Ebb, Flow, Return - Molly Thomas's Poetry in Motion in "I Am a Wave"

In “I Am a Wave”, Molly Thomas delivers a closing statement that feels less like the end of an album and more like the beginning of a journey inwards.

The track, which will serve as the final song on her forthcoming album Tumble Home, is one born from a moment of quiet observation. Thomas sitting on a porch overlooking Mobile Bay, letting the water’s rhythm lead her imagination toward music. From that stillness emerged a deceptively simple yet profoundly moving idea: What if a wave could speak?

It’s from this question that “I Am a Wave” flows.

The result is a meditative ballad where the voice of the wave becomes a metaphor for human connection, separation and return. The song’s imagery speaks to the way we move through one another’s lives — touching, drifting apart, coming back — forever changed by the encounter. It’s not just a love song, though it could be heard that way. It’s a reflection on friendship, loss, longing and the deep ties that persist beneath the surface.

Thomas handles the arrangement with exquisite care. She performs all the strings herself (violins, violas, and cellos) creating a lush, layered texture that moves like water: swelling, receding and shimmering under moonlight. Her vocals sit at the center, clear and vulnerable, never forced. There’s a tenderness in her delivery that invites the listener to lean in, to hear not just the words but the space between them.

Longtime collaborator Ken Rose contributes bass and guitar work that feels like a grounding shoreline. It's steady, warm, and quietly essential. His playing doesn’t draw attention away from Thomas’s vocal and strings but instead, it offers a harmonic anchor, a subtle reminder of land beneath the horizon.

There are no dramatic crescendo, no towering chorus demanding to be remembered. Instead, the song’s power lies in its patience, in the way it drifts rather than rushes. This is music that trusts its listener. Music that understands the value of quiet reflection.

And yet, beneath that calm surface lies a deep well of feeling. The wave’s voice is not just poetic metaphor. It’s an articulation of the ebb and flow of human experience. We meet people, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for years. We share space, share tides, share the same stretch of sea. And then, as inevitably as the moon draws the water back, we part ways. But the current is never gone. The pull remains.

As the final track on Tumble Home, “I Am a Wave” feels like a distillation of the album’s broader themes — about survival, resilience and the search for meaning in life’s turning tides.

The placement is perfect. After the storms and swells explored in earlier tracks, this closing piece offers a kind of still water. It doesn’t promise resolution so much as acceptance — an acknowledgment that motion is constant, and that beauty exists in the continual act of moving, tumbling, returning.

It’s rare for a closing track to so perfectly encapsulate an artist’s sensibility, but “I Am a Wave” manages to do just that.

In the world Thomas creates here, waves don’t just crash — they carry, they connect, and, when the time is right, they bring you home.

Find out more about Molly Thomas and her music here