Singer/songwriter Mallory Feuer reflects on her open mic beginnings, DIY touring, creative intuition, and the search for connection at the heart of her psychedelic art rock band, The Grasping Straws.

Stream: “Comforts” – The Grasping Straws

At one point in our conversation, Mallory Feuer describes musicians locked into a groove together as becoming “one entity.”

The phrase surfaces naturally while she is talking about collaboration, and it echoes throughout the rest of our discussion. Whether she is talking about anti-folk open mics at the now-shuttered SideWalk Cafe, sleeping in cars on early tours, singing fourteen harmony tracks over a single song, or watching child surfers repeatedly fall and get back up on a beach in Puerto Rico, Feuer returns to the idea of connection.

For more than a decade, The Grasping Straws has served as the vessel for that exploration. What began in New York City’s underground music scene has grown into a constantly evolving project that pulls from folk, garage rock, jazz, psychedelia, and experimental rock without ever settling comfortably into a single category. The band has shifted between solo project and full group, welcomed a revolving cast of collaborators, crossed oceans on DIY tours, and continued to follow inspiration wherever it happens to appear.

That openness seems central to Feuer’s creative philosophy. She speaks fondly of chance encounters that altered the course of her musical life, of testing new songs at open mics, and of treating collaboration as a study of humanness. Even her songwriting process reflects a willingness to embrace uncertainty. Rather than waiting for the perfect idea, she writes constantly, trusting that meaning will reveal itself somewhere along the way.

With 2025’s Shapes, Feuer turned her attention toward themes of nature, oneness, and wildlife preservation, while continuing to wrestle with questions of identity, isolation, creativity, and community. Now, as she begins work on the next Grasping Straws album, she remains driven by the same curiosity that first drew her into those crowded open mic rooms years ago.

In our conversation, Feuer reflects on the SideWalk Cafe years, the challenges and rewards of independent touring, the influence of jazz harmony on her songwriting, and the moments of serendipity that have shaped both her music and her life. Most of all, she discusses the search for connection that runs through everything she creates, and the rare magic that occurs when a room full of people becomes part of the same song.

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Stream: ‘Shapes’ – The Grasping Straws

A CONVERSATION WITH MALLORY FEUER

Mallory Feuer: The SideWalk Cafe open mic was my introduction to the eclectic world of New York City’s underground music scene. I was fascinated, mesmerized, and deeply inspired by what I found there, and it helped me find my voice, develop my sound, and become part of a community. It was the most raw and real art form I had ever experienced, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

I was particularly inspired by Cannonball Statman, who would scream and yell, bark like a dog, run around the room, jump off the stage, knock down mic stands, and recite piercing lyrics at ridiculously fast speeds. We became friends and started booking local shows and tours together.

Mallory Feuer: Many of those early basement and DIY venues no longer exist, and many of the artists I met have left the city or stopped performing. There’s a lot of turnover, with new venues and artists constantly entering the scene.

I still go to open mics, especially when I have a new song to test out. My favorite currently running open mic is at Bar Freda in Ridgewood. These days, I feel more like one of the scene veterans.

Mallory Feuer: There were a lot of chance encounters that led me to form this band and start touring. Every experience I’ve gone through has also shaped my songwriting.

I use songwriting and performing to connect with myself and others and to work through heavy emotions. I try to maintain my openness to synchronicity and serendipity by doing morning pages, inspired by The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and by collaborating with other musicians whenever I can.

For example, when I opened for Jeffrey Lewis on tour, I asked our drummer Brent Cole to play some songs with me. He was so amazing with the material that it opened up a whole new stream of magic. I’m hoping to feature him on our next album.

Mallory Feuer: Definitely. I’m a huge perfectionist and procrastinator, and I do well with deadlines.

For a while I kept up with writing a new song every week for the open mic. Good or bad, it’s a song, and I can always edit it later. Most of “Shapes” came together that way.

I also try to do morning pages as much as possible. Even when I feel like I have nothing to say, I force myself to write. Then when inspiration inevitably strikes, I’m warmed up and ready to receive it, and I have pages of words and phrases to mine for lyrics instead of getting stuck wondering whether an idea is “good enough.”

Mallory Feuer: I don’t think I’m a particularly political musician. I have a few political ideas woven into my songs, but where politics often divide and polarize people, I strive to bring people together through universal truths.

I believe that we’re all the same being. I’ve been trying to bring ideas of oneness and yogic philosophy into my music and message more. Lately I’ve been very inspired by Ram Dass, and one of our newer songs is based on his quote: “And so I practice turning people into trees, which means appreciating them just the way they are.”

Mallory Feuer: I have a hard time navigating it. I’ve never been very good at measuring success through money. It’s a labor of love, and whatever money we’ve made has been more of a byproduct than the goal.

The goalposts keep moving anyway, and most of the money we earn gets reinvested into the next idea. I make music because ideas come to me, and I love the process of working them out and sharing them.

I have a day job, and that takes some of the financial pressure off the art. It helps preserve the magic. If I were making music primarily for money, I think it would sound very different.

Mallory Feuer: I think performing allows me to express emotion. I’m pretty quiet and reserved in my day-to-day life, and when I step on stage and suddenly have a microphone and everyone’s attention, I’m able to show a side of myself that’s raw, loud, and deeply internal.

Mallory Feuer: Playing solo feels much more intimate. I like adapting to the energy of the room and finding ways to captivate people.

Sometimes that means being really loud in a large space, and sometimes it means being very quiet. I rarely write set lists. Usually I keep a list of songs at my feet and move through them based on what feels right in the moment.

Mallory Feuer: Patterns had to do with taking a step back and noticing the patterns and cycles through an abusive relationship. Shapes goes one level of abstraction further. Thinking about patterns on a literal level.

“Shapes” are the ethereal building blocks of language, emotion, understanding, and communication. The album celebrates nature, oneness, and wildlife preservation, against a backdrop of technologically-driven consumerism. When we abstract away our arbitrarily assigned meanings, we can connect as pure lines, forms, colors, sounds, and overlapping symbols.

Mallory Feuer: Being part of Jeffrey’s band exposed me to the business side of music in a way I hadn’t experienced before. It inspired me to track metrics and become more comfortable discussing money and logistics.

Jeffrey has a very specific vision and hundreds of songs and lyrics to manage. My approach is more collaborative. I like developing new material and allowing room for interpretation. It’s interesting to have both perspectives as a bandmate and a band leader.

Mallory Feuer: I think playing the violin feels the most like singing. As an instrument, it can convey so much emotion, and it can make so many different kinds of sounds. It also sits between my head and my heart when I play it, and I feel it vibrating against me.

Mallory Feuer: Yes! I think writing songs and coding both serve to solve puzzles in creative ways, where there are many possible answers and outcomes. It often comes down to one word here or one rhyme there, or one syllable out of place. Both use language (and punctuation) to express ideas and solve problems.

Mallory Feuer: Growing up, I was exposed to a lot of jazz vocal harmonies. I was involved in a handful of different jazz choirs from middle school through to college, and I developed a love for harmonies and dissonance.

When I first heard Alice in Chains’ MTV unplugged album, I was captivated by the harmonies between Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell, and I was drawn to a fusion between jazz harmonies over grunge music. I’m always hearing weird melodic harmonies over everything I listen to, so it’s fun to find harmony parts over my own vocal takes and turn myself into a choir. I recorded 14 harmony tracks over “Robots” on the Shapes album.

Mallory Feuer: It’s very hard to tell! I definitely depend on my bandmates to create parts and give notes on the mixes. Looking back now, I think our first 2 albums were a little bit too gritty and raw at times, but I think Shapes struck a better balance and displayed a bit more of a range of styles.

Gordon Raphael worked on the mixes, and I think he did a great job with it. I also thought Seth’s guitar tones and parts added a lot. It’s an iterative process, and it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees when listening back hundreds of times.

Mallory Feuer: I used to stake too much of my self-worth on my bandmates’ enthusiasm and availability. Every show felt like such a huge deal, and I would get so upset if we didn’t perform well, or if the audience wasn’t big or attentive enough.

I also didn’t have a clear vision of what I wanted our recordings to sound like, and I didn’t have the words to describe what kind of parts I wanted or why I felt like the mixes were off. I was so hypercritical of my recorded work that I had a hard time promoting it.

Creating Shapes, and working on building my confidence and self-worth outside of music has made a big difference. Touring also taught me to be less precious about every individual show. Not every show can be magical, and there are always some good moments and some challenging moments.

All of this to say I’m not sure if I really would have done anything differently. I think I needed these experiences to become a better songwriter and recording artist. It takes the time it takes.

Mallory Feuer: I think this goes back to the idea of “oneness.” When I’m in a room with musicians I admire, and we’re playing parts and grooving together, we all create one sound and become one entity. We communicate beyond words and connect on a deeper level that transcends time and space. It’s a truly magical experience when all of our parts lock in together. On top of that, traveling and touring with other musicians creates a unique bond where we feel like a mix of siblings and roommates. It feels amazing to be with a group that can depend on each other and help each other, especially when we all get along and we’re laughing and joking around.

Mallory Feuer: Yea definitely. I feel like my relationships with all of my songs change over time though. Songs serve to capture a moment or a feeling. So while I find that older songs I’ve written tend to be tied to specific memories, a lot of them take on new meanings as I grow and reach new phases of life. I think my perspective on a lot of things is constantly changing and unfolding.

Mallory Feuer: I guess we’re tough to categorize into a specific genre because we hit on so many different types of sounds, and we’re not your typical idea of a band where the bandmates and arrangements stay the same or reflect the recordings exactly. Things are always evolving and changing.

Mallory Feuer: European audiences generally seem more appreciative of independent artists. We’ve had especially good experiences in Germany. I think European culture celebrates artists more. They always feed us and help us find a nice place to sleep. In the US, independent artists are seen more as outsiders, drifters, degenerates. There’s definitely a strong artist community in Brooklyn, and I love being part of it, but there’s also a ton of other shows and events to compete with.

Mallory Feuer: I listened to a ton of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday before I started writing music. I was also learning complex vocal harmonies in different jazz choirs and listening to groups like the Manhattan Transfer and the Swingle Singers, and then I started recognizing similar types of harmonies in Alice in Chains and I started to think of Grunge as “heavy jazz” music. I was also really inspired by Hiatus Kaiyote’s trip hop rhythmic feels.

Mallory Feuer: Yes. We usually tour as a 3-piece with Seth on the bass, and no lead guitarist to cut costs. There were a few venues on our most recent tour that didn’t have a drum kit, so we adapted our merch suitcase to be a kick drum, and used various other available implements to hold cymbals. I like that we can be crafty and play smaller, intimate spaces that don’t allow full drums. Those sets were fun and interesting, and it brought out some different ideas and parts.

Mallory Feuer: It’s definitely instinctive and unintentional. Sometimes I present the band with a song, and there’s a bit of a disagreement about how to interpret the rhythm, and where the downbeat is. There are a few songs that also have major tempo shifts and time warps. When I play solo, I can freely exaggerate these things even more.

Mallory Feuer: One of my favorite shows from our 2025 tour was at ZAKK in Bremen, Germany. I’d played there previously with Jeffrey Lewis, and returning with The Grasping Straws felt special. The room was packed and energetic.

A high point of our previous 2023 Europe tour was in the small town of Hasselt, Belgium where we played a DIY space opening for our friends, Peuk. It was the first time someone crowd surfed during our set!

Mallory Feuer: I wrote the first line of “Comforts” on a beach in Rincon, Puerto Rico after a bunch of my friends peeled off to get food and left me on the beach watching a pile of all of their stuff. I felt saddled with all of their things. I took out a notebook and started journaling. I observed some child surfers falling and getting back up, fearlessly. It started to rain on me.

For the video, I approached my friend Clare O’Kane after seeing her work on Emily Frembgen’s “Fentanyl.” I really liked the idea of carrying around too much stuff at the beach, and finally setting it all down to run into the ocean and “be free.” I loved the shots Clare came up with.

The shoot was fun, but very cold! By the time we scheduled the shoot, it was November, so the beach was pretty empty. I wanted to be fully submerged in the water at the end, but it was just too intense.

It was physically challenging running around in the cold all day, but it was fun, and I’m super happy with how the video came out.

Mallory Feuer: I struggle to label our music myself, so I appreciate when other people try.

Some labels fit better than others. Lately I’ve been calling it multi-genre, introspective, jazzy rock. I think “eclectic” fits.

Mallory Feuer: We’re already recording the next album, and it stretches even further stylistically than anything we’ve done before. The songs move from jazz to dirge to hard rock. We’re trying to capture the full range of what this band can be.

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:: connect with The Grasping Straws here ::

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Stream: “Comforts” – The Grasping Straws

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