Playing with ‘Emotions’: Molly Taylor returns with confessional, self-produced new album

Over a meditative, buzzing guitar riff, Molly Taylor’s voice is as raspy-edged heavy as it is vulnerable.

“I’m just trying to breathe, can I have some peace, with all of these emotions?” she sings on the title track of her new album, Emotions, arriving Aug. 15. The first single, also titled “Emotions,” drops today, July 11.

The song opens with the admission that the singer-songwriter went to the “dark side,” and what follows is a confessional clutch of 13 tracks filled with acoustic folk, blues and country-influenced stories tracing the challenges and triumphs of Taylor’s life.

“This feels like being reborn,” she says.

The former Baton Rougean and founding designer of the Beneath the Bark jewelry line now lives with her young son in the Covington area where she performed, mixed and mastered every instrument and vocal for the album. The learning curve was steep, but necessary—and thrilling. Last summer’s early recording attempts using software from Baton Rouge-based PreSonus were like learning a new video game.

“I wanted to move forward in life by making this myself,” Taylor says. “I wanted to put my all into these songs. You record some things that turn out OK, and you start to feel like a little kid, like you got to level two, and that is such a fun feeling. The first song was called ‘Emotions,’ and everything in the album is truly me in music form, so I thought, ‘How could this album be named anything else?’”

Discarding her filter has never been a challenge for the artist, who was singing in school plays and writing love songs at age 11. But motherhood and the end of her marriage have colored her work with a deeply introspective voice and a renewed purpose.

“I don’t take time for granted anymore,” Taylor says. “The days my son is with his dad, I’m up early working on my art until the second I go to sleep. I’m really putting all I have into it when I can, and I’m better at that now because I’m a parent.”

That commitment has produced a set of soul-searching lyrics that pivot strongest to personal growth on “Losing Something You Never Had,” a woozy, waltzing ballad with thick double-tracked vocals and a bouncing electric keyboard riff recalling Figure 8-era Elliott Smith. “It’s too late—it’s too late, baby,” she sings in the song’s bittersweet refrain.

“When you’re young, you’re writing about what’s going to happen—you’re dreaming, really. And then you get older and you write about what just happened, what you’ve had to process,” Taylor says. “You really have to come to terms with things how they are, and release the idea of someone you have in your head. That song is saying, ‘You’re not losing something. You’re just letting go of the idea of something that was never yours.’”

Finishing a full-length DIY album in just under a year’s time could cause some songwriters to need a break, but Emotions has invigorated Taylor’s creative course.

She’s busy writing and planning a tour for the fall and will take the mic at a few independent record stores for intimate performances celebrating the album’s release.

“The fire was relit, you know?” Taylor says. “You go through a sad time in your life, then you realize you can turn around and channel that energy into art. Making this album felt like I just wanted to go running, like I wanted to hear that gunshot and take off as fast as I can go.”

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