The third single from Mol Sullivan‘s eponymously titled “Goose” is out today. As a single and also as the spiritual familiar for this album, the goose looms large. Sullivan asks, “am I a swan or just a goose / I’d bet the latter, grab my purse / it’s not so difficult a choice / between a joker and a fool / without giving them a voice / do you want an ocean or a pool?”. In some of the choicest chamber pop experimentation, “Goose” expands on the cygnet myth, offering empathy for anyone who feels like they’ve contained multitudes who treat the open mic like a grab-the-mic singalong at a hardcore show.
After 15 years, Mol’s work has culminated in GOOSE – an album brimming with sophisticated pop arrangements and statements of clear-eyed emotional survival. Sobriety, fractured relationships, and compassionate introspection loom large on this record that brings together Todd Rundgren style pop craftsmanship with the sweeping intimacy of Bill Callahan – both of which share a knack for turning phrases into devastating and devastatingly funny lines.
Mol Sullivan referred to her debut album, GOOSE, as a “long exposure photograph,” representing snippets of her songwriting styles throughout the past fifteen years, along with capturing the radical change she has experienced as a person through the process and emerging from a decade-long affair with alcohol, the Cincinnati-based singer-songwriter highlights her sobriety and the difficult labor of unlearning patterns of behavior that don’t work anymore – and learning to let go of relationships that refuse to recognize their own. Wrapped inside a sparse chamber-pop instrumentation, this collection of Sullivan’s songs honors the person she had to be to become who she is now.
Sullivan has been writing and performing music since the age of eighteen, working mostly independently with her guitar as a songwriting partner. Her first musical inspirations met at a nexus of nineties Top 40, Americana, and singer-songwriters, crystallized by figures such as Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, and Lisa Loeb. These influences then flowed seamlessly into a love for indie songsters of the 2000s such as Mirah, whose song “The Struggle” is homaged with Sullivan’s “Cautiously.” The songwriting process behind GOOSE shows how Sullivan’s approach has developed into a discipline and craft. While Sullivan’s previous music relied on events in her life as catalysts, Sullivan no longer wants to “wait for the next heartbreak” to motivate a song. Instead of composing in a flash of inspiration, Sullivan views songwriting as more conversational now, a dialogue between herself and the music as she continually returns to shape it.
GOOSE is set for release January 26, 2024. How are we feeling about it’s third single?
