Mollie O'Brien

Friday , January 12, 2001
12:00 am
Location: Elderly Instruments
in-store performance (free)

"Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald never got asked why they didn't write or play an instrument," Mollie O'Brien points out. "It's only in our era of the sensitive singer-songwriter, that it becomes a question. I concentrate pretty darn hard on singing; that's my instrument. I'm putting my own stamp on the music. Someone else may have written the song, but no one will sing it the way I sing it. I'm an interpretive singer, like Frank and Ella." On her new album, Things I Gave Away, Mollie O'Brien emerges as one of the top interpretive singers of her generation. Though she is often associated with the folk and bluegrass worlds because of her frequent collaboration with her brother Tim O'Brien, Mollie is just as comfortable in the worlds of jazz, blues and pop. She proves as much on the new disc, which draws from songwriters as diverse as blues giant Percy Mayfield, folk legend Judy Roderick, jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln, the Subdudes' John Magnie and John Lennon & Paul McCartney. "I don't think of myself as a blues singer or a folk singer or a bluegrass singer," Mollie confesses. "I think of myself as an interpreter. I've done lots of acting, and it's only when you've learned your lines and your blocking that you can go out of the envelope. That's how I learn tunes. I learn them backwards and forwards and try them in all different keys, so I can learn how far I can stretch them. You can't take chances until you really know where you are, and taking chances is what's fun." Mollie takes a lot of chances on Things I Gave Away. Rather than relying on familiar standards, she chose songs by such relatively unknown songwriters as Kristina Olsen, Randy Handley, Rose Bygrave, Tim Cook and Henry Hipkins. Rather than sticking to the Celtic-folk-bluegrass sound that made her duo projects with Tim so popular, Mollie goes for jazz minimalism on "Throw It Away," art-song atmospherics on "Train Time," and rowdy blues belting on "When I'm Gone." Rather than working with an established Nashville producer, she let Nina Gerber turn the knobs. Gerber isn't well known because she has been reluctant to venture beyond her Northern California home turf. But her work as a guitarist for Kate Wolf, Kristina Olsen, Rosalie Sorrels and others has made her a revered figure in progressive-bluegrass and folk circles. Two years ago, Mollie convinced Gerber to try some limited roadwork and they've been together ever since, performing both as a duo and as the core of a larger band. "She's such a great accompanist," Mollie enthuses, "because she can follow me anywhere I go and she can hold her own as a soloist. You can't ask for anything more. I enjoyed touring with her so much that I asked her to produce this record. She worked us all very hard, but it was worth it because she was so creative with the orchestrations. She's a hopeless romantic at heart, and it really comes across in her playing." For Mollie, the musical journey began in Wheeling, West Virginia, where she and her kid brother Tim grew up as the youngest children in a large Irish Catholic family. As the only red heads, left-handers and serious singers in the clan, they bonded. By the time they were in high school, they were singing covers of Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and Peter, Paul & Mary for folk masses, ski lodges and local coffeehouses as a duo. After two years of college, Mollie moved to New York with hopes of becoming a musical-comedy star on Broadway. She got bogged down in day jobs instead, and when two members of Tim’s then current trio -- The Ophelia Swing Band -- came to visit, it changed her life. "They were doing all this Boswell Sisters and Cab Calloway I had never heard before," Mollie recalls, "and I just went nuts. That music gave me a mission. It took me a couple years, but I moved to Boulder in 1980 on a quest to sing those songs. I met some people right away, and we started a jazz band called the Prosperity Jazz Band, doing '30s and '40s swing stuff with three-part harmonies. It was a really wild time to be in Boulder." She also met local guitarist and bassist Rich Moore, whom she eventually wed. They now have two daughters, 12 and 14. "We've been married for 17 years and together for almost 20," she notes. "I'm as proud of that as anything I've done. It's hard being a mother and trying to make a living as a traveling musician. There's a tremendous lot of maneuvering and guilt. It's hard, but I love it; I can't imagine doing anything else. On the plus side, my kids have heard lots of music their peers haven't heard. Their friends think they're weird because they don't like Britney Spears." In 1985, Mollie and Tim reformed their high school duo for a one-off show in Boulder. It went over so well that it became an annual event. In 1987, Tim produced his sister's debut album, I Never Move Too Soon, for a local label. When Sugar Hill asked Tim to record a duo record with a famous bluegrass artist in the style of the Ricky Skaggs & Tony Rice album, he suggested that he make a duo album with his sister instead. The result was 1988's Take Me Back. "The label had never heard of me," Mollie remembers, "so they hemmed and hawed. But when they heard the tapes, they were with it. That record did really well in both folk and bluegrass worlds. People could hear the family intimacy of it. We blended well and it was obvious we were siblings. There was a simple, down-home feel to it." There were two more quite popular duo albums, 1992's Remember Me and 1994's Away Out on the Mountain. Between 1989 and '91, Mollie also sang with a popular Colorado blues and R&B band, the Blue Tips. Her second solo album, Every Night of the Week, reflected that work. When Tim moved to Nashville in 1996, though, it was clear that the duo's days were coming to an end. Mollie used the change as an opportunity to strike on her own as a national solo artist on Sugar Hill Records. Her next solo album, 1996's Tell It True, was produced by Tim, but the follow-up, 1998's Big Red Sun, was produced instead by Tim's old Hot Rize bandmate, Charles Sawtelle. That disc, with its brilliantly imaginative reworking of songs by Lucinda Williams, Randy Newman, John Hiatt, Willie Dixon, Memphis Minnie, Steve Goodman, and Chuck Berry finally moved Mollie out of her brother's shadow and out of the folk-bluegrass niche. As such, it set up the triumph of this year's even bolder Things I Gave Away. "Everyone said, `Are you going to make another Big Red Sun'' I said, `No, I've already done that.' I wanted to do something with a greater range of textures. Some songs, like `The House, The Boat, The Lovers,' are really beautiful and refined, while others, like 'Love, Life and Money,' are really out there and funky. "I'm almost 48 and I'm finally feeling confident in my singing ability. I'm confident that I can do all these different styles. They fit together because I'm doing them. I don't worry about how many blues tunes or how many bluegrass tunes I do; I just go with the flow. I'm really sure of myself, and I hope that comes across."

Check out recordings we carry featuring Mollie O'Brien