I am a big fan of Mary Strand‘s newest album, I Don’t Need Your Permission, which is rocking and unabashedly feminist. We need more albums that embrace the fact that feminist issues can be a making of an amazing album. Mary’s proof of this! You can hear it all live at The Hook and Ladder in Minneapolis on July 31.
You are about to release your second album (I Don’t Need Your Permission). It sounds great. Did you go into this album with different goals and expectations as from the first (Golden Girl)?
Thanks for asking, and thanks for the kind words for my new album! Yes, it was a completely different experience! With Golden Girl, I simply decided it was time to put out my first album. I’d written 80 or so songs by the time we released Golden Girl, so we sifted through the best, which were often (but not always) the ones I’d most recently written. As we chose songs for that album, we saw that many had a theme of love: good or bad, requited or not, etc. So love became the album theme. In contrast, I Don’t Need Your Permission happened because I was deathly sick for a few months in early 2024 (including two near-death experiences, not kidding), and my whole life changed. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t even walk around the block, nothing. All I could do was sit down and write songs. And oh boy, did I write songs! I suddenly had PLENTY of material for an album, and the clear theme was empowerment. I was experiencing the worst possible times, I was angry, and I wanted a better world, both for myself and everyone else. I poured all of that into my music and this album. On a separate note, I also had far more experience as both a songwriter and a musician when we began the new album, and my album band (Ryan Smith, Mark Wade, and my son Jack Strand, now known as Mary Strand & The Garage) had gelled in the coolest way: we each trusted the others to “go for it” on our respective contributions to the album. One fab example of that: on the song “Stay Or Let This Go,” Ryan laid down a guitar solo, Mark created a bass solo in the same place, and it sounds like dueling solos, but it’s absolutely amazing.
Take Your Time is a quiet, resolved feminist anthem song. The anger is gone, and it’s replaced by power or Midwestern sarcasm. I like that. Please, tell me more about the song because sadly it could be an expression of so many relationships we have.
I’m a little startled to hear “Take Your Time” called a quiet song! We definitely rock it! 😊 But yes, it showcases a woman’s resolve: she knows what she wants and what she doesn’t want, and she gets rid of what she doesn’t want. As with most of my songs, I began the song with a songwriting prompt: “strut.” I immediately pictured a guy strutting along Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, on top of the world, and thinking only of himself. But rather than write a song about him, I wrote it about his wife or partner … and her joyful liberation from him. But I don’t think of it as a sad song: I’ve called it the happiest breakup song you’ve ever heard. Yes, it reflects so many relationships, but this one ends well: she realizes that it’s not a good relationship for HER, and she happily lets it go. Powerfully.
Least of All Her is a sad feminist song that gets stronger as it progresses. What I find interesting is that you really address the lyrics to the “him” in the song and I’m wondering why you chose that perspective? I think it was a shrewd decision.
Ahh, thank you! I love “Least of All Her” and feel very strongly about it. In fact, we’re currently working on a music video for it, with the bold hope that it might do something for victims of domestic violence like Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” video did for lost and runaway teens. Honestly, the song is an odd story structure for me: the verses are her speaking directly to him, and the choruses are in third person, talking about the evil of domestic violence. I began writing the song with the songwriting prompt of “slip-up,” and I immediately got angry. I thought of all the times a guy commits an act of domestic violence, but he’s let off the hook by police, courts, and society because everyone calls it a mere slip-up, mistake, momentary lapse of judgment, and all that nonsense. (By the way, domestic violence is obviously committed by both genders and against both genders, but my song merely captures the male-against-female violence.) I simply started writing the woman’s story from her point of view. But when I got to the end of the first verse (“but hey, enough about me”) and immediately charged into the second verse with “no, let’s talk about YOU,” I knew it was just more powerful this way. By the third verse, I wanted to show the world that this woman is strong, not a victim, and that she’s capable of doing what she can to fight back hard. I did worry that “Least of All Her” might not be well received, because it’s a very direct song, so I was stunned when it became my highest-performing radio song so far: it hit # 1 on Radio Indie Alliance’s worldwide indie charts. I do think it’s an important song for us all.
I know you are a member of the Singer/Songwriter Songwriting Challenge. How did that inspire or help you with the album?
I absolutely LOVE the Singer/Songwriter Songwriting Challenge on Facebook, and so many of us have become good friends in real life. I’d guess that 90 percent of the songs I’ve written came from the weekly songwriting prompts we receive from the challenge: 10 in the winter and 10 in the summer. Of the 12 songs on my new album, I Don’t Need Your Permission, 10 began with prompts from the challenge. (The other two were co-writes with my bandmates: “Costa Rica” with Ryan Smith and “Ditch Your Fate” with Mark Wade.) I’m also a novelist and a storyteller at heart, so I’ve found that a single word or phrase or even a picture is enough to inspire an entire song. In the challenge group, we each post quick-and-dirty videos of the song we’ve written each week, and I’ll also say that listening to other songwriters and reading their lyrics is tremendously helpful in offering ideas on how to approach and improve my own songs. This week, in fact, I’m working on a song inspired by how Sarah Morris writes songs, which is quite different from how I do. Learn from the best!
Please tell us about the upcoming album release show.
I can’t wait for the album release show! It’ll be at The Hook and Ladder in Minneapolis on Thursday, July 31. (The album itself releases on Friday, August 1.) Mary Strand & The Garage will be joined by an incredible collection of bands I love: The Silent Treatment, The Customers, and RuDeGiRL. Rock and roll! Doors at 6pm and music starts (with RuDeGiRL) at 6:30pm. We’ll also have CDs there, with vinyl to follow sometime this fall. And right this moment I just have to finish memorizing a couple of the new songs! ha ha! We’ll be playing mostly songs from my new album, a few from Golden Girl, and one cover in which I took the Urban League’s lyrics and twisted them into my own story, just for fun. It’ll be a great night!
Thanks so much for your time! Love Mostly MN Music!
Mostly Minnesota 