Jena Malone has spent more than three decades quietly building one of Hollywood’s most intriguing careers. She’s the rare Millennial child actor who didn’t just survive the film industry, but emerged seemingly unscathed—thoughtful, creatively fearless, and self-assured. She successfully navigated the transition from an acclaimed preteen actor (you may remember her playing a young Jodie Foster in Contact) to a cult favorite who’s been in so many iconic films it seems showy to list them all. From Donnie Darko to Saved! to Love Lies Bleeding to the Hunger Games franchise to my personal favorites, The Neon Demon, Sucker Punch, 2005’s Pride & Prejudice iteration, and Inherent Vice. Malone has built a filmography that defies easy categorization, though one unifier remains: her roles linger.
Her music is no different. In an era of relentlessly curated celebrity personas, Malone remains refreshingly down-to-earth and authentic, making choices less about appealing to industry expectation and more tailored to her own instinct and curiosity. Flowers for Men is her first full-length album in over a decade, following her work in the twee-pop duo The Shoe. The record isn’t a comeback so much as it is a recalibration. The single “Barstow” is a good indicator of the album’s emotional center, melancholic and layered—dreamy with an eerie edge. Hypnotic tracks like “You’ve Been on My Mind,” “Hermon Park,” and “Disaster Zones” echo through the album, irresistible in their pulsating vulnerability. Malone refers to her new sound as “sci-folk,” and the album, indeed, hits like a minimalist message from another dimension. It’s atmospheric and haunting in all the best ways, with lyrics that swing between devotional and unruly.
We were lucky enough to talk to the triple Scorpio about the toxic feminine, the Medieval Persian poet Hafez, the profundity of motherhood, the unjust hate of Auto-Tune, and her role in the Duffer brothers’ new supernatural-mystery series The Boroughs.
This is your first full-length release since your work with The Shoe. Much has happened since then, including having a child. How has your approach to making music changed?
Everything has changed. It’s one of the main reasons to have children that no one talks about: It will burn your entire life down. It’s so hard, as ego-driven, solo humans, to burn your life down to honor what you truly deserve. At the risk of sounding too triple Scorpio, it’s dangerous. The reason why it’s so important and so hard to do is because guess what remains: What’s real. All the surplus dies down. All the things that don’t serve you no longer stay, and what’s real and true and divinely yours stays. It not only stays, but strengthens. Becoming a mother changed everything, and it strengthened my relationship to my creativity. It’s not the same—it’s more challenging and definitely less prolific in some ways.
I’m also not really a pothead anymore. I don’t really drink. You allow yourself spaces to find creativity that are sort of indoctrinated in this world, like going out for drinks with your girlfriends. But you could also just wake up in the morning and say, “I have 30 minutes, I’m writing, I don’t care if I’m feeling it or not.” I’m not technically sober, but I’m trying to honor my body and the flows of growing older as a woman, and alcohol isn’t good for me. A lot of things aren’t good for me—not that they were great when I was 17, but no one was really asking that question back then. It’s been a challenge. My creativity has changed, and I’m trying to honor that by creating new rituals, new ways of writing, and new ways of working with people. There are also different expectations. I haven’t made a record in 10 years, and it may take another 15. There’s no expectation there, and it makes things feel so much juicier.
“I want more stories around the toxic feminine. I want more stories about the sacred masculine, and I just felt like they were two buddies that needed to kind of hook up a little bit.”
This is your first time working with producer Jamie Jackson. What was the process like collaborating with her?
We got along like a house on fire. I’ve never worked with a female producer before, and I’ve never felt more seen. I took creative risks I never felt safe taking before. I felt like we spoke a language that was beyond music theory or bro-tech coded [studio language]. It felt so freeing, and we’re never going to stop working together. Even if it’s just canvassing for our favorite politician, taking our kids to whatever, or writing a jingle. I found a deeply empowered relationship there.
Can you talk about the title Flowers for Men? I saw a poetry fragment you shared on your Instagram, where I believe it’s derived from. What’s the origin story?
It is derived from that. I was working on a book of poems simultaneously. As the album emerged, I kind of stole that title because it felt more aligned with the record. I’m raising a son, and I think about that stuff all the time—I think about masculinity, about femininity, about my own interior bias and sexism. I think about, “What is a ‘divine masculine’?” It was nice to find a healthy, creative way to be curious about those things. I know so much about the sacred feminine and the toxic masculine, but I want more stories around the toxic feminine. I want more stories about the sacred masculine, and I just felt like they were two buddies that needed to kind of hook up a little bit. They needed to get trapped in an elevator.
You and Robin Tunney star in the music video for “Barstow.” Why was she the right fit for the song?
Robin is amazing. [Writer/director] Jennifer Reeder was the one who brought us together. Jennifer and I love each other’s work. She had a project we could potentially do together, and it just takes forever to get anything made these days, so I said, “I’m making music right now, I’ll send you the album and maybe we’ll make a music video instead.” She listened to it within a day and we were already in preproduction. I told her about this doppelgänger idea, potentially, where it’s sort of like seeing a former self, and she thought of Robin, who she’d just met with. She was like, “You guys have a similar look, and she seems really game.” It happened naturally, which is cool.
I actually just spoke with Robin, and she mentioned a conversation the two of you had about the pressure on young women around branding and controlling their own image. What do you think about the modern conundrum of maintaining agency over your identity as both person and artist?
Here’s the thing: no one gives you agency. You give yourself agency. You have to be your ally first. We’ve all been in a space where we have a lack of inspirational figures that are helping us find our agency again, and [we may be] lacking in courage. It’s a risk moment. I deal with that a lot, not just on social media. I feel that pressure more in the PR world with red carpets and presentations. You look at the red carpets of the The Craft era, where you just walked down in your jeans and it was, like, three photographs. They weren’t these perfectly curated moments. I really feel that’s a space that I lose my courage in.
I want to be a leader sometimes, and I want to be an ally to myself in such a way that it’s contagious. But I constantly lose courage because I know everyone’s gonna look so nice, and if I go in there and don’t hire a stylist and don’t have hair and makeup, it’s gonna be a moment where it feels like a failure. I’m still trying to find that line of how to be an advocate for yourself, take control, and feel like you’re on the same playing field. I still want to have confidence when I take a swing. It’s a challenge, but even saying this out loud, I’m thinking, “Don’t give up, there’s ways to do it.” I think there are ways to band together as the femme community and say, “Let’s all do the same thing together, let’s all walk out there in our casual clothes and just give them a taste.” Because if we’re all in it together, there’s nothing to compare to.
“I’m still trying to find that line of how to be an advocate for yourself, take control, and feel like you’re on the same playing field. I still want to have confidence when I take a swing.”
You’ve also started your own label, There Was an Old Woman Records. Was that part of the same impulse to have more authorship/agency over your work?
I feel like starting my own label was a way for me to say, “Maybe I should really scale things down and just make stuff that I care about, and potentially collaborate with others and bring in other artists.” I’m still confounded by the music industry in a lot of ways. I’m just poking it like, “How do you work?” Someone gave me some good advice once. When I was younger, I didn’t know if I wanted to be a DP or a director, and they said, “It’s like owning a restaurant. You have to do all of the jobs first. You gotta wash the dishes before hiring a dishwasher. You need to serve before you hire a server. You need to know what it’s like before you can bring people in.” And I think that DIY approach is very much a part of the generation I grew up in. [In that era] it was like, “Do it yourself until you realize whether you love it or you hate it, and then you outsource.”
There’s a bunch of vocal manipulation and layering across the tracks on this album. What drew you to that approach?
Motherhood felt like such a sci-fi, out-of-body experience that when I found this Auto-Tune [the Voloco app], I was like, “Oh my god, I feel like I’m recording songs that a great-grandmother who traveled into the future would bring back to her younger self.” It felt like folk music, it felt like science fiction—it felt like something I hadn’t heard in that realm. I do know that Auto-Tune is very unique, and it’s so divisive. I also think there’s a false concept that Auto-Tune is this coverup to bad singing, but really that’s just the paint job of the car. Auto-Tune and what it can do in terms of manipulating sound and effects is so much more than that.
“There’s a false concept that Auto-Tune is this coverup to bad singing, but really that’s just the paint job of the car. Auto-Tune is so much more than that.”
What were you reading and listening to while creating the album?
I was reading an interesting book by Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand. I was also reading a book on polyamory, and then also [Yuval Noah Harari’s] Sapiens. I was really doing a deep dive of Guns, Germs, and Steel—that anthro, socio-cultural, science/human biology. When I became a mom, a lot of my music tastes changed. I loved depressing music so much when I was younger. Not depressing, moving—like Neil Young, PJ Harvey, Nina Simone, Liz Phair. And then when I became a mom, all I wanted to listen to was Bieber and Taylor Swift. I wanted to dance. I just wanted something up.
Any poetry?
I love so many poets. I grew up reading Hafez, who’s this amazing Persian poet. Some of his translations, if done by an interesting author, can be very punk-rock, very sex-positive, and really exciting. I started reading The Odyssey again because a woman finally translated it, and there are such interesting changes. One translation will say, “I am a heralded man.” And the new translation is like, “I am a complicated man who thinks often of himself.” I love Anne Carson. I started reading Sappho’s fragments, too.
Can you tell me anything about The Boroughs?
It’s the first time I’ve worked on a job where the whole family can sit in a room and watch something and be excited about it. I just love the actors so much. Getting to work with Geena Davis, Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, and Bill Pullman—incredible. It was really fun to support this 70-plus crew, and they’re just so young and vibrant, with a thousand stories. My son has a tiny little role in one of the episodes, and he’s really, really excited.
Is acting possibly in his future?
He’s starting to really be interested in acting. I started at 10, so I’m opening all the windows and the doors and seeing where he wants to run.
Are you planning to tour anytime soon?
I find touring wildly unsustainable. I’ve never done it regularly. I don’t know how people tour and make money. It’s crazy to me. I think I’m gonna do a residency in a girl’s bathroom where I just play for four women for, like, eight hours straight and do shifts. FL
