The Molly Miller Trio, consisting of Molly Miller, Jennifer Condos, and Jay Bellerose, are releasing their new Western-influenced instrumental album The Ballad of Hotspur on May 3rd. It builds on their individual musical influences around a Jazz sensibility and on their creative interaction as a live performing group in the LA area and beyond. Recording mostly live in studio, the songs on The Ballad of Hotspur were co-written together, following some general trends and ideas, but always pursuing the group’s interest in storytelling and emotional arcs present in instrumental music.
Molly Miller pursues a lot of musical avenues that keep her happily in motion, including playing guitar in Jason Mraz’s touring band, teaching at the University of Southern California, and writing, recording, and performing with her trio, among other projects. In Mraz’s upcoming tour, she will actually be both opening for him and playing in his band. I spoke with her about the ways in which these different activities inform each other, and the inspirations that weave their way through The Ballad of Hotspur.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I feel like it’s natural to ask about these different areas of your life in music and how you keep those things in motion, between touring, teaching, and recording original music. But then I see that this album is really a project from the three of you, and how you work together in a trio. That actually makes life much more complicated, because it’s about harmonizing everyone’s schedule!
Molly Miller: Yes, that’s right! There’s such a balance and a delicate dance, but I’ve been fortunate in that most of the time we can find dates to play and dates to do shows. We just booked a bunch of stuff, and I’m a little nervous that I’m going to have to cancel a couple of shows because of my schedule for a different artist. It is a balancing act, but the beautiful thing about being freelance and being your own boss is that I know that I’m teaching freelance at USC right now, so I’m not going to book a tour. I know that I’m playing with Jason Mraz right now, so I won’t necessarily focus on my trio shows. But while I’m on the road, I’m setting up gigs for my trio. While I’m on the road, I’m writing songs for the trio and getting inspired by the different cities and places I’ve been.
I don’t know what my life would be like if I had only one thing. For me, it all informs other things. I get to work with amazing students, and to me that’s super-inspiring. Things that we talk about in classes will be inspiring in my own practice. My own music, I hope, brings something to the artists I play with. Then that inspires my own music. I feel like all this makes me more well-rounded and keeps me challenged. It’s never like, “Wow! I can just sit back and see what happens!” [Laughs]
That reminds me of the fact that I often need to be on the hook, having promised things to other people, to get me to do something. You have a lot of people who you’re answering to, in a way, so you’ve taken on those responsibilities that keep you in motion. But I think it’s energizing to stay in motion.
That is such a real thing. I think that staying in motion keeps me energized. I used to not crash. I used to be the energizer bunny. Since covid, when I have a crazy couple of weeks or month, I do crash. I try to be better about managing my time now that I’m not in my 20s. Sometimes I say, “I’m going to lay in bed for an hour and read right now.”
That’s the other side of things, making personal time. Even more to juggle?
I had the day off yesterday and I went to three guitar shows. It was super-inspiring. Old Molly would stay to the end, but last night, I was exhausted. At 9:30, I’d seen hours of guitar, so I went to bed. That way I get to wake up a functional human being.
I kind of figured that the teaching, and stuff that comes up with your students, might be a recurring theme that popped up in your life when it came to writing.
For sure. Even the name of the record came up in one of my classes. I teach a solo guitar class to graduates and upperclassmen. One of the assignments was ballads. We got into this whole discussion about how a ballad is not just a slow song, it’s a story. That got into the whole idea of “The Ballad of…” relating to folklore and Western music. It’s a tale. That’s what I think every song should be. It’s all a story that you’re telling. It’s not necessarily “Joe went to the park and fell…”, but it is an emotional journey and a story being told. Then I kept thinking about that phrase, “The Ballad of…” That’s the intention of all my songs, and especially since this record has this Western flare, it felt even more right to call it, “The Ballad of…”. Then I chose “Hotspur”, a character from Shakespeare.
There is that feeling of romantic ballad storytelling associated with the Old West and being out West. It might not be a love story, though it could be, but there are also all these death ballads and murder ballads.
Murder ballads are the best! That’s the thing, ballads can be fun, ballads can be sad. So often, the characters are these flawed humans. It is romantic, but in a nostalgic, emotional way. That’s what a ballad is, and it doesn’t matter the speed of the song. That’s why I was drawn to them.
Ballads definitely seem engineered to get as much emotion out of the audience as possible, too. When you talked with Jennifer and Jay, did you all talk about these ideas?
We all have this notion about our music and how it should be played, that they are stories. The arrangements are very intentional. Yes, most of our songs have an improvisation section, but we are all writing it together. All of our songs have a story being told, with a beginning, middle, and end, and we have a preconceived notion of it, but it’s also live instrumental music. The record was pretty much recorded live. We recorded the album over two days, then overdubbed percussion a couple months later.
We probably didn’t play any song more than five times in the studio. We’d then just choose our take. The music is about a story, the idea of bringing back an instrumental, and trying to capture the live feeling. I think a lot about a picture. You take a picture, and even though there’s some editing you can do, it’s a picture. We do the same thing with our music. It’s live, and it’s there, and it’s supposed to capture a moment. You could have done something different, but what you capture is the truest form of the song in this moment.
Does that mean that in your performances later, things could be quite different?
Things can shift. We have open sections. The basic form of the songs is the same though. We don’t do free jams. Our songs are very arranged, like old Nat King Cole arrangements, or Dave Brubeck. All of those arrangements are super-specific.
I felt that listening to this album. It was so intentional. But, as you’ve explained, it doesn’t feel overworked. There’s a gentleness to the way the songs are delivered that feels very natural, which I’m sure is a fine line to create. How much did anyone collaborate on the songs before going into the studio?
We are a band who collaborates all the time. I’m actually going to Jen and Jay’s house tomorrow to work on a couple of tunes. The normal process is that either I write a song, or Jen and I write a song together. One of us has an inspiration for a song and sends it to the other one, then we finish each other’s songs. That’s the entire record. Then we get into a room, and Jay always has super ideas for arrangements. His drum parts are very interesting and three of us will make it whole.
Sometimes I have an idea of how I want a song to be played, and sometimes we stay true to that, but sometimes Jay has an idea that flips things entirely. We rehearse a couple of times before we start playing a song live. We gig a lot in town at restaurants and bars, and sometimes we have proper shows. We like to play. You can rehearse a song a hundred times, but there’s something about playing it live that means it’s ready.
It seems like working in a trio is a great setup for making sure everyone gets to contribute and explore their ideas. It’s a small enough group to help that along.
Yes. I sometimes work in a really big band. I have a couple of situations with really large bands. You have to have the confidence to play something, but also not step on someone else’s toes. I think of this analogy for a fill—if there’s only one slice of pizza left, don’t always be the person going for that one slice of pizza. But in the trio setting, there’s so much space. That’s one of the things I love about the trio setting: You can’t hide. You’re such an essential piece of the whole thing. Everyone’s voices get heard.
What’s one of your songs on the album that you feel has a particularly specific emotional or narrative arc?
Some songs are more of an emotional journey, but some songs have a very clear meaning behind the writing process. The song “Blues to Greens”, one of our singles, was written around week one of covid, like March 20th, 2020. As for all of us, our lives were flipped upside down, and all the plans I had, and the tours that I had. The emotional state that I was in was distraught. The world was in such a dark place. But LA had just had a crazy rainstorm and then the sun came out. I don’t think the skies have ever been that blue or the colors have ever been that vibrant. No one was driving and no one was flying, so there was no pollution. It was breathtakingly beautiful. I think that song’s about the juxtaposition of the multiple truths: There could be something horrible going on, but also, there is beauty to be seen. I felt an immense sadness in the moment that I wrote that song, but also hope.
I started feeling a little bit of the Western flavor on that song already, so that’s interesting that it was one of the first songs for the album.
The Western idea happened because Jen said, “I want to write a Western record!” She started sending me some ideas. It was fun, because Western music is so guitar-centric. It really was in line with our project which has songs, and stories, and is kind of old timey. The songs “66 West”, “Head Out” “2 West” and “Cine” are very Western-centric, but all of the songs are connected in some way. They all kind of have that idea. My friend directed a music video for the last record, and he had this idea of directing a three-part music video of a Western murder story. I still want him to do this! We were going to have vocalists. We were writing these songs thinking they could be a music video that could be connected, and it turned into a record.
I hope you get to do that! That would be great. The music does feel very cinematic and essentially visual. But you also allowed a fair amount of difference between these songs. It’s not a concept album in the sense that the songs all have to be appreciated in order.
I think we didn’t want it to be too on-the-nose. All of us have such different musical influences, too. Some songs have old R&B grooves on them. Some of them are a little more modern. Some are jazzy. I think there are a lot of influences, but it’s all our voices, together. They are all connected by a time period, and they were all written with the three of us in mind.
