By Anita Malhotra

Nashville-based singer-songwriter and DJ Davis Mallory first came into the public eye as a reality TV star on the MTV show The Real World.

Becoming a singer-songwriter was his lifelong dream, and after several years working in New York City as a music journalist and for an EDM record label, he launched his career and moved to Nashville. 

An early highlight was when his single “Anyone Would Know” was remixed by Swedish DJ John Dahlbäck and released in 2017 by Armada Records.

Since then, DAVIS has released dozens of other successful songs and music videos, and his songs have received millions of streams on Spotify, SoundCloud and other platforms. 

Davis took time out from his busy schedule to speak to EDM Beat on Dec. 22, 2023 about his life and career.

EDM Beat: Hi Davis. Can you tell me about “FA LA LA LA,” the song you released recently?

Davis: In 2022 I was visiting my cousins who live in Sweden (my mom is Swedish). 

Over a cozy Christmas dinner, they knew I had a songwriting session the next day in Stockholm, so they encouraged me to write a Christmas song.

Up until that point in time, I had been working with the same producer, and we’d written five or six pop, catchy songs.

So asking him to write a Christmas song was a curveball. I was like, “What do you think of writing a Christmas song?” And he’s like, “Okay, let’s do it.” 

With us was a Swedish songwriter, Maria Broberg, and she helped co-write the song. My cousins tasked me with trying to write something as good as “Last Christmas” by Wham, so that was where we began.

It has ABBA-esque chords in it, and it’s basically a song about, “Will we get it right this year?” Will our wishes come true?” And it’s set to a Swedish pop production.

EDM Beat: Going back to your early life, can you tell me a little bit about your musical life growing up and your musical aspirations when you were really young?

Davis: My dad’s brother was a successful songwriter. His name was John Mallory, and he wrote songs for country and Christian artists, mostly in Nashville.

And then my dad’s sister married an artist manager, and he managed primarily Christian artists such as Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. So I grew up having the music business in my family.

Most people in my family can play guitar really well. I, for some reason, have not been able to pick up that skill.

But my mom put me in a children’s choir, and I fell in love with singing. And my mom – I’ve said this a million times – said when I went off to college, the house became quiet because I was always singing in the house. 

EDM Beat: How did you feel when you were singing as a child? 

Davis: I would make random songs about anything I felt. My mom has home videos of me singing my words out loud, so it was just my way of talking. I’m still that way.

My cat is crazy, and I was writing a song for her in Spanish. It was called “Locasita mi gatita,” which means “Crazy Cat.” I will just write songs randomly. I’ll record them on my phone, and maybe if they’re good, I might make a release out of it.

EDM Beat: Your path towards becoming a singer-songwriter was not that direct, from what I understand. What were some of the obstacles? 

Davis: I had a lot of self-doubt entering into the music industry. Even though it was in my family, I still felt like it was a really big reach to get to it.

It wasn’t until I was 30 years old that I entered into a recording studio for the first time – recorded a song I wrote.

That was kind of a midlife crisis moment for me because I felt like, from that point forward, I really wanted to keep doing it full-on. 

Before, it was just a dream or fantasy, but it felt really unreachable. I was in high school and I applied to go to college and got into a music school. But my mom wanted me to be a doctor, so I ended up pursuing medicine throughout college. 

During college, I auditioned for The Real World on MTV and, to my surprise, I got on. 

That threw me in a famous way into the mainstream world, but not for music.

Then I got recast for these Challenge shows, where you compete for money in different exotic locations. 

That took up almost five years of my life. And still dreaming of doing something in music and trying to figure out how to get out of being a reality star and into music in a proper way.

People that were famous for reality TV were trying to do music, but a lot of times they were mocked and they weren’t successful. So I took a slower jump. For a while I was a music blogger, and I interviewed – and I still do this today – artists for a radio station.

I was working for an MTV-owned outlet, interviewing musicians. And then through doing that for about two years, I got a job at a record label in New York City and became a marketing employee. 

Having spent about four years in a business side of the music industry, but still not creating any music, I met an artist named Parson James who invited me into some songwriting sessions, and I threw out my ideas in a co-writing way, and he liked them.

Then he’s like, “Send Davis in there to do backup vocals for me,” and that was my first experience doing vocals.

His manager heard me sing and thought Nashville would be a good location for me to live because the way I sang sounded kind of country. I’m from Georgia, and I think I have a lot of country influences. So that’s what led me to Nashville.

EDM Beat: Was it hard to establish yourself in Nashville? What kind of music did you release or work on when you first got there?

Davis: When I first came to Nashville, I found a magazine called Music Row. There’s a street here called Music Row – it’s where all the record and publishing labels are housed. Music Row put out a “Power Players” edition.

I bought a copy and in it was around 300 people’s emails. I took the time to craft a personal email to anyone I wanted to meet. Some of them were songwriters and, to my surprise, a lot of them said yes to meeting me.

So my first year in Nashville was just getting coffee with as many strangers as I could.

And through that, I started getting some songwriting sessions set up with people who had written songs I loved and was familiar with.

I was in those environments kind of shy and just watching them – seeing how they write a song. I would throw some ideas out, but the songs were often for me to sing.

A lot of these songs were country, as you would expect being in Nashville, and I wasn’t prepared to release country music. I still really liked EDM dance music.

The record label I worked for in New York was David Guetta’s and Swedish House Mafia’s label. So I was in a dance label world coming to Nashville.

One of the songs I wrote in Nashville was less country and more pop. The song is titled “LOUD” and a DJ named Landis asked if he could have the vocals, and he remixed it. 

His remix was one of my first songs ever to be signed to a record label and came out on Grammy-nominated (for his remix on Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Ray) French producer Cedric Gervais’ label Delecta. 

And then an artist who I was a fan of, John Dahlbäck – he’d worked with Avicii, with Swedish House Mafia, with Lady Gaga – wanted one of my more country songs.

I remember it was Easter Sunday and he emailed me on my way to the church. I was like, “Wow, this feels like it’s a big moment for me.” Within half a year’s time it came out and it was a big moment in my career.

That song was called “Anyone Would Know.” It was signed to Armada Records, which is based in Amsterdam.

EDM Beat: Did you study the art of songwriting? Or did that just come naturally from listening? 

Davis: I used to keep a journal. In my first year of living in Nashville it was 15 songwriting sessions, in my second year it was 50, in my third year it was 100, and in my fourth year it was 250.

I would say I learned how to song-write from doing those co-writing sessions – watching people who had gone to school for it.

EDM Beat: You recently came back from a writing camp. What is a writing camp and what did you do there? 

Davis: It really can vary. There was a writing camp in Nashville called “Denmark comes to Nashville.” It was 20 Danish people who came to Nashville and we wrote songs all week. I’ve done K-pop camps, where everyone is just writing music for K-pop artists during the week. 

This camp specifically was for one artist, a DJ from Honolulu, who goes by zuezeu. We spent three or four days (I was there for just two) writing music for his project.

He was there with us, so it was good because we were able to get his opinion. 

Sometimes you’re writing songs for artists in a camp and they’re not there. You’re just sending them everything at the end of the week, hoping that they take or release some of the music. 

EDM Beat: Do you write collaboratively with the other people in the camp or by yourself?

Davis: It’s definitely collaborations. There’s nobody working by themselves. Maybe in your yearly life as a songwriter, you do that a lot. But the idea of a camp is to come together and work with other people. 

EDM Beat:  I looked at your work on YouTube and I’m really struck by how much you’ve released. There seem to be 50 or 60 music videos at least. 

Davis: I came from a television career and after that I was in an acting school prior to becoming a Nashville-based songwriter.

So for me, visuals are a really important part of anything I do. A lot of times when I write a song, I have a music video in mind. I’ve found, frustratingly, a lot of these videos just don’t make any money back.

When I was in this writers camp, I overheard the manager tell his artist that major record labels were laying off their video departments because these big-budget music videos don’t see a return on the investment anymore. The manager said labels are way more interested in 10-second, 15-second, little Instagrammable reel-able content than a full video.

EDM Beat: Do you have a very busy schedule, balancing all this – the songwriting, the camps, the DJing?

Davis: Yeah. I DJ nearly every week, sometimes a few times throughout the week.  And then in combination with that, I’m songwriting fairly often.

I stressfully decided to take part in LAAMP (Los Angeles Academy for Artists & Music Production founded by Stargate) music school this year because you have to write one song every week, and it’s 31 weeks. 

There’s weeks this year where I’ve been in Hawaii or Arizona or Amsterdam and tried to write a song in combination with my flight schedule, flying with my microphone.

And there’s been times where it’s been stressful because it’s a collaboration with at least two other people every week and sometimes people have been on very different schedules from me.

EDM Beat: Many of your songs seem to be very personal. How does songwriting function for you in terms of processing things that are happening in your life?

Davis: I do write firsthand what I’m feeling almost all the time. I had a music publicist one time who asked me, “What is my most engaged social media?” And I said, “It’s when I have a picture of myself shirtless.” She said, “Then you need to write a song called ‘Shirtless’” and I did.

After that conversation, I started doing that sometimes, where I would think, “What’s doing well online? Okay, let’s write a song with that theme.” But more often than not, I write exactly what I’m feeling that day of my life. So a lot of my songs are like my journal for the day.

Davis: I like songs with positive messages. One of my songs called Faith I wrote at the beginning of the pandemic with a girl who was on American Idol.

It was at a time when everyone was scared, and we didn’t know what was about to happen.

To my surprise, it got a lot of in-store radio play. It went on to be one of my most financially successful songs. And I’ve had that happen a few times in my career. 

Anita: In your music, in your music videos, in your social media, you’re very open and approachable. Was this a conscious decision to be authentic? Or is that just your personality?

Davis: I think it’s my personality. I think I’m just very truthful and very open. I was in a songwriting session this week with a girl who’s a Taurus, and I’m a Leo. And she said she dated a Leo once before, and Leos can’t tell a lie.

I feel that about me. I am honest to a fault, I think. And it’s gotten me in trouble before, but I think it’s a nature I have within me just to be very open and honest.

EDM Beat: You were brought up Christian. Would you say that Christianity still influences your music?

Davis: I still go to church and I do feel that connection to God and to the stories that I was taught as a kid. I haven’t really written Christian music as a direct artist pursuit, but I do feel in my music I try to write music that holds to my Christian values.

EDM Beat: Has your faith also helped you keep going in a music career?

Davis: I will probably make music until I die. If I’m an old man, I’ll probably still be singing songs.

I will think it’s cool if a DJ uses my voice and puts me on a record as an old Willie Nelson sounding man. So, I just feel unstoppable when it comes to music. It’s what I love to do. 

EDM Beat: You’ve been out as a gay man for some time, but some of your videos feature same sex couples, while others feature opposite sex couples. Do you find that you need to balance these two aspects in order to reach a wider audience?

Davis: I came out on The Real World. And in some of my music videos, I’ve had same-sex relationships display if it’s myself, or if it’s characters. As recently as this year, I did a video for a song called I Want to be Free, which was about me and a guy that I was dating. So I want my videos to be authentic.

In some of my early videos, when I first moved to Nashville, some of the directors weren’t okay with making same-sex content because of their faith. So I did find it harder to display visually what I wanted to display. But in I Want to be Free I feel like it kind of hits the nail on the head. 

EDM Beat: In terms of the business aspects, what are some of the challenges involved in making a living as a singer-songwriter?

Davis: I think making money in music is a challenge. I’ve found that I’ve made most of my living through DJing. Sometimes I do corporate wedding work and it’s taken me around the world. I’ve been DJing weddings in Hawaii and I’ve done eight different trips to Hawaii in two years’ time. 

The other way I make money is through music getting played in stores. That gets paid out through your PRO – like BMI, ASCAP, SESAC.

So every time one of my songs plays in the store while people are shopping, I get paid for that. And that has been really profitable for me as well.  

I had some really big concerts on my calendar that were cancelled due to the pandemic.

Pre-pandemic I played the NBA Denver Nuggets TV Halftime Show live, which had four million viewers. It was a really big moment in my career. And I opened for the winner of Eurovision, Netta, from Israel, that same summer in Sweden.

EDM Beat: What are some of your next musical projects?

Davis: Last year, I returned to Sweden to Ten Music Group to work with the Gustav Blomberg producer of FA LA LA LA, and we wrote three new songs. I have since then written a variety of songs during Amsterdam Dance Event that I think are cool. 

I’ve written some here in Nashville. So I feel like I’m sitting on a library of unreleased music that I’m excited for. And I’m always finding a DJ to collaborate with me or a record label to sign it, or maybe polishing it up and self-releasing it. 

Totally different, I have a manager who’s based in Amsterdam who came up with this idea of starting a brand-new artist project where it is me as a DJ but we’re using other singers. 

To me, being a singer on my own record was always so important. But the idea of working with other singers – maybe I co-write the song or I just produce the song – is something that I’m open to doing. So sometime next year I might put out three songs under this new project. 

EDM Beat: I have one more question and it’s about advice that you would give to singer-songwriters in the EDM world who are starting out.

Davis: I would just encourage people to find the community around them and start working with people nearby to collaborate.

I learned how to make music from being around other people, specifically producers, songwriters here in Nashville. 

When I first got here I didn’t think there was an EDM community – it was hard to find. Now, I would say it’s a little easier to find, but it is smaller than Miami, for example, or LA. But just find the community around you and get involved with it.

EDM Beat: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview, Davis. It was such a pleasure to learn more about you and your music. 

Davis: Thank you, Anita, for having me. It was good to see you again. 

For more information on Davis Mallory, please visit Davismallory.com. His work can also be found on Youtube (@DavisMalloryMusic) and on Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok and X (all with the handle @davismallory). His music can also be streamed at SoundCloud, Spotify and Apple Music and other platforms.

For an audio version of this interview, please visit my channel EDM Beat on YouTube.