Molly Healey Brings the Orchestra to the Rock Show

Most one-person bands are a guy with an acoustic and a loop pedal. Molly Healey is a cellist, fiddler, guitarist, and pianist who loops herself into a small string orchestra inside Ableton Live — and then, when she wants the full weight of it, hands the parts to an electric band. It is the most quietly ambitious project in Springfield music, and it's ours.

Healey is Ozarks to the marrow. She's a longtime fiddle player for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, the Springfield-born group whose "Jackie Blue" still turns up on classic-rock radio, and she co-organizes Earth Day: The Festival, the annual local fundraiser for regional environmental groups. But her own music sits somewhere stranger and more modern — orchestral folk laced with experimental beats, with a stated lineage running through Radiohead, Andrew Bird, and Massive Attack. A fan once put the appeal more plainly: "Molly brings the orchestra to the live rock show."

Since going solo in 2015 with a single looping pedal, she's released five albums, most recently With the Wind: an Orchestral Dance Music Suite in November 2025 — the title tells you she's stopped pretending these are folk records. When she wants the roof off, she calls up the Molly Healey String Project: Zach Harrison on electric guitar, Kyle Day on bass, and Danny Carroll on drums, a lineup that turns her looped chamber pieces into something you can actually mosh to.

The résumé is deeper than a regional act's has any right to be. She's opened for bassist Victor Wooten and for Yonder Mountain String Band, and she's played Burning Man — the kind of credits that would let her decamp to Nashville or Asheville tomorrow. She hasn't. She stays in Springfield, does session work across Missouri, and keeps showing up on hometown stages.

You can catch the full String Project this summer without buying a ticket: the band is slated for the Birthplace of Route 66 Festival on Saturday, Aug. 8, on the Aaron Sachs Stage in the Car & Motorcycle Village — an afternoon set where those looped strings will have to fight a few hundred idling engines for airspace. Bet on the cello.

What makes Healey matter locally isn't just skill, though there's plenty. It's the proof of concept: that you can be genuinely experimental, genuinely rooted, and genuinely from here, all at once. Springfield doesn't have to export its most interesting musician for her to reach a national stage. She just plugs in the loop pedal and builds the orchestra herself.

Sources: Molly Healey — Bio; Molly Healey — Missouri Arts Council; LIVE MUSIC — Birthplace of Route 66 Festival