The Music of Monallo

Update: 2025-04-21

Description

“I'm always happy to play anywhere really. As long as you got an outlet for me to plug my speaker into … or even not, I'll just play acoustic.”

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The Beach Maniac Island Music Podcast (audio):

The Beach Maniac Island Music Podcast (video):

He overcame a near fatal car accident in his teens and serious vocal cord issues in his 20s that left him wondering if he would ever be able to talk again, much less sing. Now Monallo is fully recovered and one of today’s rising Trop Rock stars, having been named the 2024 Horizon Award winner by the Trop Rock Music Association. With hits such as Moonlight, Sunrise Vibes, He’s Gone Coastal, Live by the Sea, and Everything’s Beachy, Monallo is solidly one of today’s top Trop Rock singers and songwriters.

In this Podcast, Monallo tells the stories behind his biggest hits and shares insights on his songwriting, performing, production and marketing skills.

Above all, he says, he just loves creating and performing.

Reels …

Monallo tells how G-Love contributed a surprise verse to his latest Trop Rock release 'Moonlight'.

Monallo tells the inspiration and message behind his latest release ‘Moonlight’.

Monallo tells how he got seven other Trop Rock artists to contribute to his hit song Everything's Beachy, written by Bryan Ruby.

Highlights:

Monallo was born in Tennessee but grew up in Pennsylvania and attended the University of Pittsburgh (“Pitt”) where he got an environmental science degree.

In college he played rhythm guitar in a band. After he graduated, he decided to pursue music on his own but worked himself so hard he damaged his vocal cords, leading to surgery to remove nodes from his vocal cords. Despite fears that he would never sing again, he recovered.
He now lives in Cape Coral, Florida, with his wife, and they are expecting their first baby in May (2025).
Monallo transitioned into Trop Rock music only a couple years ago but has found it a great fit for his music.
Monallo’s latest release, Moonlight, is about “escapism and having a good time with your friends.” He is excited that he was able to get G-Love, one of his all-time favorite artists, to play harmonica on the track - and contribute a verse.
The name Monallo came from mashing together the names of the three rivers that come together in Pittsburgh - the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio.
He and Mark Mulch put together the song Sunrise Vibes remotely after meeting at a songwriter festival and staying in touch, then discovering they both independently had embraced Trop Rock.
Last year’s hit song Everything’s Beachy was pitched to Monallo by Bryan Ruby when they were performing together on stage. Monallo loved it but it is unusual for him to sing songs written by others, so he texted several of his Trop Rock friends and asked if they would join him in recording Everything’s Beachy. He got these artists to participate: Bryton Stoll, Aubrey Wollett, Donny Brewer, Jonas Lorence, Sunny Jim, Bryan Ruby, and Alan Jax Bowers. They each recorded their parts in different locations, and Monallo put it all together at his home studio. “Probably one of the wildest things about that song that not many people realize is there were no two people that were in the same room for that song. Everybody recorded that wherever they were.”
His song He’s Gone Coastal is a quintessential Trop Rock song about “a guy who had just grown up landlocked his whole life and all he wanted to do is leave everything behind and just go drink some rum while he sails around the gulf and just live his days down there.”
The songwriter in Monallo likes to perform in the smaller, more intimate settings, and the musician in him likes to perform for larger audiences on the big stage. “But I just feel really fortunate that people have listened to my songs in both settings and have allowed me to continue to play in both settings. So I just love them both.”
He loves what he’s doing and appreciates all his fans for making it possible. “This is the best position I've ever personally felt in musically. And we're just writing some of the best songs I feel like I've come up with and everything is kind of just getting better and better because I'm learning as I go. But so as long as people are just on the ride and having a good time, that's huge though. Any sort of support is welcomed here at Monallo.”

Full Podcast transcript:

Thanks so much Monallo for being a guest on the Beach Maniac Island Music Podcast.

Absolutely, thank you so much for having me, Bill. I appreciate it.

My pleasure. I want to talk about you and how you started and your journey into Trop Rock music. But first I want to jump right in and ask about your latest release, Moonlight, which is getting a lot of play on Trop Rock stations and getting some social media buzz as well. For those who maybe haven't heard this song, give us a visual of what the song is about.

So we're excited about this song. It's called Moonlight. It's got one of my musical heroes, G-Love on it. To paint the picture, I wrote this song with the daily grind going on lately. It's so hard to get ahead. It's all about taking that step back and realizing that sometimes everything you need is right in front of you.

I always have such great memories of going down to the beach with my friends when I was younger and having a little bonfire and just hanging out at nighttime around the fire with a couple friends, listening to music and having a great time. And sometimes we've got to take a step back and get back to basics and just take a breather because everything's getting crazy out there. So that's kind of where the song was born.

I went to high school up in Erie, Pennsylvania, a little town called Northeast right outside of Erie. So those images of those Lake Erie beach fires were always kind of really good memories to have that I called upon for this song. So it was nice. It's brought back some good memories and hopefully it's just a great summertime “hang out with your friends” song. That's what it was kind of born into.

So that was kind of the inspiration for this song. You wrote it yourself? Is that right?

Yep, yeah, I wrote that song. Wrote it myself. The only part, you know, G-Love surprised us with adding a verse of his own to it. So that was really cool. So he wrote that verse, but the rest of the song was written by me.

So tell me how that comes about. You write a song or most of it, and then where does G-Love fit in all of a sudden? You think of him and give him a call or run into him somewhere? How does he get involved?

Yeah, so I was in the studio. You know, I work with Alan Jax Bowers a lot from Mudcut Studios, Mudcut South. You know, he plays drums in Monallo and he's just a good dude, an amazing producer, an amazing artist. And so we were working together on this song and it's just gonna be me and him. This is back in like December. And we just want to put out a couple of new tunes this year that had him more firmly established in Monallo beause he played on most of the last album songs, but this was like collaboration and I wanted everything to be kind of recorded at his studio. And so we had almost finished the song. We're like, all right, what are we going to do with this lead part? Do we want to get a guitar player? Do I want to play lead guitar organ, whatever we wanted to get. And I was like, man, I could really hear some like harmonica in here. I was like, one of my fa