Singer-songwriter Chris Molitor finds home in Spokane

In “Still KD: Through the Noise,” a Nike documentary about basketball player Kevin Durant, includes a clip of Durant talking about how he shouldn’t be praised for doing what he’s supposed to do.

This minute of the documentary is soundtracked by a folk-rock tune called “The Fallout” that features electric guitar and foot stomps, plus some ominous “oohs” and “aahs” for good measure.

“The Fallout” was written and produced by Chris Molitor, a recent Spokane transplant, when he still lived in Los Angeles.

His journey up the coast could fill a documentary itself and culminates in “Coming Home,” his debut full-length album, which he will release at the Bartlett on Friday.

Molitor, originally from a small town in Michigan, was living in Redding, California, when he and his wife, Lauren, decided to make the leap to Los Angeles.

There Molitor worked as a freelance graphic designer and pursued a solo career. After feeling burnt out on performing by himself, Molitor began the Wilder Society in 2015 with friend René Cruz and David Powell and Sean Cunningham.

Over time, the folk-rock quartet gained a steady following in Los Angeles, releasing the “Lion’s Den” EP to a packed crowd at the Hotel Cafe.

The band then embarked on its first West Coast tour, stopping by Portland, Seattle and a few cities in between.

“None of those crowds are our crowds. No one really knows who we are,” Molitor said. “Almost every show, by the end of the set, you could feel the shift that had taken place and people were in our corner.”

After the Portland show, Molitor’s band mates approached him with the idea of relocating to the city.

Unbeknownst to his band mates, Molitor and his wife had already been thinking about moving from Los Angeles to Portland, where she was from.

The band returned to California rejuvenated from tour and with a plan to move north starting to take shape. But shortly after returning to Los Angeles, things began to fall apart.

In early November, Molitor’s main graphic design client, his “bread and butter,” let him know they were hiring an in-house designer and would no longer need his services.

At the same time, the band mates who were once keen on moving to Portland had a change of heart and began looking to pursue other artistic interests.

“It was a whirlwind of emotion realizing we knew the season was going to end in L.A., we just didn’t know it was going to happen so quickly and quite how it did,” Molitor said.

With little choice, Molitor and his wife packed up their things, drove to Portland to place their things in storage, then drove to Spokane, where Lauren’s parents live and where she attended junior high and high school, in early December.

The pair planned to spend a month or two in Spokane to catch their breath, save a bit of money and finds jobs and an apartment in Portland.

That was last winter, and the pair never left.

Part of the decision to stay had to do with the fact that Spokane had changed considerably from how Lauren remembered it from her time in school. The couple found a few great pubs and restaurants and saw a friend’s band play the Bartlett.

“It really got my gears turning quite a bit of this could actually be really great for us,” he said.

With the old plan out the window, Molitor and his wife spent the winter in her parent’s lake house on Diamond Lake figuring out their next step.

The pair moved into an apartment on the lower South Hill in June, but before leaving the lake house, Molitor took full advantage of its solitude and recorded and produced “Coming Home.”

“It was such a perfect environment to create music,” he said. “It was so peaceful and for me, a lot of my songs there are themes of travel, there’s themes of the outdoors, there are themes of nature so it was perfect. It really felt like the right time and the right place to do this project.”

Although unintentional, “Coming Home” thematically follows the path Molitor’s life has taken in recent years.

Album opener “Across the Room” is a high-energy tune that Molitor said echoes the excitement he and Lauren felt about moving from Redding to Los Angeles.

From there though, the album starts to reflect the roadblocks he has had to overcome.

“Once the glamor and the glitz wears away a little bit, you recognize ‘This is still going to be really hard. This is going to be tough. It’s a challenge,’ ” Molitor said. “It becomes more melancholy as the album goes on. There’s a gradual transition of feeling some of those defeats or those heartaches or those hardships.”

Appropriately, the album ends with the title track, which Molitor said represents where he and Lauren are currently at in their journey.

“Forget fame, forget fortune, forget all of that,” he said. “Right now, if we could just have home and all that goes along with that, the feeling of connection, the feeling of belonging, the feeling of being loved and being cherished just for who you are, if we can find that, then things are going to be great.”

In the months since he’s arrived in Spokane, Molitor has worked to establish himself in town.

A mutual friend connected Molitor with local singer Marshall McLean, who in turn introduced Molitor to Bartlett owners/musicians Caleb and Karli Ingersoll.

Molitor performed at “The Round Spokane #28” at the Bartlett in May and opened for the Los Angeles-based Eagle Rock Gospel Singers in July, Spokane’s Dario Ré in August and Nashville’s Lillie Mae in September.

Molitor has also taken what he learned self-producing “Coming Home” and is using it to help local artists. He produced a single for a local singer-songwriter that’s set to be released in November and he will produce an EP for another Spokane-based singer-songwriter this winter.

It’s all in effort to put down roots, bringing him closer to his goal of finding home.

“That theme of coming home is so important not just to the album but to our lives in general,” he said. “Part of that is why we stayed in Spokane because we feel like we can find that here.”