Molly Jenson is a singer-songwriter from San Diego who currently bases her operations in Orange County. Her new record, “Maybe Tomorrow,” dropped in stores March 3. The Chimes was able to sit down with her a week before the album released to talk about her music.
So your new album’s coming out next week right? I heard it’s actually a re-release of one that you did a few years back.
Yeah, I put a record out just independently and sold it at shows and to friends a couple years ago in 2005. And then when I signed with Bully!/Pulpit Records/Nettwerk Music Group, they bought the record off me and we changed the artwork and added a duet that Jon Foreman and I wrote.
So it’s one week before your record releases. Is life any busier than usual for Molly Jenson?
It’s been crazy. This last month has been the busiest and most stressful month of my life, but it’s fun. I’m growing a lot, I’m learning a lot and I’m getting to do a lot. We shot my music video last week, and I got to go on tour with Fiction Family. We’ve been doing all these promotional things and it’s been really cool. This is the kind of stress I like. It shows me that stuff is getting done and things are moving forward.
You mentioned touring with Fiction Family. Was that different from anything you’ve done before?
Absolutely! It was so amazing! It was my first real tour. I’ve played in Europe and I’ve played up the coast of California, but I haven’t left California on tour with my own music, opening for a band who has a good crowd of people. And I did five shows with them and I played solo. I’ve never played solo; I would always have at least one person backing me up because I never felt confident enough to play guitar and so they could cover up my mistakes. But I had the best shows I’ve ever played; we sold out every night.
Your profile description on Myspace said you never planned on recording an album or ever doing any of this stuff. What happened?
Well, Greg Laswell and I went to college together at Point Loma in San Diego and we had mutual friends and we were only acquaintances in college. But in 2004 I moved to Orange County and I’d been singing on other people’s projects, but I really was starting to think that I wanted do my own stuff, but was really struggling. So Greg was working on his own stuff and producing other people. He heard that I was starting to write and called and said he’d love to meet with me. So we got together and wrote a song, and we just had this connection that can be really hard to find with other people, and it went on from there.
I was interested in the song you wrote with Jon Foreman, “Do You Only Love the Ones Who Look Like You.” Any stories about that one?
Yeah, that was actually the first song we wrote together. He called me up out of the blue and said, “Let’s write!” I kind of blew it off as just something where he was probably just trying to be nice to his friends. But he really pursued it, and that was encouraging for me because I look up to him as a musician and songwriter, and to have him come up to me and say he wanted to write with me was a pretty big deal.
We got together and I played a song I’d started writing for him and I had a verse and we went with it. He just kind of went with it and it took a couple hours and we eventually finished it and had a song.
It’s basically a reminder to ourselves and everybody else in the world that we’re called to love everybody, not just the people in our circle of friends. We need to love the really awkward guy at school who doesn’t wash his hands. It’s kind of a reminder for us to do that.
One last thing to end. Word on the street is that your brother is a professor here at Biola. Is that true?
He [Torrey professor Matt Jenson] is. He’s my roommate and we live together and he comes home every day and tells me about his day. We kind of have opposite lifestyles but we get along well, so it’s great. I love it that he works there, because I almost went to Biola and I’ve had a number of friends who have gone there or work there, so I feel like I know the campus pretty well.
Any plans on playing here soon?
Well, we’ve been trying to set something up, but hopefully in the next couple of months I’ll play a show (at Biola).
