like, I should have thought of that," says Malcolm, who is now the frontman for his band Low Level Flight. "A critic once said on the radio, 'Where's Ryan Malcolm?', and another person replied, 'I think I saw him with a squeegee on Queen Street.'"

Malcolm has moved on from his Idol days and is now working on his debut album with his band. He recruited his friends, whom he met while playing at various gigs, and spent two years writing songs. It's not really a follow-up to his first album, Home, but rather "Chapter One" as he puts it. He is now signed under an independent label.

"This is the album that I first wanted to make, but I feel as though it would have been wasted because everyone would have just pegged it as an Idol album," he says. "The Idol thing sets you up to be a TV star, not an artist or musician."

Malcolm hasn't been keeping up with the Idol show since he beat out thousands of other Canucks belting out Motown hits and Elton John classics, although he'll occasionally tune in just so he has an idea of what's going on when journalists ask him what he thinks of the newest batch of contestants. "I'll be like, 'Oh yes, that guy with the grey hair,'" he muses, referring to American Idol winner Taylor Hicks.

Another question that Malcolm is always asked is if he has any advice for Idol hopefuls. "If you can't sing, then I can't really give you any advice," he says. "Maybe if you can't sing you'll get on the 'Worst Of' show. If you want to know what not to do, just listen to the William Hung album."

Wearing slim black pants, a white leather belt, and an HKD skateboarding T-shirt, Malcolm would be almost unrecognizable behind his handlebar moustache if it weren't for his trademark thick-rimmed glasses and spikey, jet black hair. It may seem like another image change where the artist conjures a random nickname or develops an obsession with a foreign culture, but it's obvious that Malcolm is more himself now in his laid-back persona than the clean-cut Tiger Beat image from three years ago.

"What [Idol] shows is actually 40 per cent of the potential that contestants have, because they are restricted to certain songs," says Malcolm. "It's not like we were restricted to what we wore and how we acted, but it just feels like this is my turn to step up and show the country what I can do as opposed to what I could do with other people's songs."

It's not that Malcolm regrets Idol. On the contrary, he performed at large venues all over Canada, appeared on talk shows, and got a sense of direction over where he wanted to go with his music.

Malcolm describes his band's music as new rock mixed with the Killers, pop and opera with a bit of Il Divo. Well maybe not the last one, he deliberates. He credits his current musical tastes to the songwriters and band members that he toured with during his Idol days. Their "older" — in the most flattering sense, he laughs — musical tastes exposed him to some of the more old-school artists that provided the base for today's rock and pop music.

Shaun Noronha, one of Malcolm's bandmates during the Idol tour, is now the bassist for Low Level Flight. He, along with the other bandmates — guitarist Dave Carter, drummer Brandon Merenick, and guitarist/keyboardist James Rooke — are used to defending Malcolm's Idol notoriety.

"In terms of credibility, I don't really care," says Noronha. "If someone thinks the band is a certain way because the singer won Canadian Idol, then that's not the type of fan we want. We want someone who'll listen to the tunes and tell me that they don't like the songs rather than not liking the band just because the singer won Idol."

With the band's album hitting shelves in March, the members look forward to touring the country, and Malcolm is, once again, ready to face the critics. "I know I'm capable of what I'm doing, and I don't need anyone's approval or validation," he says. "You set yourself up for a backlash in this job. My motto is that if they care enough to review your album, then that's a compliment."