A punk rock anthem for Market Basket

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Sometimes inspiration strikes in the darndest places. That happened last year as sax player and songwriter Terry O’Malley was driving along Interstate 495 in Massachusetts. He passed the Haverhill exit and noticed a long line of cars stretching down the ramp. “It was backed up all the way to the highway,” he recalled. Then O’Malley uttered to himself, “Everybody's going to the Market Basket.”

That six-word sentence sounded good to O’Malley’s ear. Soothing even. “It had a nice cadence,” he said. “The syllables worked together.”

So he decided to try teasing out a song for his punk band Stop Calling Me Frank. O’Malley said the first rhyme came easily. “Everybody's going to the Market Basket / You know why they’re going, there's no need to ask it.”

Then he added a sweet little kicker, “At the same time!”

Anyone who’s braved the crowded parking lot and aisles at a Market Basket can relate to that, including O’Malley. “It's always that way, no matter what time of the day it is.”

The 61-year-old, longtime resident of the Merrimack Valley knows this intimately. He said, “I've been shopping at Market Basket since before it was even called Market Basket.” Until 1975, the family-run, Massachusetts grocery store chain was known as DeMoulas, after the Greek immigrant couple that founded it in 1917.

O’Malley’s earliest Market Basket memory is the brief moment he got lost (and found) there as a tiny kid. Then there’s the time a kind deli counter employee gave the musician’s daughter a slice of cheese just for being cute. “That’s always been the family's go-to store,” he said, “There’s a familiarity that really is comforting, and I think most people feel that way.”

The iconic grocery chain’s community spirit is what O’Malley strove to capture in “MB Anthem (The Market Basket Song).” Its debut is a bit uncanny, as you’ll learn, because the company has been making news again over the past few weeks. Clocking in at a mere minute and 42 seconds, the song delivers a concise portrait of what makes the store such a beloved shopping destination. There’s “More for your dollar at Market Basket.” “Portions are not smaller at Market Basket.” “Tell your mom you’ll call her from the Market Basket,” punctuated with “Get in the line!”

This amusing little ditty embodies the raucous, sax-driven rock Stop Calling Me Frank added to the heyday of Boston’s punk scene when they first got together in 1984. The band took a lengthy hiatus, but decided to get back together after a few successful reunion shows about a decade ago.

O’Malley and his five bandmates planned to record their new ode to Market Basket last year, and scheduled its release for September 2025. “We're not a touring band. We don't have a lot of visibility. We're not trendsetters or taste makers. We don't have a huge following on social media,” O’Malley said, "but we thought people might wanna hear this song, so that's why we wanted to release it.”

Then, just two weeks before their song’s expected drop, the ongoing family saga within the New England grocery company reappeared in the headlines. On Sept. 9, Market Basket’s board of directors voted unanimously to oust patriarch and CEO Arthur T. Demoulas for the second time. “All I could think was, ‘Oh man, they're gonna ruin the song,” O’Malley recalled. “No one's gonna want to hear it now.”

The musician has been following Market Basket’s corporate skirmishes since the in-fighting became public and fueled headlines in 2014. “As many folks around this part of New England are relearning, again, it's just part of the place,” O’Malley lamented. “And when something so frustrating is happening with the company at the corporate level, it just feels like they're messing with a tradition.”

For the record, Stop Calling Me Frank stands with Artie T. – as legions of loyal fans call him. “All I know is that I love the employees of the Market Basket, and the employees love Artie T.,” bassist Dan Caspariello said in the release announcement. But O’Malley wasn’t thinking about internal drama when he wrote the tune. “I was just trying to come up with things I like about the place,” he said.

Those things include the army of Market Basket workers in their maroon or blue jackets, “shelves are hanging from their brackets” and “veggies for the grill in square packets.”

For O’Malley and Stop Calling Me Frank, the song celebrates Market Basket’s always helpful employees and the family store’s nostalgia-infused continuation, especially in an era of new construction obliterating the old, corporate chain stores gobbling up other chains, and the loss of legendary music clubs like The Rat and Great Scott. Even with all of its drama, O’Malley said Market Basket maintains its culture and dedicated following at 95 stores around New England. The “MB Anthem” is the band’s old-school punk rock way of saying thank you.

“Thanks for having the same logo, thanks for having the same tile floors and not trying to update the look to be trendy to catch a new audience or demographic,” O’Malley said. “It’s the same, it’s reliable, it's trustworthy.”

And, these days, that’s something to sing about.