Molly Rankin was stuck trying to pay tribute to her father’s musical legacy until the indie-pop genre offered a way. Molly Rankin explains why she’s not a famous bandleader and why it’s uncomfortable playing music with your boyfriend.
While I wait to be in touch with Molly Rankin of the Canadian Indie-pop group Alvvays The videos for their latest track, “In Undertow,” an addictive, shoegaze slurry with feedback, Farfisa as well as feedback, just went up on YouTube. When she calls the phone from Toronto, I ask her whether she’s viewing real-time responses to the comments thread.
“I learned very early on that it’s not good to read that stuff,” Rankin smiles. “I’ll probably go for a long walk for a few hours today and then come back and see if there’s been any disaster.” I’ve read a few of the responses, however: “This is fricking amazing,”; “Totally 80s and awesome,”; “Molly so cute.” YouTube’s tiny thumbs-up icon has been viewed many times. “Things are always good early on,” Rankin says in a deadpan.
The Alvvays’ singer, guitarist, and songwriter must be more confident. However, she has plenty of reasons to be happy as they get ready to release their sophomore album Antisocialites. The creation of their debut album, which was self-titled, was lengthy and risky and risky. Rankin was required to pay to master it by utilizing waitressing funds, and it took a while to gain people’s hearts after cassette copies were hesitantly distributed before finally getting the full release in 2014. Due to the captivating, swooning tracks like Archie Marry Me, the album was featured on several reviews’ lists at the end of the year and saw Alvvays tour across the globe for two whole years.
Antisocialites is a sparkling bubblegum song that evokes Scottish indie-pop such as the Vaselines and Camera Obscura. Rankin can sing with a voice that is so beautiful and aching she could sing you an entire sentence in prison and create a dreamy sound. Her constant growth as a songwriter is awe-inspiring when considering that an incident in Rankin’s early years could easily have ended her music career for all time.
The five members of the group hail from the remote islands of Northern Nova Scotia; Rankin is the daughter of John Morris Rankin, a fiddler from the Celtic folk family collective known as The Rankin Family. In the 1990s, they sold two million records, won many awards, which included Six Junos and were recognized for creating a North American renaissance of Celtic music and culture. “It’s crazy – the places they resonated in are still revealing themselves to me,” Molly says of Molly of her father’s success that all happened while she was still a young woman. “People approach me during our travels in Europe and ask me questions about the band’s achievements. One guy came to an event we’ve been at wearing the largest binder of photographs of my dad playing the fiddle.”
On a Sunday, at dawn on January 20, 2000, John Rankin was driving Molly’s older brother Michael and two of his classmates to a hockey game when he fell off the highway, sending his vehicle into a cliff 75 feet high into the cove. The teens managed to crack the window and then swim to the safety of the cove. John Rankin didn’t make it back to shore in good health. Molly was 12 years old and lost her father but also an aspiring young fiddler, her mentor. “At the time of his passing I was really growing as a fiddle player, and afterwards there was this sign of life through me and through my playing that everyone noticed,” Molly remembers. “It brought everyone joy at the period of time. However, it was also an enormous amount for me. I didn’t feel like I was yet at a point that I could have my own style. I was trying to follow his footsteps which became quite exhausting.”
At 19, she learned to play the fiddle – “one of the hardest instruments” – well enough to pay dedication to her dad during the Rankin Family reunion tour in 2007. Her musical tastes were changing, mainly when she got to know Alec O’Hanley, with whom she is engaged professionally and romantically. While she was playing guitar in Alvvays, He switched her to indie rock, except Teenage Fanclub, a band she describes as “a door.”
“Alec gave me, I think, two copies of Bandwagonesque – one for the car and one for the apartment,” she states. Rankin sent him samples of songs she was developing. “He didn’t like them,” she notes with a laugh. “He was the first person to say, ‘I think you can do better’.”
The couple’s relationship was sometimes turbulent, but Rankin described her new album as “a fantasy breakup arc” in which “life nearly imitated art.” “We’ve been sort of pulling each other over mountains for the last few years,” she confesses.
She has also been forced to confront the pressure imposed by those in the music industry and herself to become more outgoing as a band leader, and even the name Antisocialites acknowledges Rankin’s opposition. “When we were starting out, there was some expectation that I would be a certain type of frontperson, that I would develop into someone very charismatic and comfortable – and that’s never really happened,” she says. “But it’s not my school. I’m not one to show off on stage or to have any bizarre rock personality. As time has passed, I’ve come to realize that I’m the shy persona, an uneasy human.”
Before I leave Rankin to take her long stroll, I will ask what her father’s thoughts have been out of Alvvays.
“Something that he instilled to me was that If you’re not willing to complete something with 100%, then you shouldn’t bother. This is certainly somewhere in my head all the time. Therefore, I’m certain I’d become an academic, or whatever if there was a chance to live,” she chuckles. “Or he would be there yelling, ‘Tune the guitar!'”
Antisocialites is out now on Transgressive. Alvvays will be touring the UK in February.