It's the coldest day of the winter, with temperatures plunging well below zero, as I talk on the phone with violinist Molly Healey, who is feeling under all that weather. "I got the flu or crud or something," Healey tells me from her home base of Springfield, Missouri, on a good day to hunker down.
Sick or not, Healey has things to do. She is busy planning this year's Earth Day festival in Springfield, the annual all-day music festival that Healey founded in 2019, and she is prepping for a February 9 show at Blue Strawberry in St. Louis. So an isolated day at home works fine for Healey. After all, she needs no outside help to write or record new music: She's a one-woman band with remarkable gifts for playing and looping sonic layers into uniquely beautiful melodic compositions.
Healey is a ubiquitous presence on the Missouri music scene, playing solo sets with her cello, violin, voice and looping pedals, but just as frequently, she has been in high-profile collaborations as a member of popular Americana bands including Big Smith, Cornmeal and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, as well as her own four-piece Molly Healey Band.
Surprisingly, Healey describes herself as a "late bloomer," despite the fact that a life in music seemed predestined for her. Raised in Jefferson City, Healey says she has been making music "pretty much since birth." Her father, J. Patrick Healey, was conductor of both the Jefferson City Cantorum, the city's main community choir, and the Jefferson City Symphony. Her mother was an accomplished singer, and her older brother is a pianist and music teacher. "So I had no choice," Healey says.
Still, nothing she tried instrumentally — piano, violin — took permanent hold until well after high school, focused as she was on singing and performing in theatrical productions. In high school, she starred as Maria in West Side Story; at Missouri State in Springfield (then known as Southwest Missouri State), she was Catherine in Pippin. "I thought I was going to go to New York and make it big on Broadway," she tells me, laughing at the thought. "I was really terrible at dancing, and I wasn't very good at acting. All I could really do was sing."
While majoring in musical theater, Healey remembers a particularly honest appraisal that prompted her to pivot musically. "I had a pretty harsh sitdown with one of my professors, who told me that I could continue to do [musical theater] if I wanted but that I was going to struggle, and that I might want to think about changing my major to something more practical. I've had people tell me that it was a mean thing for a professor to say, but it might have been the best thing that could have happened because it brought me to just music."
Healey switched to majoring in vocal music and, around that time, picked up the violin again, a decision that led to her sitting in with local rock bands toward the end of her college days. "One of my first stage performances in a band was a not-very-good version of 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia' in a Primus cover band," she says with a laugh.
After graduating SMS in 2000, Healey added her violin to Barefoot Revolution, a popular jam-folk outfit in Springfield, providing her with her first taste of touring as she played regionally and hit the Colorado roots-jam scene. That exposure led to an invite in 2006 to join Big Smith, the hillbilly family band that gained a loyal following in the Midwest throughout the '00s. It was her tenure with Big Smith that forced Healey to become a high-flying fiddler who had to wing it on stage. "That's when I cut my teeth on improvisational playing," she says. "I had no idea what that was like. It didn't make any sense to me. I got thrown on stage, and you just sink or swim. I started small and got better."
Having grown up with formal training, Healey was never steeped in traditional bluegrass, taking her inspiration instead from violinists like Andrew Bird and Dave Matthews Band's Boyd Tinsley, who provided classical-music-steeped violin to rock bands. Nevertheless, Healey took a deeper dive into the jamgrass scene after the Chicago-based band Cornmeal called in 2013 asking Healey to fill the spot previously occupied by fiddler Allie Kral, who went on to join Yonder Mountain String Band (and who now lives in Webster Groves). A favorite of the bluegrass festival circuit, Cornmeal took Healey all over the country on longer tours and bigger stages, requiring Healey to stretch even further as a soloist.
"Sometimes those songs would last 10, 15 minutes," she says. "And I'd always been a bit of a purist with my instrument. I didn't even really use reverb before, but Cornmeal was when I started to really open my world to effects and how cool that can be."
Eventually the rigors of the road with Cornmeal proved too much for Healey, who was raising her daughter as a single mom back in Springfield. (Today, Healey's daughter, Annabelle Moore, is a piano major at Mizzou with a burgeoning music career of her own; she occasionally jumps on stage to harmonize with her mom.) But the sonic expansions that she adopted during that time inspired a major new phase in her career around 2015. "The biggest mile marker after Cornmeal was when I started doing my solo stuff," she says. "I got a looping pedal. After that, I went from writing a song every three years to writing a song every week."
How did Healey learn to loop tracks? "I went to YouTube University. I'm a proud graduate!" she jokes, adding, "I just learned by doing. It's the best way to learn. After I got my first pedal, I was out performing a month later. And I wore out pedal after pedal trying to do more things." The first time I saw Healey playing in her solo configuration, she broke out a stunning version of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" using a left-field arrangement that rendered the song unrecognizable until her vocals kicked in. That, it turns out, was intentional. "With covers, I like to arrange the songs completely upside-down," she says slyly.
When recording and performing live, Healey will sometimes loop 15 to 20 different tracks, adding layer after layer of violin, cello, vocals, guitar and percussive elements into ambiently gorgeous cascades that send melodic lines in every direction. "I think [the loop-based compositions] came from loving a lot of early music and counterpoint," she says. "I always loved baroque and Renaissance music that is based on a lot of moving lines, not necessarily chords, and that style of writing was really attractive to me."
The popularity of her solo work meant that suddenly Healey was everywhere, playing weekly in Springfield but also omnipresent in festivals all over Missouri. There she was busking before screenings at Columbia's True/False Film Festival. Then she was mesmerizing crowds at Springfield's Queen City Shout. Then her music was entertaining cyclists along the Katy Trail during Pedaler's Jamboree. Then she was commanding the stage at Columbia's Roots N Blues. Then she was performing as a featured musician with the Columbia Ballet. And she stretched well beyond Missouri's boundaries, headlining shows at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and even taking her mind-expanding soundscapes to Burning Man. (But not in 2023, thankfully.)
With the frequency of her appearances in Columbia, it's easy to assume she has made her home there. But, no, her regular involvement with Columbia-based acts the Kay Brothers, the Hipnecks and other gigs has meant burning up Highway 5 traveling between Springfield and Columbia nearly weekly for 15 years, a trek that has resulted in her totaling three cars in collisions with errant deer.
The musicians who make up the Molly Healey String Project — Kyle Day (Healey's boyfriend) on bass, Zach Harrison on electric guitar, Danny Carroll on drums — are also Columbians, and Healey's four studio albums were all recorded at Columbia's Centro Cellar Studio. Nightbirds, released in 2015, was a dreamy introduction to Healey's ethereal solo-collage soundscapes; 2017's Human added more full-band and singer-songwriter elements, including a beautiful solo-cello cover of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun"; 2019's Circles contained more focused showcases for Healey's gentle, mellifluous vocals and pushed her songwriting into more progressive forms; 2022's Lotus incorporated more rock and dance elements into Healey's unique aural alchemy.
A few years ago, Healey took her next step into the big time when she was invited to play on stage with the legendary Ozark Mountain Daredevils. As one of the definitive long-haired country-rock bands of the '70s, the Daredevils remain mainstays of classic-rock radio, although Healey at first had only casual awareness of the band. "I had heard 'Jackie Blue' and 'If You Wanna to Get to Heaven,' but I didn't really know much about them," she admits. "It wasn't until I played with Big Smith that I realized how cool the Daredevils were and what they'd done." When Big Smith opened for the Daredevils one night in 2012, Healey was invited on stage to jam with the band. Later, what started as one or two shows a year as a guest eventually became an invitation for Healey to break into the Daredevils' all-boys club and become an official member. "That's something I'm super proud of," she says.
So do the Daredevils — John Dillon, Supe Granda and the rest — tell her what to play on their beloved songs? "They're so easygoing," she says. "They were like, 'Just play.' There was no studying involved." Just last week, the Daredevils announced When It Shines: The Final Tour, which will take the band on a farewell trek through 2025, giving fans one more chance to see Healey playing fiddle breaks on "Chicken Train," "Standin' on the Rock" and other Daredevils classics.
In the meantime, Healey is excited about Springfield's upcoming Earth Day festival, which came out of a moment of crisis for her. "[A career in] music can have good days and bad days, and on one particular bad day, I turned to my daughter and told her that I'm not sure I can do [music] anymore and that I want to get into some environmental work so that I feel like I'm doing something more meaningful with my life," she says. "She was 10 or 11 and said, 'I don't think that's a good idea. You're going to be really sad if you quit doing music, and I think you can find a way to blend your two passions.' And she was right."
With partner Barry Rowell, Healey founded Earth Day Music and Sustainability Festival, a plastic-free festival that raises money for local and regional environmental organizations, only to see the COVID-19 pandemic cancel the planned 2020 launch. They picked the idea back up two years later, hosting the inaugural event in 2022. The fest's third incarnation will take place on April 27 in Springfield's Jordan Valley Park and will feature two stages with performances by Langhorne Slim, National Park Radio, Ha Ha Tonka, Molly Healey String Band, Rochara Knight and the Honey Doves, aerialist demonstrations and more.
In addition, Healey continues to make original music and perform as a solo artist and with her band. The upcoming showcase at Blue Strawberry will be a full-band performance highlighting selections from Healey's solo albums along with new material that she is eager to debut on stage. "More music is on the way," she says. "I'm always writing. For me, it's like a faucet. Once you turn it on, it doesn't go off."
Molly Healey String Project plays Blue Strawberry (364 North Boyle Avenue) on Friday, February 9, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15 to $20 at bluestrawberrystl.com.
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