The Non-Renewed, a queer indie rock duo from Denver, joins KGNU’s Hannah Taub for a studio session. Meghan Mallan and Mellik Gorton of The Non-Renewed discuss their recent U.S. tour and their first album. They share details of their upcoming show at Bread Bar in Silver Plume, CO (Interview date: 8/20/2024)
Hannah Taub: We’ve got The Non-Renewed in the studio with me in Boulder. It’s a super special time because these are my friends, and they also are really talented musicians. Thank you for coming on a Tuesday afternoon, how are you guys?
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): Great. Thanks for having us.
Hannah Taub: Thanks for coming in. I know you guys have a lot of music to play for us, starting with a single that I love called “Smoke You Out”. Would you like to talk about the song or play it first?
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): I think the only preface that this song needs is, I’m sure everyone experiences this when they go through a breakup, but you use your vices a little bit more than you would when you’re not going through a breakup. And that is the inspiration for this song.
Hannah Taub: Great. I think that’ll be relatable for a lot of listeners. Let’s hear it.
Alright, great stuff. I know that you all went on a tour, you had a busy last couple months, and I think some of that was in your hometown Mel, so how was that tour?
The Non-Renewed (Mellik Gorton): It was our first, hopefully out of many more, our first little go at a tour here. We did four days across the United States. Meghan had already had plans to be out east, and I wanted to go home to see family, so we decided that we’d make a tour out of it.
It went really well. It’s always very interesting to see how vastly different audiences and venues are across the United States. From gig to gig it’s never the same, and that was certainly true on our trek back west. But it was really great to see family and really awesome to be able to play in front of old friends and family back home, where we had yet to really dip our toes into. It was pretty great.
Hannah Taub: Nice. That’s exciting. Any big tour mishaps, lost gear?
The Non-Renewed (Mellik Gorton): Honestly, no. I think we did our logistics pretty well. No cars got broken into. Yeah, mostly smooth. I think the big lesson learned is that six hours to travel in a day is way too much. Which is unfortunate, because here in Denver, it’s really hard to get to many major cities within six hours. To do some touring in the West versus the East, you could do 12 venues in 12 hours.
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): The thing we did lose was my voice. I guess we didn’t lose it in the way that you lose other instruments, but yeah, that was one struggle. I did lose my voice on the tour. When I got to Connecticut, before I even went to Mel’s house, I went to Urgent Care. They did prescribe me some oral steroids which was great for that first show in Connecticut. I was feeling so great. Problem is, I didn’t sleep that night. But yeah, back to what Mel said about the sleep, I think if I had been really good about getting a full eight hours of sleep, it would have been a little bit better.
The Non-Renewed (Mellik Gorton): Yeah, in our touring dreams.
Hannah Taub: Tough to do on tour for sure. Before you guys jump into the next one, you should introduce yourselves, cause we missed that.
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): My name is Meghan Mallan. What do I say about myself? I’m a music teacher by day. Actually by night, more so by night.
The Non-Renewed (Mellik Gorton): My name is Mellik Gorton, pronouns he/him, and we are a queer indie rock duo based in Denver. I have a nine to five during the day. So Meghan and I have a really nice time trying to get together and make this work.
Hannah Taub: I’m glad you made it work this afternoon. It’s so special to have you in the studio. You’re sounding great So let’s jump into the next one.
The Non-Renewed (Mellik Gorton): This one’s called “Dog”.
Hannah Taub: All right, good stuff. So that’s “Dog” off of your latest album, The Non-Renewed, first full length release. Maybe we can chat a bit about the process of what it was like to put together that album.
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): Absolutely. It was interesting. We only recorded it in about 16 different locations.
The Non-Renewed (Mellik Gorton): Yeah, it was quite a process. Before the album came into our brain, other than the fact that we knew we wanted to record music together, I had applied for an equity, diversity, and inclusion grant from the city and county of Denver. They have an LGBTQ commission there. And so we applied for this grant, just put it in. A friend had reached out and was like, hey, you should do this.
I was like, I don’t think that applies to us, but sure. We put it in and we got a $3,000 check back, which I was not expecting to receive. So that was a nice little kick in the butt. We actually have a little bit of something to make this happen, and we only have a year to spend these funds. So while $3,000 is definitely not enough to do much in terms of an album, it got us pretty far in terms of our work. That was the origin story of how this album came to be, and we’re grateful to them for that. The album itself, we ended up working with our good friend Judy Bell, who is a producer out in L.A., to produce this album. We flew them out for a couple weeks here, and we just pilot drived through it, recording in probably 13 different locations, which I would not recommend to anybody.
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): Don’t do it. Don’t do it.
Hannah Taub: You all usually have a full band with drums and everything. So that’s a lot of equipment to schlep around.
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): Yes, it was. The first day of recording was drums. So the nice thing is, we got at least the drum set out of the way. But there was still plenty that we had to drag around with us.
But yeah, back to Judy Bell real quick. They were someone who I knew from college. We were in an acapella group together and at the time, I would have never thought that we would be making an album together. And especially not an album that I was one of the songwriters and it was partially my music that we were making. At the time, in college, I was majoring in music ed. I thought I was just going to be a music teacher. I had never really pursued any of my own musical endeavors, so it’s pretty crazy to think what can happen when you get non-renewed and possibilities kind of start becoming more than, oh, maybe I can not be just a music teacher. Maybe there’s another realm of music that I haven’t even tapped into.
Hannah Taub: That’s the band name lore, right? Your contract as a teacher was non-renewed. And so there was the name of the band.
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): Exactly. And I have to give my fiance, Brianna, full credit. Because even though that is the origin story it had not occurred to me to name the band that. One day Mel and I were sitting in my living room and it had been two hours and we were like, what about this? Nah, what about this? And then Brianna was like, what about The Non-Renewed? And we were like, oh!
Hannah Taub: Sounds pretty good.
I’m Hannah Taub and this is the Afternoon Sound Alternative. We have The Non-Renewed, a queer indie rock band from Denver, Colorado, and my good friends, live in the Boulder studio with us today. Let’s hear another track.
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): All right. This is the second on the album. This one’s called “Runaway”.
Hannah Taub: Track number two on the latest album from The Non-Renewed. We’ve got one more track to hear. It goes by so fast, but it’s been such a lovely little session here. I would love for you all to be non humble and shout out some upcoming gigs, your socials. Where can people find you? What should people be looking out for?
The Non-Renewed (Mellik Gorton): Yeah, definitely find us on social media. Our primary area of interest is Instagram where we prioritize our time. But we’re on TikTok and Facebook and all that too. So we’re out there. You can find us @The Non-Renewed. Play us on Spotify, Apple Music, we’re on all the streaming platforms.
Right now in terms of our gigs, we’re taking a little bit of a break because of Meghan’s voice. It never actually did come back quite the same way, so we want to keep that in mind and her health being a priority, especially because she’s a music teacher and sings and is loud at work all the time, so she can’t just take a break on that. We got one more show at Bread Bar in Silver Plume, Colorado, which is just west of Georgetown, if you all are familiar. So we’ll be playing a 6:00 dinner set there on September 7th, which I believe is a Saturday. But that’s it for now. We’re gonna keep our options open and see what else is going on, maybe work on some writing and other things in the meantime.
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): Increasing our TikTok presence since we’ve been neglecting that. It’s actually upsetting sometimes how important it is to have a TikTok presence as an indie band, but it’s also really cool because 20 years ago independent bands couldn’t blow up at all. You had to have some sort of label backing to ever get anywhere, really. And nowadays, because of TikTok a lot of indie bands can actually get somewhere. We have yet to blow up on TikTok.
Hannah Taub: There’s still time.
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): Still time. We haven’t really tried yet.
Hannah Taub: Cool. Before we jump into the last one, what are some other local bands that you guys want to shout out that you’ve been liking?
The Non-Renewed (Mellik Gorton): Yeah, I’ve been really getting into some of the Fort Collins groups Slow Caves and Frail Talk. I know both are located up in Fort Collins, but, just saw Slow Caves at UMS for the first time and it was really great to see them perform. Maybe Fern, there’s so many great local acts and Meghan’s got a ton too.
The Non-Renewed (Meghan Mallan): Yeah, I love Kaitlyn Williams who ‘s a pop artist. Just really well done production stuff that she’s got on the streaming things, and she’s amazing live. She’s at UMS nearly every year and I always make a point to go see at least one of her sets if not two. So I love Kaitlyn Williams. Yeah, we have a lot of really cool friends. Mel shouted out Maybe Fern. They’re a local funk group. Really fun. Blank Slate is another kind of queer rock type band that we’ve played with before. I enjoy their music a lot. I could go on for days because I actually work for SoFar Sounds, so I see a lot of local artists all the time. I’m so impressed with Denver. A lot of outside people might not think of Denver as having a music scene, but it very much is vibrant, very diverse in so many ways.
Hannah Taub: Love it. And The Non-Renewed is among those artists. We’re listening to them live in the Boulder studio on KGNU’s Afternoon Sound Alternative. We’ve got one more song.
The Non-Renewed (Mellik Gorton): Alright, this one’s called “Englewood”.
Hannah Taub: Beautiful. Thanks so much to Mel and Meghan for coming in. They’re from The Non-Renewed and you can catch them at said venue in Silver Plume on September 7th.
The Non-Renewed (Mellik Gorton): Bread Bar. Thanks so much for having us.
Hannah Taub: Cool. Thank you.
