Molly Ringworm is an indie rock band from New Jersey who recently released their newest single Frank's Frat. Sarah and I had a chat about all things music, their creative and writing processes + so much more!
Hi Sarah! Thanks so much for taking the time out to answer my questions, how are you?
Hi! I’m doing well! Chillin’ at home, working, taking classes and writing songs.
What made you want to start a band? How did it come into fruition?
I had been singing in bands and choirs for a long time so I guess doing music in a group was what felt right to me; I was playing music with my bandmates in cover bands and in class at our performing arts high school so recruiting them to play songs I wrote just felt natural. Also being insecure about being alone on stage with a guitar – I needed the emotional support and talent of my friends to trick me and anyone watching into thinking I knew what I was doing.
How did you get into music? How did you know this is what you wanted to do?
I’ve been singing forever, like putting on choregraphed performances with a boom box and my Britney Spears cassettes for my parent’s dinner guests at like 4 years old. I started taking vocal and piano lessons around 9 and became active in local theater and choirs. I fell into being in bands around 11 when my cousin Johnny (who plays guitar in Ringworm) and his friends were looking for a singer for their band.
What was the first song you ever wrote?
One of the earliest ones I remember I wrote in sixth grade about my crush. Really bad lyrics about his brown eyes and how I thought he was so cool because he liked the Beatles. No one ever heard it, thank god.
When did you start writing lyrics? Did it always come naturally?
I started to keep a journal of lyrics around fifth or sixth grade. I never did anything with them, they just lived in the book with melodies in my head and weren’t given much thought. Now it’s definitely a process I take my time with and think about for a long time before deciding a song is finished.
How did you guys find your sound?
I still don’t know if we’ve found it. We have a lot of influences and they come through in different ways. I always say we’re “indie rock” but these days that category is so vast in and of itself. Artists I really love are like the 90s Matador label line up: Pavement, Liz Phair, Helium, Yo La Tengo. But I also grew up on 60s rock and roll my dad loved like The Beatles and The Stones, folk rock from Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, and 80s college rock bands like R.E.M and The Smiths. A lot of the stuff I’m writing at the moment doesn’t seem like it could all go together, but I don’t think I want to have one particular sound.
What’s your creative process when you are writing a song?
It’s usually me and a guitar by myself. Once I have the structure of the song figured out and most of the lyrics written I’ll bring it to the rest of the band, and everyone writes their own parts for it.
Your newest single “Frank’s Frat” recently came out, can you tell us more about it? What was the inspiration behind it?
One day in a creative writing class, I said “Frank is in a frat” out loud in conversation with another student and my professor was like, “You need to make that a song!” After class I jotted down the first two lines in notes my phone and forgot about it for a while. It was around that time that the first few of nine lawsuits for sexual assault cases were being brought against the university I went to, Stockton U. in New Jersey. Me and some other students became super active in pushing for administration to take action against the unrecognized fraternity that was responsible for these rapes and continuing to function on campus. Any woman that’s on a college campus knows that fraternities are a hub for gendered violence and racial discrimination; it was a shock to everyone but the women and people of color on campus to find out that this little college in the woods in New Jersey could harbor groups with this same exclusive culture. The university wound up settling these cases. I was really heartbroken that these girls who were assaulted didn’t get more justice than that. With my downtime during quarantine this summer I decided to finish this song one day after reflecting on all of this. I just wanted to get across that no matter how good these Greek organizations try to make themselves look through philanthropy and bake sales, underneath the surface is this violent, masculine, exclusive evil. I’m also never not thinking about this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy and frenemy Cordelia go to a frat party and they wind up being drugged and (almost) sacrificed to a giant snake demon living in the frat house basement…a not so subtle metaphor that went perfectly with the narrative I was telling in the song, so I had to throw an allusion to that in the track.
Is the writing and creative process for “Frank’s Frat” any different from your other songs?
The creative process was definitely different. We never practiced the song all together because we were deep into COVID isolation. I wrote the guitar part and sent a demo to our drummer Niko and bassist Andrew. They wrote and recorded their parts to the song remotely in their free time. So the recording and mixing for the song was done completely remote and separate from one another during quarantine, as opposed to recording and mixing all together like we have done in the past.
When creating a song what comes first? Lyrics, or music?
It depends. I have a bunch of scraps of lyrics written, and sometimes I start noodling on the guitar and think the emotions of the music would match perfectly with something I already have written. Or, I make up the music and something comes to me lyrically the more I play it and think about how the chords influence the feel of the song. It usually all depends on the music, but “Frank’s” was a rare occasion that I had the lyrics finished and wrote the music specifically for it.
You’ve said that “Frank’s Frat” follows the punk tradition of bands like Bikini Kill, Dead Kennedys, and The Dead Milkmen! Would you say you guys are also inspired by them too? If not, which bands have inspired you the most?
Yeah we love all of these bands (early Dead Kennedys with Jello, not the Dead Kennedys who are praising Mitt Romney on Twitter). Kathleen Hanna is a big influence for me as someone who charged her music with politics surrounding gender and was always so outspoken about her own experiences of sexual assault. The Minutemen were the inspiration to keep the song under the one minute-mark (lol). I was also listening to the new Illuminati Hotties album around the time of writing the music for the song.
What inspires you the most when writing lyrics?
I’m definitely fueled by emotions at all times, but especially when writing lyrics.
Do you listen to any bands or artist for inspiration during the creative process? If so, who?
Sometimes if I’m stuck on lyrics I turn to Elliott Smith. He’s an amazing storyteller in his music. If I’m not sure what else I have to say about something or I’m not sure where I want my own narrative to go, I’m like, how did Elliott do it in a song similar to the topic of my own?
The inspiration behind “Franks Frat” was the frustration you had with your own university, how do you go about being able to write a song like this with such as heavy story behind it?
I don’t think I was consciously thinking about this when writing the song but reflecting on the process, the only way I was able to write about this absurd and heavy story was through use of satire. I was definitely thinking about how successful satire is used in songs like Dead Kennedy’s “Terminal Preppie.” A seemingly positive tone about white, male power can makes the underlying dark truth of the story even scarier.
We’re all about discovering new music, who should we be listening to right now?
Tierra Whack, Korine, Sishamo, Béya & Illuminati Hotties
Words by Melody
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