This article is from the spring 2025 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Virginia Kinnier
Born-and-raised coastal people tend to return to the water in one way or another, pulled back home with the tide, their lives and work ever reflecting the influence of the water.
Molly Thomas is the perfect example of this.
While her address may have changed over the years, the singer, songwriter, and musician has always been a child of the Gulf. Born in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Molly spent most of her early years in Hattiesburg, Jackson, and Gulfport before she moved to Mobile in her twenties and eventually settled down in Point Clear after a stint in Nashville.
“I love it here,” Molly says. “Even when I moved to Nashville, I always wanted to be back in this sacred space. I always felt like my spirit was here.”
Within her music, Molly fully embraces her connection to the coast, like a child running toward a wave at the beach. Lyrics like “the ocean is in my veins” and “the sand sticks to my feet” shout her recognition of and appreciation for the environment that raised her.
No stranger to the live music scene, Molly has graced the stages of local haunts like Callaghan’s in Mobile and the Book Cellar in Fairhope, while also checking off bucket-list appearances at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, El Ray Theatre in Los Angeles, and late-night appearances on David Letterman and the “Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. Her instrumentals and vocals have accompanied the work of other celebrated musicians such as Guster, Todd Snider, The White Buffalo, Matthew Ryan, and many more, and her music has also appeared in three films.
As a solo artist, Molly has released three acclaimed records and two singles, as well as one album, Honey’s Fury, along with a single with her band, Molly Thomas & The Rare Birds. In August of 2023, she was in the middle of recording her upcoming album with writer and producer Ken Rose when she almost lost her life in a near-fatal car wreck in Fairhope. Her car flipped several times, and she was life-flighted to Mobile with several broken bones, broken wrists, and numerous lacerations.
Today she is grateful to still be able to play and perform at all.
“I’m doing so much better, but I still have lingering issues from the wreck, like a rod in my strumming hand, which can make it a little stiff sometimes,” Molly explains. “Mentally I can get overwhelmed easily by things, but I think trauma does that to you. I’ve also had some trouble remembering things, but I had that before the wreck so that might just come with age,” she laughs.
During her recovery, Molly was plagued by other health issues, undergoing surgery twice, the first to remove her gallbladder. Homebound and forced to literally sit with her thoughts, there was only one thing she could do: write. And she had some new material to work with.
“When I was in and out of consciousness, being helicoptered to USA, I remember saying out loud, ‘I want to live, I want to live,’” Molly recalls. “Until that moment I never knew I had that will to live or that I felt so strongly about it that I was ready to fight for it. It was really powerful.”
In a new song, aptly titled “Crash,” on her upcoming album, listeners get to experience that fight for life firsthand. The music lifts and lowers throughout, mimicking that rise and fall of consciousness as its propelled by something much more powerful than even the sounds themselves: her will to live.
“When I write, I try to make things more visual,” Molly says. “That’s the effort that I try to put into creating a soundscape to pull people in and have them feel and think about their own life. What kind of light can I bring or help people recognize in their own life?”
Listening to a sneak peek of the upcoming album, it feels infused by her recent traumatic experience, like the wreck itself was the catalyst for the entire work. Ironically, it wasn’t.
“I was actually in the middle of recording the majority of the songs on the new album when I had the accident,” Molly explains. “But so many relate to what happened that it’s almost like it was some sort of premonition.”
For example, her song “Even the Strong” flips the idea of a survival story around to show the backside of it, the dark underbelly where the realness and rawness of strength is exposed, as well as the limitedness of it.
“I wrote that song several years ago and finished it just before the accident, oddly enough,” Molly says. “Even people who go through life and appear strong need somebody to lean on, a shoulder to lay their head on,” Molly admits.
Luckily for Molly, she didn’t have to go far to find that somebody.
“While I was in the hospital, Ken Rose, my co-writer, gave up everything he was doing and he came and stayed at our house and took care of our animals,” Molly recalls. “When we started writing again, he would come over and we would sit and work out some songs, and it really helped, just being around somebody. I’m so grateful for our friendship and everything he did to help me during the healing process just by bringing his guitar over. I honestly cannot imagine having worked with anyone else.”
Molly and Ken lucked upon the perfect spot for her self-described “indie swamp-pop” writing and instrumental sessions. Captain Tom Yeager of Fairhope lent them his home on Fly Creek, and the setting and characters found there greatly influenced their work.
“We were in a house that sits very high in the trees, so we could look out over the Creek and the Bay,” Molly explains. “We were surrounded by birds and alligators and water and turtles, and there was so much of that feeling of nature that found its way into the writing.”
The history of the area also seeped into the album, particularly in the song “1839,” which is about a little section of land in Montrose called Ecor Rouge, which once served as the main port on the Eastern Shore in the 1800s. Potters would search along the beach in that area for clay to make milk jugs or containers for exporting things, a practice that Molly herself has taken up when collecting material for the ceramic clay earrings she creates by hand.
Back in the 1800s, the clay became such a significant resource that if you go to Fairhope today you can still see some of the structures that were made from the brick formed with that clay. Molly’s first show following the traumatic events of her wreck and long recovery was a homecoming of sorts at one of these remaining clay-brick structures in the heart of Fairhope: The Book Cellar at Page and Palette.
“It was amazing and full of tears — happy tears — and so much support from the community,” Molly recalls. “It meant the world, and it’s something I need to remind myself of more often because it was another spiritual moment with an audience, a communion, a give-and-take with people of their excitement and joy that we were able to play again. It’s hard to even talk about because words don’t really describe it well enough.”
Experiences like the homecoming show at the Book Cellar have served as lampposts in Molly’s journey back to music, not only lighting the path but brightening her resolve to continue down it.
“The music business is really hard,” Molly admits. “It’s a tough game, and there’s so much risk involved. I always wonder if I should go back to school and get another degree, but just like the push and pull of the ocean and that metaphor that seems to constantly lead my life, music has always come back to me in some form. Even before the accident, if I had decided I couldn’t live this life anymore, someone would come up to me somewhere and say, ‘You know that song you wrote? I was going through something, and it really helped me get through it.’ And I would say okay, this really is my ministry. My father was a minister so I guess that’s how I see it. I try to leave religion out of it, but I am a very spiritual person, and there are too many signals that say ‘This is what you’re supposed to do.’ When I try to think of my life any other way, I always end up in these conversations with myself, and I always end up in the same place: picking up my violin.”
After almost losing her life, much less her physical ability to create and perform, her choice to return to music means so much more. Even the title of the album, Tumble Home, originally a lyric from another song on the album, became synonymous with her recovery and her journey back to music.
“It’s actually a nautical term,” Molly explains. “In every ship there is a part that is referenced to as the ‘tumble home,’ and it’s what keeps the boat from tipping, what keeps it upright. After the wreck, I realized the connection, and suddenly ‘tumble home’ become a double entendre. The metaphors around this thing are godly, I’m telling you it’s weird. I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it, but that’s why I’m grateful for conversations like this because it reminds me of these cool things that I need to be more conscious of.”
With a new record set to be released this summer, Molly feels hopeful about the future of her music.
“As hard as it is to relive it, I really appreciate opportunities like this to remember my story because it reminds me of these epiphanies that have come,” Molly says. “You live your life and you go on about your business, and all of a sudden you forget that lesson you just learned. My grandmother always told me that I had a gift and that it was my responsibility to share it with people. When I sit down and compose a song or a string arrangement, I follow the flow of the work, and it kind of takes care of itself. For so long I thought everybody was like that, but come to find out not everybody can do that, and it is a gift. The wreck taught me to embrace this gift, giving me permission in a way to continue to pursue this path of music and art and songwriting. Everybody has their special thing that they do; mine just happens to be this.”
