If I believe the things I’m singing, it resonates more with others: Molly Rankin on how Alvvays made Blue Rev [Video]

There’s a song on Blue Rev, the monumental current album from indie pop band Alvvays, that’s named for the late Tom Verlaine. Verlaine also had a song called “Always,” but more on that parallel in a second. The first time lead singer Molly Rankin heard the Television frontman, with his singular swagger on the guitar, was probably back in Prince Edward Island, where she lived in her outfit’s early days.

“To hear guitar that way was really eye opening,” Rankin tells the Straight. “And even Tom’s vocals, I think, maybe get a bit overlooked. The whole thing is a really timeless combination, and still exciting and relevant to me.” 

In “Tom Verlaine,” Rankin channeled the art-punk icon’s disaffected image (“I think of him as sort of a classic, fashionable, chic person who is a face of the scene in New York”) when thinking about the subject of the narrator’s conflicted love. Over textures of surging …