Music Under The Star: Mother Falcon with Molly Burch

Mother Falcon is a symphonic rock band from Austin known for their wide-ranging instrumentation and collaborative songwriting. Founded by Nick Gregg in 2008, the group has grown to include a collective of up to 20 musicians playing strings, horns, guitars, and percussion. The band began to garner national attention after the 2013 release of You Knew, including press from NPR, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Texas Monthly. The group has toured throughout the United States and Canada, and collaborated with artists such as Ben Sollee, Kaki King, Todd Reynolds, and Gina Chavez. For the last six years, the band has been running an annual summer songwriting camp called the Mother Falcon Music Lab, encouraging young musicians to find their creative voice through collaborative songwriting and other mediums. In fall 2017 and spring 2018, Mother Falcon will tour in collaboration with Glass Half Full Theater in a production of Petra and the Wolf, a Texas-based adaptation of Peter and the Wolf, featuring an original score by the band.

Molly Burch was exposed to the arts at an early age. Growing up in Los Angeles with a writer/producer father and a casting director mother, Burch's childhood was filled with old Hollywood musicals and the sounds of Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. After finding her voice in adolescence, Burch packed up for the University of North Carolina in Asheville to study jazz vocal performance.

“I was always really interested in singing before songwriting. I didn’t always have the confidence to write,” Burch says, “Initially it was more about finding the right songs to complement my voice.” And that voice is the first thing you’ll notice on Burch's debut album, Please Be Mine. It’s smoky, with an incredible range, effortlessly evocative of her early influences. It was in Asheville where Burch would meet guitarist Dailey Toliver, who plays on her debut, and who inspired much of its music.

Searching for a bigger pond, Burch moved to Austin in an effort to stand on her own two feet. Burch began to write her own music in earnest, with the lovelorn Everly Brothers and Sam Cooke as her songwriting guides. Joined by Toliver in Austin a year later, the two connected with Dan Duszynski of Cross Record, and they recorded all the songs on Please Be Mine at his idyllic studio in Dripping Springs, Texas. Motivated by the hourly rate, Burch and her band recorded all the basic tracks and vocals live in one room and in one day, with minimal overdubs for keys and back-up vocals happening a day later. A difficult task for any talented musician, it becomes more mind-blowing when you hear her belt it on tracks like “Downhearted” and “I Love You Still.”