Mother Mother: Embracing Evolution

By: Curtis Sindrey –

With their fourth album The Sticks, Vancouver born Mother Mother have abandoned their dance pop roots which were intimately explored on their 2011 album Eureka and have produced a more complex record with more harmonic and creative risks.

“Ignorance is cool now,” says lead singer and guitarist Ryan Guldemond in a phone interview, “and I thought that it was just blissful.”

Spending just four weeks in a Vancouver studio, Guldemond and company decided to produce The Sticks in a different way than the dance-pop oriented production of Eureka with a “less is more” approach.

“We wanted it to have a more elastic feel, a more human feel,” says Guldemond.  “The whole ethos was, ‘don’t do more than enough, just do barely enough’.”

Guldemond wanted imperfection to thrive on the album and he actively resisted any additional post-production polishing.

“With this record we wanted it to be a big platform for imperfection to exist and survive and trump some impossible ideal of a perfect thing,” says Guldemond.

With the release of The Sticks, Mother Mother now has the luxury of cultivating a set-list that draws from all the right spots of their albums.

“There has been an augmentation as we have these new songs incorporated into our set,” says Guldemond. “Once people are familiar with the record when we do our official launch tour, the set list will be gangbusters.”

“With this record we wanted it to be a big platform for imperfection to exist and survive and trump some impossible ideal of a perfect thing.”

This album is the second Mother Mother production to have Guldemond listed as a producer. Being a producer is, “a loose term in a lot of ways. It’s just a guy in a room with a bunch of ideas that come to fruition that are completely musically based and all of a sudden you’re a producer.”

“It’s something that any creative person can do,” continues Guldemond. “Once you are given licence to do it then you can start refining other skills like engineering and the other languages that you need to have a handle on in order to communicate with the technical side of it.”

When touring before an album is released, bands often run into a problem where they want people to be exposed to their album but they don’t know any of the songs, but in the case of Mother Mother’s new album, fans will have two months to get a feel for the songs before the launch of their supporting tour.

“The album isn’t drastically different and it’s not so drastically the same that it feels redundant and it’s a nice, new family member,” says Guldemond.

“The MO of the album was to have an eclectic feel, and to make something diverse and to allow the writing process to be indiscriminate where a good song is a good song.”

Mother Mother will release “The Sticks” on September 18th, which took only four weeks to record, where Eureka took over four months.

There are many prime examples of well-known lead singers going solo after many years in a group. Matthew Good, Jack White, Paul McCartney, just to name a few, and a solo career is something Guldemond hasn’t ruled out, although not something as conventional.

“I would never want to do something like that for the sake of falling into that formula and I’m also not hell-bent on it being a Ryan Guldemond album, and I just want to do what feels right and natural,” explained Guldemond. “I have no stray desires to go and do something else right now, but I’m young and it’s a long road, so I would only hope that I can get my hands into other projects as years go by.”

Guldemond claims that the album was two songs short of being a concept record, something which Mother Mother has yet to do. However, he asserts that “95 percent of thematically cohesive works of art are accidental,” so don’t hold your breath on a The Wall-esque epic from Mother Mother anytime soon. But while the album didn’t have a cohesive theme, Guldemond focused on several intertwining subjects like escapism, post-apocalypse and a musical protest of modernity.

The track “Love it Dissipates” was a particularly difficult song for Guldemond to record due to his desire for intimacy with the listener. “The whole idea for that song was to make it sound and feel close, like the guy is breathing on you,” says Guldemond. “And we found that any element of proximity or distance from the ear was a problem so we re-recorded the guitar and the vocals.”

In many interviews Guldemond has criticized the music industry for distinguishing albums as “the best,” when music, by nature, is diverse and eclectic.

“People have they’re little blue ribbons and they like to pin them on stuff. I think it’s more about people having the power to do that and it’s almost more about the judicators in this world than the prize-winners,” said Guldemond.

Guldemond plays only one guitar on stage, a late sixties Japanese Mosrite copy in a sunburst colour. He received the guitar when he was eight or nine from his great uncle who placed great importance and significance on the instrument and naturally Guldemond stashed it away in his parent’s basement until he resurrected it for Mother Mother.

“It was a big deal for him to give me this guitar which was given to him by a friend during the turn of the century and he made it very clear that it was a very special guitar,” says Guldemond.

Being well versed in the language of music is important to Guldemond, who majored in jazz guitar at a Vancouver music school. The influence of his education, he notes, is especially evident on Mother Mother’s first album, 2007’s Touch Up. He asserts that many, “rock musicians, and indie musicians especially, aren’t schooled and there seems almost to be a stigma attached to being versed in the language of music.”

“There’s a beauty to some of that more emotionally complex harmonies in jazz and I don’t see why it isn’t incorporated more in pop music,” says Guldemond.

In November, Mother Mother will set out on a nation-wide Canadian tour that will begin in Halifax and will work its way west.

“We’ll be in a bus for the first time and it should be a gala affair,” says Guldemond.

“We’ll be playing a lot of theatres and we’re bringing a lighting director and fuckin’ smoke machines so you can expect a whole new Mother Mother experience.”

Check out the latest updates from the world of Mother Mother at their official website.