Molly Ferrill has been a globetrotter ever since graduating from Tufts University in 2012.
First, she went to Thailand to work for Freeland, an organization that fights wildlife trafficking and human slavery. Since then, as a as a National Geographic Explorer, wildlife filmmaker and photographer, her travels have taken her Myanmar, the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, Thailand and Costa Rica.
However, growing up in Peterborough and Temple as the daughter of composer and pianist Lisa Murray and writer Dennis Ferrill, music was a major part of her life. Her younger sister, Bridget Ferrill, who lives in Berlin, is also a musician.
“I have songs from when I was a child that I wrote,” she said.
Ferrill, 33, splits her time these days between New Hampshire, Mexico with her partner Luis Palomino and Thailand, where her father lives, but it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she couldn’t travel, that she decided to turn her songwriting hobby into something more. The result is her first professional song, “Born to Fly,” which is available on Spotify and other digital platforms.
“This is the first time I really decided to go for it,” she said. “I was really able to look through some music I was writing and look at the songs and put them out into the world.”
Ferrill said she chose to release “Born to Fly” first because she wanted something fun, uplifting and energizing.
“I guess it is a song about liberation and independence,” she said. “It’s a song that has this free spirit and motivation to it. It’s a feeling we all need sometimes. You never know who will connect with it.”
That spirit extended to the music video, shot over three days and directed by Martin Bautista and produced by Palomino, with Damien Corr as director of photography.
“I had a great time. I worked with a great team,” she said. “I felt very privileged to get to work with them on my first music video.”
Shot in a bar in Mexico City and the mountains and cactus fields of Tlayacapan, the video featured a trained Harris’s hawk as Ferrill’s co-star.
“These hawks are free. They’re able to fly away at any moment. They decide to stay with humans and work with them,” she said.
Ferrill said she thought of the concept of releasing a caged bird and the parallel between the freedom of birds and the freedom people need ever since she started writing the song.
“I just felt, I’ve got to make the music video to go with this,” she said. “They go together.”
Since releasing “Born to Fly” in August, Ferrill said it has been fun to hear from people who listened to it and learning how people are responding to it. She also enjoys looking at Spotify to see when people are listening and where they’re listening from.
“It’s fun to think ‘What are they doing? What does it make them feel like?’” she said.
Ferrill hopes to have her next song out soon. It’s called “You Dance,” with a video shot during her travels between Thailand, Mexico and New York City.
“It took some planning ahead of time to think what I was going to shoot in each place and how things were going to go together,” she said.