Badfinger's Joey Molland Has An Eternal Message For Us: "Be True To Yourself"

Joey Molland has a new solo record arriving from Omnivore this week on October 16th, titled Be True To Yourself. Molland was originally part of the band Badfinger, who were a feature of The Beatles' record label, Apple, and played on a number of Beatles-related albums and singles, particularly with George Harrison. You might have heard that Molland toured in 2019 with Todd Rundgren and other artists to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The White Album.

It's been ten years since we've seen a solo album from Molland, and this one has a great deal to recommend it in terms of songwriting and sound, but it's also particularly relevant to audiences right now as a message we all probably need to hear. There's a great deal of positivity to be found in the way that Molland continues to roll out meaningful love songs on Be True To Yourself, but also in the way he works social commentary into more universal ideas that we can all relate to.

Tower's PULSE! was very pleased to speak with Joey Molland about what it means to Be True To Yourself, his family's values, his youth in the Liverpool music scene, and how he started down the path of songwriting.
 

Hannah Means-Shannon: Have you been able to find ways to keep yourself busy over the last few months?

Joey Molland: I’ve been working with a friend of mine, Brian Jentges, in the studio, and we’ve done five songs, and we’ll be doing another six. I’ve been doing the odd podcast to raise money for people who are suffering right now, you know, the roadies, and the crews. And I’m trying to maintain my own sanity.

HMS: It’s outstanding that you’ve been able to do all that during this time.

JM: Well, people have been inviting to do things. And I feel blessed myself to be able to contribute and people care about what I’m doing. I’m pretty lucky because I get a few royalties here and there, and I’m not rich or anything, but it really helps me maintain a normal lifestyle. Because I can’t gig or anything right now, which is what I normally do, I gig a lot. I’m fortunate. It’s nice to turn that around and try to give a little back.

HMS: That’s a wonderful attitude and never has it been more needed than now, really. Thank you for doing that.

JM: I wish I could do more. But we can only do what we can do, and that’s usually good enough.

HMS: Absolutely. Regarding the new album, I heard that Kickstarter was involved in some way. Was that the first time you’ve used Kickstarter for something?

JM: Yes, it was. We got about halfway through the album, and we’d done the back tracks and stuff, and we ran out of money. I’d managed to raise a little money with some friends who wanted to back me making a record, but it was just way too expensive. We couldn’t really change the way we were doing it, though. We were trying to make it in an old-fashioned kind of way, in a studio in New York City. We used live musicians. There’s very little digital fooling around on the record. We recorded entire tracks. We were able to get all the back tracks done in New York at a place called Mission Sound.

But we had to pay the studio, we had to pay the engineers, and we went through the money. But we were able to do a Kickstarter and the fans really came through, as backers, and gave us a little bit extra even than what we needed, so we were able to put some strings on there, some horns, some real instruments. I’m really happy. I think it turned out sounding great. The reviews are all telling me it sounds great, so I’m really happy.

HMS: It does sound great. You don’t have to wonder! I did notice that there were quite a number of musicians on the album. The credits are really substantial. So I’m sure having a bit of extra funding helped with that.

JM: Oh, yes, we couldn’t really even fit all the credits on there. On the CD cover, it was so tiny, you couldn’t read anything. We did an abbreviated version of the credits. But it was such great fun. It was a lot of people coming in, hearing the music for the first time, and putting their talent into it, picking up parts, bringing in riffs.

HMS: There’s a tremendous amount of energy on the album. When did the album wrap up?

JM: We actually wrapped up the whole thing in December of 2019. We were in the process of doing the final mixes, and I have to credit Mario McNulty, the engineer, for getting it all together in the end. And of course, Mark Hudson. They were finishing up when the Covid hit, and we had to wait for the record labels to open up a little bit to present the tapes.

HMS: It’s great you were able to lock in the important elements before the world got crazy.

JM: Yes, we even had people coming in to do vocals. Julian Lennon came along and sang a little bit, traveling from France, I think. This was really lucky, he was coming to New York to do some work with Dennis DeYoung, from Styx. I had met him briefly, years ago, but he came in to sing. It was something else. Later on, we did some more work out in LA.

HMS: That’s such great timing. I was wondering about the title of the album, Be True To Yourself. I know it connects to the final song on the album. Did the song and its title come first, and it was later applied to album?

JM: Yes, we thought the song said something. It came from the title of the song. The song was written early on, a few years ago, after a conversation I had with my oldest brother. I’ve got a huge family, with five brothers. My oldest brother was far older than me, maybe 17 or 18 years older than me. I say “maybe” because I don’t really know what his age was. When you’re a young kid with elder brothers, you don’t hang out with them. The conversations are limited.

I was in England, in Liverpool, at his house a few years ago, a little while before he passed away. We were sitting in his kitchen and we actually had a real conversation about stuff. We talked about school, about religion, about the army, and about life in general. About how our lives had been. So, I actually got the lyrics for that song, “Be True To Yourself” after I had that conversation. I’d had the melody for a while, so it was a great relief to get the song done.

Then, when we’d done the record, we thought, “What are we going to call it?” Mark suggested “Be True To Yourself” because it’s a lovely thought, a truism if you like. It seemed like a good idea to me, so that’s where the title came from.

HMS: That’s a wonderful story about your brother. Thank you for sharing that. Did you get the sense from that conversation that that was his worldview and philosophy? Or was it more something that you felt that you were saying to him?

JM: I think it was a combination of how the conversation flowed. We both had grown up with my Dad, who was a very straightforward person, as was my mum. They told us the truth about things. They didn’t make things up. We knew we had to work. We knew there were no shortcuts. We were raised with that. We knew we had a family and we knew we could always depend on them. But there was this idea that as long as we were straightforward with people, things should work out. Those were almost the rules that we lived by. I feel like that.

We all got married, we all lived normal lives, we all had children. We were a perfectly normal family, if you like. There were six boys, so we had a little trouble here and there, but that’s how we grew up. It worked out for us. I got into music, but my brother Frank ran the assembly line at the Ford plant in Liverpool. My brother Chris ran the computers at the Bank of Canada.

My father was a great engineer and mechanic, and he did that all his life with an Army career and all that. My mother was a cook for the church when he met her, a great cook, I might add, like everybody’s mother. She was a lovely mum and I can’t tell you how much we loved her. She was such a sweetheart. I was really fortunate to be raised in that way.

With Badfinger, the band I was in back in the old days, we made quite a lot of money touring and writing songs, but the business people stole it, just took it, leaving us destitute. And I mean destitute. When my son, Sean, was nearly two, I remember being in the poverty line of the clinic in Pasadena, in California, waiting in line to get into the emergency place because we had no money. But because of the upbringing I had, there was something in me that enabled me to find work, you know? And I didn’t care about it. People used to ask me, “Aren’t you the guy from the band?” And I’d say, “Yeah, and I’m here working.” We all have to do what we’ve got to do.

HMS: Absolutely. I think right now that people can relate to that story. A lot of people right now have jobs on pause, or they’ve lost work, and they’re having to try to find ways to keep going for the sake of their families.

JM: It’s true, it’s true.

HMS: One thing that I think is great about the song, “Be True To Yourself” is that it’s not saccharine, it actually has some quite direct lines in it, like the idea that the future is not getting better. [Laughs]

JM: [Laughs]

HMS: It’s the kind of song that tells you how to survive, or adapt, rather than telling you that everything is going to be great all the time, which isn’t true to life.

JM: No, life isn’t like that. Right out of the blue, things happen, and we’re living through it right now. But we can get there, we can make it anyway. We really can. Even if you’ve got no jacket, you can still get there. We’re really remarkable creatures. We are. We’re inventive. We think of things. We do whatever we need to do to survive.

This is America. We’re the people who get up and go to work every day. We really are the rulers of the country. I’m really big about this: as soon as America fixes the tax system, a lot of the troubles that people have will go away. The so-called minimum wage is not a living wage.

HMS: No, it’s not.

JM: You know that, I know that. I couldn’t survive on that even though I live a very normal life. I got to Goodwill and buy used stuff. My equipment is incredibly expensive, so I have very little. I don’t know how we do it, but we do. They need to fix that system.

HMS: I get you. The time that we are going through has exposed all these weaknesses even more and it’s very obvious what the problems are right now.

JM: You’re right.

HMS: I heard something about your youth, and I wondered if you could comment on it. I heard that you learned to play the guitar by listening to the radio more than you learned by other people teaching you. Is that true?

JM: Yes, it is. Yes, I did. I come from a musical family, actually. My brothers Chris and Tony played the guitar. My Dad played the harmonica with us. We all liked to listen to music. I had a bit of that inside me anyway. I heard Elvis in 1958, I was 11 years old, and I’ll never forget it. I heard “Blue Suede Shoes” on the radio. Before I heard that record, I was a completely normal kid. I was making bows and arrows, playing in the park with my mates. I played a bit of cricket with the family and stuff.

But when that record finished, I went straight in the front parlor of the house, and I got my brother’s guitar out. I started to teach myself to play it. I could already tinkle on the piano and I just started to teach myself to play the guitar. Over the next four years I got good enough to start thinking about playing with some other guys.

I was pretty nervous about it. When I started going to clubs in Liverpool when I was 16, I couldn’t believe how good the bands were. They were scary good. Scary good! There was great singing, great playing, with five-piece Rhythm and Blues bands, little Rock bands, “Beat Groups” we used to call them. It was really exciting to be invited to come and play. People had seen me when I was a little boy playing on the corner.

I’d be playing Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Elvis, Little Richard, and all that. People had seen us there doing that, and one day a guy stopped me in the street in Liverpool when I was about 15 and a half, and asked me if I was Joey Molland, and did I still play the guitar? He asked me if I wanted to come and play with his group that night. It was a group called The Profiles. I went down and was astounded. I told him I only knew Chuck Berry and a few things, and they said that was fine, just to play the things that I knew.

The great bonus was that they gave me a pound! I worked all week in the dock office for a shipping company and they only paid me slightly less than three pounds for a week. So I went the next night and got a pound, then I went the next night, and got a pound. Then I was ahead of what I was making in my day job!

HMS: How long were those performances that you had to do in order to make that money?

JM: We had to do three or four 45-minute sets.

HMS: Wow, that’s a lot!

JM: Yes, you played for a long time in the clubs. But it worked out. Next thing you know, that group broke up, and I was asked to join another band, and we made a record with that band. It’s a great story.

HMS: It is a great story! Have you written a book yet?

JM: No, the closest I’ve come to that is that I did a really long interview with a journalist, Michael A. Cimino, and he converted that into a book.

HMS: That’s great. I’ll check that out.

Did you have a sense for why there were so many accomplished musicians stepping forward at that time? I know that these were, in a sense, amateur groups, but they took it very seriously. As you said, you were amazed by the talent at that time.

JM: In Liverpool, we had a lot of gifted and talented people sitting around and they wanted to do their best. There is a quote in Liverpool, from Carl Jung the Philosopher, which you can see in Mathew Street, and it says “Liverpool is a pool of life.” I was pretty stunned when I saw that [new] monument.

It was great for young people to see their friends and family up on stage singing good, and playing good, really singing in beautiful harmonies in a powerful way. The Beatles were a super-powerful band. There was another band called The Big Three, who were a loud, obnoxious band, but they were fantastic. There were all kinds of bands in Liverpool. There were Jazz bands, Soul music, all of that in Liverpool. I’m sure it was the same in London, in Birmingham, New Castle, with the Scottish bands. I think it gave us all a bit of freedom and a bit of recognition in ourselves, that we could actually do things, you know? Because we were raised to be laborers, not to be bosses, not to be members of the board. We were the laborers.

Then when bands like The Stones and The Beatles made it, it kind of gave us more ambition.

I hadn’t started out to be a musician, but by the time I was 20 or 21, I was starting to get ideas for songs. Before that, artists never recorded their own songs.

HMS: Right, yes. They recorded covers songs or songs from labels.

JM: There were great songwriters out there. Carole King was part of it. People like Burt Bacharach. You got the occasional guy like Little Richard, who wrote his own songs.

HMS: When did that revolution happen in your mind, where you thought, “I’m going to write a song!”

JM: I was in a band called The Fruit Eating Bears. We were in a back up band for a group called The Merseys, who were from Liverpool. The manager was Kit Lambert, who managed The Who. Kit Lambert told us that if we’d be the back up band for The Merseys for one year, he would take us to the studio and record some songs for us. This was unbelievable because he was a great record Producer who had Produced “My Generation”. We needed songs for that, so I came up with a couple of ideas.

It’s funny how you can remember these things: I remember being in a flat in London with a girl from Liverpool and an Irish girl called Deirdre. Deirdre ended up working for Apple Records. Anyway, that was my first time writing songs around age 17 or 18. They weren’t great songs or anything! Then, when I was around age 21, I was in a band with one of the Walker Brothers, then we formed a band called Gary Walker & The Rain, and we needed songs. I found myself getting ideas for songs, so I wrote four or five songs for an album. That’s when we started talking about writing tunes.

HMS: That’s a great story, thank you. I wanted to say that the new album isn’t sugary, but it does have a lot of positivity. It seems to continue to show a lot of faith in Pop music to work for us, to continue to do things for us. To help us raise questions and focus on answers.

JM: I think it’s important, isn’t it? We all know about dating, or falling in love, but we can’t write all our songs about that. There are things we need to ask, like can we get it together this time? We keep going through all these problems. In this pandemic, we’ve been forced to sit around, and a lot of things are coming out now. Hopefully we can fix these things, like the racism. I couldn’t believe when I first came to America, just how heavy that was.

HMS: I’d like to ask you about our Tower Records motto, “No Music, No Life”, also written “Know Music, Know Life”. Which of those do you feel applies to you more?

JM: Both of those things works for me, “Know Music, Know Life” works for me because it’s a remarkable saying and it’s so true. 

HMS: Do you feel that getting to know music is something that you’re still doing, even now in your life?

JM: Yes, yes. I don’t think you can ever know all about music. You can appreciate all of it, but there’s always something new to learn, something new to play, a new change, a new melody. You know there’s only twelve notes! It is unbelievable what’s happened with those twelve notes. It’s pretty stunning.