By Jim Barber
What an amazing journey the life and career of Molly Rennick has been thus far. A girl from the small city of Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, best known for Quaker Oats, hockey, and the place where former Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach (Bierk) grew up, Rennick was gifted with an insatiable intelligence, a latent but bubbling musical talent, and a confident drive to succeed at everything she put her prodigious abilities to.
It has led, in her mid-20s, to a soaring and acclaimed career in the hurly burly uncertainty and tumult of the music industry, constructed from the outpouring her own blood, sweat and tears, held together through tenacity, fierce resilience and by building her band Living Dead Girl into not only a critical darling and increasingly popular concert attraction, but also herself into an entrepreneur of remarkable deftness, insight and formidability.
Living Dead Girl recently launched a new single/video for the song ‘Succubus’ from their most recent album, Conspiracy, which was released late last year. Now based in Orlando, Florida, where she lives with husband, photographer/filmmaker Steve Haining, Rennick said the positive attention the album has earned has been heartening.
“I can honestly say I’ve received nothing but positive feedback. I don’t think I’ve seen one single negative or mean comment, which is unheard of, honestly. Of course any time you make art in any form, there are going to be people who have something to say about it, or someone who doesn’t like it,” she said in a Zoom interview with Music Life Magazine.
“But I can genuinely say that the response has been great, which is incredibly encouraging, because it’s coming both from pre-existing fans and from new fans, as well as from media and press. It just makes me want to keep at it.”
One little sidetrack before diving into the conversation with Rennick is the subject of the band’s name – Living Dead Girl. Many, including initially your humble scribe, thought perhaps it was a homage to the classic grunge rock song of the same name, concocted by the horror master himself, Rob Zombie, on his 1999 album Hellbilly Deluxe. But in fact, the name comes from something far more personal and impactful.
“So the Rob Zombie thing is obviously going to be what people think of, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But it isn’t the reason why I chose it for the band. I called the band that when I was 16 because my mom told me she thought that I was dead when I was born because the doctor said I was not breathing or anything. She told me this when I was 10 years old and I just rolled with it and started calling myself a ‘living dead girl’ because I was born dead,” Rennick said, quite matter of factly.
“I guess for the first couple of minutes, she said I was gray and not breathing, not crying or anything. She said the doctor was literally slapping my face going, ‘come on, come on,’ while my mom was freaking out, obviously unsure what was happening. But sure enough, I ended up being fine, and I lived to tell the tale. I think it’s actually kind of funny now. I have no idea if there’s been anything permanent from that. Although I remember I said to my mom, ‘I was born dead, and then I grew up to be this gothic metal singer.’ So that’s pretty fitting.”
It’s important to remember that Rennick was still a high school student in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada at this time, and was barely into her 20s when she released the first Living Dead Girl Album, Exorcism, independently. But as stated above, the level of professionalism dedication and maturity to be not only a leader of a band, but also a recording industry entrepreneur was already in its near finished form.
That passion for music began at an early age, and was prompted by the meteoric rise of another young Canadian recording artist – Avril Lavigne, from Napanee, Ontario, less than 90 minutes from Peterborough.
“My first love musically was Avril Lavigne, my fellow Canadian. She was my first introduction to a woman that plays guitar and writes her own songs and everything. She was very different from all the early 2000s pop music. She wasn’t like Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera, like, dancing and everything. She was angry and playing guitar. And then as I got a little bit older, around 10 years old, I stumbled onto Marilyn Manson and that’s kind of what shifted the gear into liking even heavier stuff. I like the guitars to be drop tuned. I like the black lipstick and the shock value and imagery that goes along with it. But I definitely still hold onto that first love of pop-punk, pop-rock kind of music. I like to mix those two together. More recently some of my favourites are In This Moment, Architects, Bring Me The Horizon, Halestorm – just off the top of my head, those are people I listen to a lot,” she said, as she talked to how all of these influences, over the past 15 years, have influenced the unique soundscapes she creates through the vehicle Living Dead Girl.
“When I am asked what kind of music we do, the most simple answer I give is modern metal. I am not a person who is huge into all the different genres and sub-genres, because our songs are very different. Some of them are more rock, some are more pop, some are more heavy metal. We really do experiment with sounds a lot. I feel that as long as I say modern metal, it tells you that it’s very polished, very perfected in the production, it’s really well mixed and mastered and everything. It’s not super raw and grungy or anything. But if I dive a little bit more, I say it’s like pop-metal, and sometimes I call it bubblegum metal. Because if you listen to Exorcism, you have these cheerleader vocals and electronic bits and whatnot in there. I feel even if I just say metal, people will ask, ‘well, what kind of metal?’ So I usually just tell them to go listen to it.”
The way in which Rennick is seamlessly able to shift her vocal performances from that slick sort of pop-metal sound, with it sense of playful sweetness, to an absolutely ferocious, fiercely infernal, screaming demon, is impressive, and even somewhat jarring, especially on first listen. It perfectly echoes the musical compositions and the dynamic intensity of the instrumental performances on all Living Dead Girl arrangements, and fits in with what she has mentioned above, is her blending of styles, tones and emotional divergence into something special and definitive.
“That was something I did very intentionally. I wanted contrast to be a really big factor of our band. I liked the idea of people saying, ‘oh, look at this cute girl.’ And then I start screaming and you’re like, ‘wait, how did she make that sound?’ So I always like to wear pink and wear skirts and pink leather boots on stage, so then when I scream, you’re not expecting it as much as if I dressed super goth and super scary. I really like having the, and I don’t know what word to use other than contrast, but I guess it’s that contrast between the two vocal styles. I love it when people say to me, ‘I listened to your music, who’s that doing the screams?’ And they can’t believe it’s all one vocalist, so I love having that bit of shock value when people think it’s two different singers,” she explained.
From a precociously early age, still in her teens, Rennick knew what she wanted from a career in music, and has had the will, the determination, the energy and profoundly impactful business strategy to build the Living Dead Girl enterprise from scratch, vesting all important decisions to her own wisdom and acumen. In other words she bet on herself, and trusts her own instincts.
“There are so many factors that go into this. Honestly, I jokingly call it a full-time job that doesn’t pay like a full-time job. It’s an around-the-clock, 24 hours a day thing. Like, I’m the one who designs all our merchandise, and then I am the one sourcing the factories and printing companies that are going to make things. I am the one who orders the samples and approves all the designs, colours, fabrics – everything. And then I do all of our online sales, and we’re very fortunate that we get a ton of online merch sales. I’m pretty much full time packing orders and going to the post office and shipping them, which is awesome. So even outside of the music part, the band is it’s own little business. And then along with that there’s answering all the emails and inquiries and people’s questions. Any time my agent gets an offer, he forwards it directly to me and I review the contracts and stipulations and respond. My manager gets all the emails for interviews and everything but still forwards them to me. I feel like I spend so much of my day answering emails. Sometimes I’ll be at some completely random place, like in a line for a ride at Disney World and I’ll be on the phone with my manager or agent, having a little business meeting,” she explained.
“This drive, I feel like it’s just something that I’ve always had naturally. I’m someone who doesn’t like not being in charge or not being in control. I never did well in school and in high school and stuff because of that. I don’t like to sit still and take direction. I like to be the person who’s in charge of everything. So having my own little business and being in charge of everything fits my personality well. All my band members call me Boss Lady, and that’s my nickname in our group chat. I think that’s just always been my thing – I want to be a boss of something. And for the music side, the creative side of it, I definitely have to be in control and have the final say. When I was in the studio making both the first album and the new one, when I work with the producer, even he said to me that it was really nice working with just one person, one on one. We’re writing the songs together and making it and I’m the only person that has to approve the arrangements and the final mix. He sends the mix and I give him the notes of what I want revised or approve it or whatever. It’s so nice to just work with one person instead of having a board meeting around a table with a group of people who have to criticize and pick apart every single thing I do. So, it’s great to just be creative and be able to express myself without having to ask for approval or permission from anybody.”
Rennick is fully cognizant of the balance that exists between having that sort of control over one’s own creative and career destiny and the risks and challenges that also come along with being a bit of a ‘lone wolf,’ and not having the sort of resources and safety net that being with a label or having more of a ‘team’ around her would allow for. But it’s a compromise she is more than willing to take, even if it leads to some hairy and potentially spirit crushing episodes.
“Some of the biggest challenges in that regard have been financially, being able to fund the band and having to deal with unexpected things that come up. It’s really hard to have a day job or a traditional career, and then also to be able to take off and go out on tour for several months of the year and navigating how to be self-employed and how to keep yourself and your business, in this case the band, going. And can I afford to pay my rent while I’m on tour for a month or two. We’ve had some pretty bad setbacks. Twice when we were on tour, the van that I bought ended up breaking down. The one time was in Colorado. The other was in Tennessee. Both times we had to leave the van, fly back home and then go back and pick it up later when it was fixed. So I lost tens of thousands of dollars on a couple of tours from that alone. I remember being in the venue bathroom crying because the transmission on the van exploded and I didn’t have $6,000 to pay for it. So I had to put it on a credit card. It’s really hard going through all that and not say, ‘I’m going to stop touring,’ or ‘I’m going to give up on this band.’ Instead it’s like, ‘okay, when’s our next tour? I’ll just pay for it and we’ll go on another tour.’ I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles like that, when it seems like touring is obviously not working for us. This is impossible, this is expensive. But then still picking myself up and continuing to do it. So there was a lot of that, as well as with logistics,” she said.
“Being from Canada, it was always our dream to build a tour in the U.S., but you need work visas for that. So we had to hire lawyers and go through the whole process of that and spend tens of thousands of dollars on that alone. I relocated to Florida just because it would be so much easier to have a home base down here and not have to cross the border back and forth with the merchandise and the gear and pay taxes and stuff on all that. So we permanently relocated down here and that was a whole hugely stressful experience leaving your family and your friends and everything – it’s scary to just up and move to a completely different place. There’s just been a lot of turbulence along the way; a lot of things that seemed like a sign to quit, a big setback or a big roadblock. But I feel like every single thing that I’ve encountered, I’ve responded by saying, ‘all right, I’m going to get through this and we’re just going to keep going. And we have.’”
Then there’s the societal and cultural challenge of being a young woman in what is still a male-dominated, male-controlled music industry, with all the inherent issues around misogyny, objectification, sexualization and the attitude that women are somewhat less deserving of respect, success and not as ‘accomplished’ as writers, performers or producers. That if they do achieve something it’s credited to their looks, or something seedier, by those who feel threatened by what are actually brilliant, hardworking, talented and driven women artists.
“I have definitely been, firsthand, like the victim of that. Although I don’t even like to use the word victim because I don’t want to make anybody feel sorry for me. I don’t like to feel sorry for myself. I don’t like that kind of attention. But I have definitely been the victim or the subject of a lot of sexism and a lot of creepiness in my music career. And it’s just really frustrating because you could be the best singer on the planet, you could be the most talented songwriter on the planet, but at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some people who are like, ‘yeah, but it’s just a hot girl with big boobs, I’m just going to sexualize her no matter what she does.’ As a woman, you really do have to prove yourself extra hard, because there’s always going to be people – primarily men – who just look at you first before they listen to you. And they’re always going to make their own assumption or their own conclusions just based off of ‘oh, she looks like that.’ I’ve had people make comments that the band is only successful because of what I look like. But I don’t think any booking agent or any venue is booking me because of what I look like. If it sounds like crap, they’re not going to book us. So, people do make really ignorant assumptions and say really rude things; they say that bands can just sexualize their singer and get successful off her looks. I mean being a young woman and using my look is part of the marketing, but it’s just part of the whole picture. I know by doing that I am going to get attacked and hated on,” Rennick said.
“It’s a very double-edged sword, and there’s no winning in it. I’ve just learned that you’ve got to dress how you want to be comfortable, look the way you want to, and do whatever you want – be real, be yourself and be authentic. And that’s because no matter what, some people are going to criticize you regardless. Like, they would criticize me if I wore a turtleneck and khakis on stage, but they would also criticize me if I wear short little leather booty shorts and a corset. They’re going to criticize me either way, so I might as well just do whatever I want. And then I’ve also dealt with more institutional sexism in the business where you will get denied from things because they’ll say, ‘well we already have a girl. We don’t need another girl on this festival,’ or ‘we’ve already got one girl, we don’t need another one on this playlist.’ You really get lumped in with the other female fronted bands in your genre because they treat it as if it’s a genre. People have said, ‘oh, we only need two girls on this festival.’ But no one’s saying that about male-fronted bands. So there’s this kind of exclusionary attitude as if we’re some special niche that there’s a limit for. You’re a token, and are there to tick a box.
“And it’s insane but there’s still a mindset that every female artist or band sounds the same too. Like, Lzzy Hale, Taylor Momsen, Maria Brink – none of them sound alike. They all have their own thing. And on that note too, what really upsets me is how many people just look at my band and go, ‘oh, it’s like Evanescence.’ And I say, ‘congratulations, I now know you didn’t listen to us. You just saw a girl with black hair and compared me to another girl singer with black hair because you didn’t even want to take the time to listen to our music.’ I feel like one of the things we can do is whenever you see a person exercising those beliefs, like being misogynistic and stuff towards us, is you need to make them really uncomfortable and prove to them that you’re not going to pay attention, you’re not going to give into what they’re saying. Even when I have situations where, you know, unfortunately sometimes fans can even cross the line. Sometimes at shows I’ll meet someone who’s really creepy towards me and aggressively hitting on me and stuff. And instead of just smiling and being polite and taking it, if we snap back when bad things happen, those people will probably feel some kind of remorse or uncomfortable. I feel as long as people are being sexist and stuff if we choose not to work with them. If we choose to avoid them or ignore them, then they eventually can’t do it anymore. We take their power away. Whereas if we’re compliant and nice to those people, they’re just going to stay that way.”
All of this savvy and resilience is hard earned, and it’s still remarkable to hear Rennick speak as if she’s a 20- or 30-year veteran of the music industry. She definitely has the street smarts and acumen of someone who has been through a lot – the good, the bad and the ugly – but what could be a sense of jadedness for someone of her relative youthfulness is overrun by an inherent sense of destiny, personal and creative empowerment, and a desire to get better and evolve in every aspect of being a performer, songwriter, band leader and creative entrepreneur.
So the loss of her grandfather [her ‘Papa,’ Bernie Ladoucier] early on in the process of writing Conspiracy led to some deep thinking about life, love and legacy – as well as giving added emotional gravity to one of the most heartfelt and powerful songs on the album, ‘We’ll All Be Dead.’
“It makes you think of your own mortality, which is obviously the intent of that song, “We’ll All Be Dead,’ on the new album. Not that it was directly inspired by that by any means, but it does get you thinking about that kind of stuff. And it’s also tough because that experience of losing him made me kind of look at my own life a little bit and realizing, ‘oh, I haven’t spent much time with my family because I’m always touring and traveling,’ which kind of makes you feel a little bit guilty. You think, ‘I should spend more time with these people instead of driving across the country in a van instead.’ So there’s a lot of different emotional things that came with that. But then at the end of the day, one of the last things he ever said to me was that he was so proud to see how far I’ve come. He told me, ‘you always said since you were a kid you were going to do this and then you did it.’ So, at the same time as I am feeling some guilt, I’m not going to stop now or give up because he was happy that I did it. I feel like I’d be disappointing him if I gave up or walked away from it.”
As well as continuing to gain confidence and resoluteness about the vagaries and vicissitudes of the music industry, Rennick also understands that part of building a career that lasts for the long haul is to be willing to embrace change, and to want to always be evolving as a creator. Over the time from when she first began writing for her first album up to the release of Conspiracy, her second studio album, [Living Dead Girl released an EP of covers called Not That Innocent: The Covers EP in 2023] all that she has enjoyed and endured has gone into that growth process, leading to a definite maturity and more strident confidence in her compositional skills on the latest record.
“I feel like there’s definitely a more refined, sophisticated sense to my songwriting that only comes with age and with lived experience. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with our first album. Obviously, I’m still very proud of it. But I did write that album when I was 18 and 19 years old. So even now listening to some of the lyrics kind of makes me cringe a little bit. I think that’s good, though, and that’s healthy because if you don’t cringe a little but then it means you didn’t grow at all. It means you just stayed stagnant. So it’s really fun for me to take a little walk down memory lane and see old photos and old videos of performances and think, ‘my God, I was so naïve then and so green. I’m so much better now.’ Because it really just tells you how much more comfortable you are with yourself now and how far you’ve come,” she said, explaining how her process works.
“I always have the lyrics first. So I always know the topic and what I want to talk about first, and then I usually write way more lyrics than I need to. I’ll write enough lyrics for three songs, and then I just start picking and choosing the lines and crossing some out and throwing some of them in the garbage, until I’ve shortened them to the best lines. Once I know what the mood is and what the lyrics are about, then we can start putting together the instrumentation, whether that’s a more playful riff, or something darker and more serious. I think doing the lyrics first really works for me because then I know how the music is supposed to sound. And for most of the process, it’s myself working one on one with the producer that I work with, Mitchell Marlow [formerly of Filter, and now an in-demand producer/co-writer for music artist, movies and TV]. I am in charge of all the vocals and coming up with the melodies and the singing parts and I’ll decide which parts I want to sing and which parts I want to scream. I often decide that once I’m at the microphone. I’m the queen of making things up as I go. I will step up to the microphone and completely improvise, which ends up being the take we use most of the time. So I do all of the vocals and lyrics and Mitch really helps me put the music together. [He also played bass on the album, produced and mixed it.]
“I feel like showcasing my growth and my maturity as well as the evolution of my songwriting and my vocals was a big part of Conspiracy. I think it was important to come back with a sophomore album after the debut album and say, ‘look, I’m not a teenager anymore.’ I feel my vocals are stronger, my lyrics are more well-written – everything is just better and more confident. I feel like I am making a really strong statement with this album. It’s showcasing this new chapter of my life. But also, this album is a bit darker and more dramatic because I was really playing with the theme of good versus evil. If you look at the album cover, the whole world is burning down around me; it looks like this epic post-apocalyptic scene. There’s UFOs, there’s money, there’s litter and destruction everywhere. But then I have my hands up with the eyeballs on my hands showcasing me warding off evil. So I feel like the overall message and tone of the music is dark and evil, but there’s also this glimmer of hope. It’s like, I see all the crap happening around me, but I want to be the light. I don’t want to let the evil get into me.”
One standout track – well, they’re actually ALL standout tracks, but ‘Succubus’ has a particular intensity of purpose and depth of meaning, all surmounted by Rennick’s absolutely majestic and dynamic vocal performance.
“I actually wrote ‘Succubus’ with the intention of it being like a part two to ‘Poltergeist’ [from the Exorcism album]. I like to call those songs abstract songs, where they’re not about anything real, it’s not about a person in my life. It’s not about anything I experienced. It is just an art piece for the sake of art. Like, here’s a song for no reason other than it’s a good story. With ‘Poltergeist’ I wrote from the perspective of a ghost. Then when I was in the studio this time, I realized I wanted to make another song like that, but as a different mythological creature. Well, what about a succubus? A sexy demon that visits you in your dreams. Why don’t we just play up that theme? It’s kind of fun to make a song like that because there’s not the pressure of me worrying if I am expressing my feelings correctly, or if I am telling the story of how something happened to me accurately, because it’s not about anything real. It’s just for fun. It is a really good time to write songs like that and to just make up a song for the sake of it,” she said, before moving on to talk about the incendiary, righteously indignant song, ‘The Disease.’
“’The Disease’ is about something really specific – it was like so specific. But just in general with social media, I feel like we are really entitled to thinking people owe us something. Even just the fact that you will message someone and it pops up on their phone and we expect an immediate answer. Or you see the highlight reel of someone’s life on Instagram and now you think you’re friends with them. We’re all a little bit delusional, when all we’re seeing is glimpses of each other’s lives because of social media. Now we think we personally know people we’ve never met and we might hold them to some kind of expectations. ‘You have to answer me,’ or ‘you’re my friend’ because we saw a little bit of their life. And none of it is reasonable or logical or normal if you think about it. And sometimes that can really stress me out because I’ve had really weird interactions with people online where they say, ‘oh, I used to be friends with Molly. We went to this bar and we did this and that,’ and I’ve never seen this person in my life. The story didn’t line up, but they think it’s real. I had some crazy guy who went off on me on the internet a couple of years ago and they started mouthing off at me and swearing at me and stuff because he said we went to this certain bar in a certain year. And I’m thinking that year I was 15 years old. I certainly didn’t go to a bar with this guy. And when I corrected him he freaked out on me and started calling me every name in the book. So I thought, I want to write a song about how delusional that thinking is. I wanted to write a song about how scary social media is and how people can just say whatever they want and that they think they know you personally, but they don’t. It’s a disease. Social media delusion is the disease in the song.
“And then the song ‘Eighteen’ is about once you’re an adult and you look back at the things you were doing and the people you were hanging out with as a teenager. At some point you think, ‘wait a minute, that was kind of weird. That might not have been age appropriate at that time. When I was a teenager I used to like to hang out with full-blown adults. I used to go to parties with adults. I used to date adults. And now as a 26 year old, I think, ‘wow, that’s actually really gross.’ Because I’m 26 and I wouldn’t date an 18 year old. I wasn’t even trying to subtly say what this song is about. I am pretty open in saying, ‘all you people who hung out with me as a teenager, I hope you hear this song and feel called out and feel creepy about it.’”
A song of empowerment that is not only a celebration of her own persistence and hardiness, but a message to others seeking to persevere through their own personal or institutional challenges, ‘Unstoppable’ is a definitive call to action that is as uplifting a message as it is a sparklingly badass track.
“It’s my self-love, self-positivity anthem. It’s about looking at all of those obstacles, like we mentioned earlier, and all the things you’ve overcome, but that you kept going. I’m saying no matter what, I can’t be stopped. I’m just going to keep going. I am just really reflecting on that journey. It’s actually one of my favourite songs because I love the lyrics so much. Like where I say, ‘I look back at the struggles over the years. The things that caused the most tears. They don’t matter now. They led me here.’ I think that’s my favourite lyric I’ve ever written because it’s so significant to me,” she said as the conversation turned to the importance of music in general in tough times, but also as a way for her to process the good, the bad and the really bad of life.
“Music is always my crutch for any time I’m going through something. Like when I lost my grandpa, I loved listening to sad songs and ballads and emotional songs talking about the same kind of feelings that I was feeling because it just really makes you feel less alone, like you have solidarity with the artist you’re listening to because it’s obvious that they’ve been through it too. They’re writing about what I am feeling right now. I find it’s like doing a little self-help to find relatable music when you’re going through something. For me, I’ve literally said before that I write songs instead of going to therapy. I just write down all of my thoughts and feelings, whether anybody wants to hear them or not. And I put them into a song and I’m think, ‘okay, there, I talked about it.”
The Living Dead Girl tour in support of Conspiracy begins May 20 in Atlanta, Georgia, then heads out to the west coast, before ending in the U.S. Midwest in late June.
“I am insanely excited about this tour because there’s so many states on it that we have not played in yet. I’ve been to California and Las Vegas before as a tourist, and L.A. is where I recorded Exorcism, but we’ve never had the chance to play there yet [the band is in Vegas June 4, and Hollywood June 6]. So I am very excited to finally get to a place where people want to see us. Fans have been asking us to play in California for five years, and we’re finally doing it. We’re going up to Oregon and Washington, which are states I haven’t even visited before. I am so happy for this tour in terms of finally getting to see people who haven’t seen us yet as well as going to places I’ve never been before. We always try to explore as much as we can and be tourists a bit too while we’re touring,” Rennick said, before talking about the challenges of an independent rock band wanting to tour abroad.
“I have a booking agent here in the States, and he takes in all the offers that we get. With Europe, we’ve had offers before, but if it’s going to cost tens of thousands of dollars to even get there, because we’d have to get the work permits and the flights and taking the gear and everything, the risk doesn’t outweigh the benefits, so we should probably not do it. We were offered a European tour last February I think it was and I got so excited by the thought of it. I looked at the dates and I looked at how big the venues were and I got really hopeful about it. But then we started doing the math and the overhead was going to be like $30,000, and I really didn’t feel like spending that at the moment.”
For more information on the upcoming Conspiracy tour, the album, and other information about Living Dead Girl, visit the band’s socials or https://www.livingdeadgirl.ca.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
