hey pals!! i know that it's really scary right now. i am very anxious!!!! i assume we are all very anxious!!! i wrote this song many years ago and wasn't planning to release it for a little while, but i thought making a lyric video would soothe me (it did!) and that hopefully the song might soothe some of you (TBD). the music is the demo version; the finished one will be up on all the streaming sites as soon as i can get it up. but for now, enjoy. -- music & lyrics: molly ofgeography vocals: molly ofgeography instrumentation: can y'all believe it but that like, OMMMM sound is my voice!!!!! you can do anything with computers, we live in a magical age. produced & mixed by greg critchley follow me on... Twitter: @ofgeography Instagram: @ofgeography Writing: ofgeography.com

LINER NOTES i wrote “bowerbird” in my little apartment in bloomsbury, which is the apartment i ended up spending lockdown in. it was a great place. small, kind of worn down -- there were small holes in the floor, boards coming loose. but i loved it. during lockdown i would sit in the windowsill with a class of wine and i’d put on a record and i’d watch the stillness of nothing happening outside, and sometimes i’d read or write or play guitar but also a lot of the time i just cried a bunch, because i went a little unhinged during lockdown, as i assume all of us did. anyway, that’s not really about the song except that when i think back on that apartment my memories of being in it all get kind of warped into happening entirely during the lockdown period, even though i wrote this song long before COVID-19. i wrote it in the first couple of months i lived there, and i wrote it on the appalachian dulcimer, which didn’t make it into the final version. “look at what love did,” came from a tweet i saw, about this old man whose wife died, and how all these people turned up to mourn her with him, even though they didn’t know her, or even him. it was just kind of one of those really beautiful human things that happen sometimes. and i started thinking about all the beautiful human things that love has done in my life. all the time it's been patient, and generous, and still, even when i was restless and selfish and ran away from it, over and over. originally, the bridge for this song went like this: the first time i let you in you said it’s nice, but you’re so hard to parse. you looked around realized that the word that the word you wanted was “sparse.” dressing up real wounds as portraits; performance of love as a narrative arc. and i still like those, and i think they’re honest -- about me, about my fears. but (and i’m grateful for this now) i decided in the end that i didn’t want bowerbird to give time and space to those fears. i wanted bowerbird to be about the place you get to be after. i wanted it to be about the reward, not the struggle. i get very in my head about loving people, romantically and not. i worry that i’m not open enough with them. but i think the heart of the song is true, even though i’m not really good at expressing it yet: my heart wants to be where your heart lives. that’s all. ---- lyrics: molly ofgeography music: molly ofgeography & greg critchley vocals: molly ofgeography acoustic guitar: molly ofgeography's brother whose name she doesn't think he wants out in the world on a song with a music video of a little clay creature produced, mixed, and mastered by greg critchley "runaway, run" EP now available everywhere: https://mollyofgeography.hearnow.com/ Follow me on... Twitter: @ofgeography Instagram: @ofgeography Writing: ofgeography.com

liner notes | cw mental health, compulsive behavior dancing plague of 1518 is probably, actually, the most personal song on the album, even though they’re all pretty personal -- maybe with the exception of medusa in a stone garden, which really is just about how Medusa Was Right. it’s the only song i’ve ever written which was almost entirely adapted from a, like, i guess you could say journal entry except that i don’t keep a journal. i was on a bus, going home after work, and it had been a bad day, and i was so tired, and like 99% of my coping mechanisms are pretty healthy now, because i’ve gone to a LOT of therapy and y’all should too, but HOO BOY that 1% really digs its heels in, you know? and sometimes it’s almost like, i have really good self-control, so when i give into my worse impulses sometimes it feels even more frustrating. it’s like, how come i can do it for all these other things, but not this one thing? it’s so easy. just don’t do it!! like, it’s easier to not do things than to do things!! and yet.* and i was sitting on the bus, so mad at myself, holding this CVS bag that i remember very distinctly had 2 bags of smartfood popcorn in it, and i was trying not to cry because i’d rather be dead than cry in public, and i opened up my notes app and just started typing to myself to try and explain it, except of course it isn’t something that can be explained, it’s not rooted in anything other than vestiges of trauma, a survival instinct you can’t let go of even though you don’t need it anymore. anyway, the note i wrote did not rhyme and was not, like, as neat as this, so i went back later and chopped it up and rearranged it. the only bit i didn’t write in the notes app was the chorus: i think sisyphus has learned to love the mountain i think he seeks to remember beaks have birds the want is animal but indulgence makes me human. oh temptation of promises untrue, and nothing makes me feel alive like you can no, nothing makes me feel alive ... which i wrote later, when i was feeling better. i wrote it because when i Do The Thing, i get so mad at myself, a terrible spiral downwards of feeling like i’m weak and stupid and the only person in the world with this problem, and how if i could just get a hold of THIS thing then i’d be the best version of me, but until them i’m BASICALLY GARBAGE, throw the WHOLE WOMAN OUT. but after, when it’s past, it’s easier to look back and realize that falling down doesn’t negate standing up; it’s not like every time you taste dirt it erases all the times you didn’t. and i wanted to understand the me that does those things, and see how hard my brain works to protect me, even though it goes about it badly. i try really hard not to separate my brain and my body; my body is not the vessel that carries my brain around. the me that i am is my body, my brain is part of my body; you can’t draw distinctions between them. and The Me That My Whole Body Is always tries so hard to care for itself. sometimes the things it does in search of that care aren’t the things that i need, but missteps are not malice; and the chorus is about that. "it seeks to remember beaks have birds,” was my attempt to remind myself that all the things i do that hurt, they’re done because there is a bird attached, a creature which is trying so so hard to survive. *nobody needs to worry about me, i’m not gonna talk about Mollyhall’s Maladaptive Coping Mechanism with u bc you’re strangers to me and that’s my business, but i promise it’s nothing unsafe, it’s just frustrating for me, personally. so nobody needs to worry. and for everyone who is also dealing with their own Stuff, i love you and you’re gonna be okay!!! give yourself grace. i’m not good at it, either, but let’s try anyway, together. "runaway, run" EP now available everywhere: https://mollyofgeography.hearnow.com/ Follow me on... Twitter: @ofgeography Instagram: @ofgeography Writing: ofgeography.com lyrics: molly ofgeography music: molly ofgeography vocals: molly ofgeography instrumentation: greg critchley produced, mixed, and mastered by greg critchley

LINER NOTES i wrote this song at my dappah’s house, on the piano that belonged to my dammah, before she died. a funny thing about my grandparents is that no one in my family can agree on how to spell their grandparent names -- dammah/dappah, dama/dapa, damma/dappa, damah/dapah. we all spell it differently. that’s not really to do with this song, it’s just a fun fact. anyway, i went to go see my dappah before moving to london. i didn’t know at the time that it would be quite so long before i’d be able to think about seeing him again. he’s 93, turned 93 while i was in london, during lockdown. now i don’t know when i’ll be able to get back to his house. it’s a really beautiful house, right above a little inlet that it’s a fun adventure to walk to. when i wrote this song, i wrote it while i was running -- i mean the lyrics -- along this abandoned train track that becomes a walking path if you go far enough. it was a really hot summer, but the breeze from the ocean was perfect. it was my first time visiting my dappah alone. i’d always gone with my dad, or my siblings at least, but this time it was just us and my cousin who lives with him. i know all of this seems incredibly unrelated to the lyrics of this song, but the thing was, going alone meant that it was quiet. nice. comforting. soft. but quiet. and my brain does this thing, when it gets quiet, when there isn’t anything to Be Done, where sometimes it feels like there’s a little fist in my chest, clenching around my heart. running helps. also, therapists have told me, running is an avoidance tactic, but like, Show Me Where I Asked, Erin. anyways i think the clenching feeling is want, but not for anything. or -- for everything. i don’t know. if i knew i wouldn’t have to write a song about it. but i think it’s a desire to open up my ribcage and take the whole world into it. to build a little terrarium for the world to live in. i think it’s wanting to swallow the whole thing at once, and knowing you can’t, and knowing time is fleeting, and you won’t ever get all the things you want to get, won’t ever be all the things you could or want to be, won’t even get to keep all the things you already have. have lost so much of them already. all the early drafts of this song, right until submission, were called alien hand syndrome. i still like it as a title but i thought people wouldn’t be able to tell that the lyrics were “runaway, run, run away,” rather than “run away, run, run away” if i didn’t make it explicit. and also i think there’s another song i want to write, about alien hands. about your body not doing what you want, or worse, doing exactly what you want, but without your permission. that wasn’t this song, it turned out. this song was just about standing on an abandoned train track looking out at the ocean and realizing there was always going to be something to run toward, and that running toward meant leaving something behind. - video: https://www.pexels.com/@taryn-elliott lyrics: molly ofgeography music: molly ofgeography & greg critchley vocals: molly ofgeography piano: greg critchley acoustic guitar: molly ofgeography's brother, Big Geography produced, mixed, and mastered by greg critchley "runaway, run" EP now available everywhere: https://mollyofgeography.hearnow.com/ Follow me on... Twitter: @ofgeography Instagram: @ofgeography Writing: ofgeography.com

LINER NOTES in some versions of the medusa story, she starts as a beautiful woman. sometimes the story says that poseidon "ravished" her in athena's temple. sometimes people say this means she was seduced. sometimes that she "yielded." either medusa was punished because she consensually had sex with poseidon in a temple, or she was punished because she was raped by poseidon in a temple. ovid wasn't clear. it probably didn't make that much of a difference, to ovid. in other versions, she's always a monster. she and her sisters. they were born with their snakehair, but medusa was the only one who was killable, and so perseus killed her. i like this version better, not just because i'm out of patience for stories about sexual violence done to women, told by men. i like this version because there is a real part of me that wants to be monstrous. it's not what you're supposed to want, as a woman. you're supposed to want to be small. you're supposed to want to be dainty, or maybe "~healthy," but like, the way people say it when what they mean to say is that they think you're fat. the thing about being a woman in society is that you are never only yourself. i've never learned how to look at myself as if i were me. i've never learned how to look as if i weren't a conglomeration of all the people who look at me, and have opinions. sometimes people i've worked with have said that i'm beautiful, and i'll be honest, in that moment of them saying so, i kind of hate them. i know it comes from a good place, mostly. but every compliment is a reminder that i have a body. that my body exists for people to look at. that my body exists, and people put their own desires, their own projections, their own ideas on it. it feels like i am never the things i am saying, i am always the body that is saying them. the thing about being a woman in society is you are never carrying only your own thoughts and wants, you are carrying the thoughts and the wants of everyone who looks at you. positive and negative. (maybe that's true for men too. i don't know. i'm sure it's true for nonbinary folks. i imagine it can be even worse.) this song is about how medusa was right, but it's also a story about how people look at you, and want things from you, always, always. about how people want you to be things you can't or will not be. about how it's okay to let those people disappoint themselves. it's not my business what you think about me. - lyrics: molly ofgeography music: molly ofgeography vocals: molly ofgeography piano: greg critchley guitar: molly ofgeography's brother, Big Geography produced, mixed, and mastered by greg critchley "runaway, run" EP now available everywhere: https://mollyofgeography.hearnow.com/​ Follow me on... Twitter: @ofgeography Instagram: @ofgeography Writing: ofgeography.com

LINER NOTES: this song was actually born out of an art project i did – the mundane saints society, which is still archived on tumblr but like, has not been added to since solidly 2013 – where i was kind of ensnared by the idea of these saints with really mundane but oddly poignant responsibilities. i am definitely not the first person to love the idea of saint anthony, who is charged with holding on to all the things we lose. but the more i thought about it, the sadder it got, or if not sad then pensive. i think if saint anthony is real he must feel some kind of possessive dominion over those things, sent to him by our carelessness; i think he must get tired of how easily humans drop things, and how rarely we go back to look for them. “after whiskey saint anthony always gets mean / throws out the last thoughts that i think before sleep,” and “saint anthony, who has run out of patience / forgot who i love and can’t unerase it,” were both meant to be nods to that, to him taking things because he doesn’t think we deserve them back. what’s stolen is also lost to you, after all. a fun fact about this song is that my mom always insists i wrote it “as a baby.” i didn’t, i wrote it in college. but that’s one of those things, isn’t it, that saint anthony gets from us: the compression of time. all things in memory take place in this kind of nebulous time bubble, i think. grouped loosely into “when i was young,” and “feels like yesterday.” things that feel like yesterday can take place anywhere between an hour and ten years ago. anyway, the kind of visual i had in my head for the production of this was like, that kind of weird imaginary space you go to when you’re zoning out listening to music and having kind of vague, shapeshifting thoughts that aren’t really ~about anything? and it’s really peaceful but you’re also kind of working through stuff, gently, by thinking about it sideways. thinking about things by setting them lose from their regular anchors and just kind of getting lost in them, not touching any of their points for too long. the other day on a run i thought for an hour about what i would say during an interview about having a deeply unsexy brand. i thought about semiotics, and social cachet, and interpersonal responsibility and in the end all i was really thinking about was how do i feel in my body? when i got back to my house i felt better than i had, and i tried to remember what i’d thought about – like the thoughts themselves, the foot trail of them, and i couldn’t. they’d come and gone but they’d done something while they were here, whether i remembered them exactly or not. this is what i mean about thinking sideways. that’s what i mean by, “when i lose my mind / he returns it missing time / and in the blank spaces i find / i burrow down, blinded but not blind.” - music & lyrics: molly ofgeography vocals: molly ofgeography guitar: molly ofgeography piano: greg critchley produced, mixed, and mastered by greg critchley "myths" EP now available on spotify, itunes, and all those other places that i don't feel like listing! SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/album/6mgmlFzvN6NdRIbIK5rLjo?si=2gy8451WST2N9E8Eq_qnNw ITUNES: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/myths-ep/1492691079 Follow me on... Twitter: @ofgeography Instagram: @ofgeography Writing: ofgeography.com

LINER NOTES: so, obviously this is ... basically a pop song. definitely the most poppy song on the EP, and also it was weirdly the hardest one to record because i kept hate, hate, hating my voice on it. tbh i still don’t love how i sound -- i think it’s kind of like, airy? -- but i do think it sounds imperfect in a way that kind of fits the song. that’s neither here nor there, i’m just a bitter perfectionist, which may surprise you guys given my personality and behavior on my terrible blog. anyway, i wrote bloom for me. well, sort of. i wrote this song about how life is good, and also hard. life is good, and life is also so, so hard. it is so full of things that are scary and thorny and hurt, things you don’t forget, things you think you left behind but turn out to have been living in little pockets of your heart the whole time. we’re all just these tiny exposed creatures running around in the world with no protection!!! our dumb little hearts are so easy to break!! but i think the thing about being human, the really beautiful thing, is that actually we can’t stop being hopeful. we can’t stop falling in love with things, and having good days, and tending to our feelings. the truth about life is that you can’t stop growing. it isn’t possible. every day things happen and you have to react to them, every day the world comes back to you. there isn’t anyplace that you can go that sunshine and people and love and joy won’t find you, even if only in little bursts. “you left your love untended / still it grew in reprimand.” we can try to shut ourselves down but the fact is that there is always something. there is always something that we love, always something that flowers. and this song is about accepting that and tending to it, letting it flourish. we have to; it’s the only universal human directive. survive. just keep surviving. things will break our hearts and we will repair it by making the broken bits beautiful. there are things i’m bad at, emotionally; there are things that really, really scare me, about being vulnerable, about letting people in. i think there’s a whole garden in me, but i don’t always let people see it. this song is about opening the window and letting yourself grow out into the world, being brave and kind and open even though you know that it will hurt sometimes. i’m not always good at it. but i’m trying!! i’m gonna keep trying!! babes, let’s all open a window and water our goddamn heart plants!! - music & lyrics: molly ofgeography vocals: molly ofgeography instrumentation: greg critchley produced, mixed, and mastered by greg critchley "myths" EP now available on spotify, itunes, and all those other places that i don't feel like listing! SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/album/6mgmlFzvN6NdRIbIK5rLjo?si=2gy8451WST2N9E8Eq_qnNw ITUNES: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/myths-ep/1492691079 follow me on... Twitter: @ofgeography Instagram: @ofgeography Writing: ofgeography.com

LINER NOTES: i was told i wasn’t allowed to call this song, “chicago is better than new york” even though, objectively, chicago is better than new york, and i have two different magnets to prove it. i wrote this song my last week or so in chicago, walking home from work. well, walking to meet a friend so that we could walk home together. it was about a six-mile walk, really nice on a summer afternoon because we always took the lakeshore path and you got to weave through all the people. it gets cold in chicago so when it’s warm people are always outside, on the beach or in the parks. during lunchtime sometimes the chicago symphony practices outside and people lay out. my friend worked at the top of the mag mile, and i worked at the bottom of it, so i walked to meet her. and i just – i was standing at the corner of michigan and wabash, on the bridge, looking out at the corncob buildings and listening to one of the trains rattling by – i love how the trains aren’t underground, in chicago; i love watching them weave in and out of the buildings. i always wished my office was in one of the buildings it passed, even though i know it’s loud and probably distracting. i don’t mind. i like city noises. i find them soothing. (if i’m really honest some of the imagery for this actually came from how much i loved the opening credits for the good omens adaption – those weird paper cut-outs, you know? they had these spindly legs that i just loved. i wish people looked like that in real life.) city winery is on the river and so is the mcc prison, right there in the center of downtown. there is a lot of violence in chicago, but there’s a lot of violence everywhere, and i think they pick on us because our violence tastes better than the violence in new york, in cleveland, in california; i think our violence feels contained and far away, there in the midwest, surrounded by cornfields. you can shake your head at our violence and say look at what they’re doing to each other over there. but there’s loyalty in chicago, too, and water, and young boys in clumps laughing at each other, parents with half an eye on their kid at the playground, women smoking, people with their noses pressed up against glass windows to see the tv during the world series because all the bars are full. it’s starts and stops and structural, systemic violence and also: something brighter than sunlight. anyway, i was standing at the mouth of the bridge and the sun was setting and you could see it glancing off the glass of the buildings along the river and in the river itself, and people were sitting outside of city winery drinking rosé out of beakers and i just thought … we made this city, and it loves us. we made it and we’re still making it, a monument to ourselves. what we’re doing to each other in chicago is building, building, building, building, building. -- lyrics: molly ofgeography music: molly ofgeography & greg critchley vocals: molly ofgeography acoustic guitar: molly ofgeography, drums, percussion, bass, piano: greg critchley accordion: bill peterson electric guitar: peter hennes. produced, mixed, and mastered by greg critchley "myths" EP now available on spotify, itunes, and all those other places that i don't feel like listing! SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/album/6mgmlFzvN6NdRIbIK5rLjo?si=2gy8451WST2N9E8Eq_qnNw ITUNES: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/myths-ep/1492691079 Follow me on... Twitter: @ofgeography Instagram: @ofgeography Writing: ofgeography.com

LINER NOTES even though this is probably the only proper “love song” (uh, sort of) on the EP, it’s actually – not really about love, per se, to me. i mean it kind of is, obviously. but really i was thinking about the way that we grow up and grow out, and how sometimes in growing we have to leave stuff behind. the flag in the contact info, for example, is a nod to somebody that i outgrew, but like, really slowly, and it took me a really long time to notice. that’s how it goes, sometimes, isn’t it? like, suddenly something happens and you think, oh. and the feeling that would have to be there for you to, i don’t know, get past the thing, just … isn’t there. and you realize that you’ve been doing something for a long time because it was habit, because there’s affection lingering, because there’s still love in some form, just not the one you thought. i don’t know that we ever really stop loving people or things, i think maybe that love just shapeshifts into something we don’t recognize, and we lose track of it, or put it away. or maybe the love stays the same and we shapeshift around it. who knows. my point is i love to overthink things, to look back and try to dissect every moment and think – what if i had done this? what if the timing had been different there? what if i had said X instead of Y, or what if they had? but a whole written history wouldn’t ever really be able to say, i don’t think, because life is choosing, and every tiny choice makes all these dents in who you are. (dents sounds negative, but i don’t think i mean it that way, necessarily; it’s more of like how you make sculptures out of metal by hammering them to change their shape.) anyway. i think probably my favorite lines in this are, “you said, love was good, when love was here; it didn’t ease the ache. […] now all our cups are empty and love is not what love became.” love was good, when love was here. it was, wasn’t it? -- music & lyrics: molly ofgeography vocals: molly ofgeography, kyle wareham all instruments: greg critchley produced, mixed, and mastered by greg critchley "myths" EP now available on spotify, itunes, and all those other places that i don't feel like listing! SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/album/6mgmlFzvN6NdRIbIK5rLjo?si=2gy8451WST2N9E8Eq_qnNw ITUNES: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/myths-ep/1492691079 Follow me on... Twitter: @ofgeography Instagram: @ofgeography Writing: ofgeography.com