You’d think with an ultra-popular single, regular playtime on college and CBC radio and a shout-out from über-popular celebrity news blogger Perez Hilton himself that Vancouver band Mother Mother would be sitting pretty on the throne of indie rock stardom. Unfortunately, that’s woefully untrue.
“I would have to disagree that Mother Mother is getting popular,” says guitarist and vocalist Ryan Guldemond. “It’s because of what we’ve experienced, what we’re doing, and the nature of where we’re at. We’ve done well this year and built awareness of the band, but I wouldn’t say that the band has exploded yet.”
Despite the critical acclaim the band has received, they still find themselves playing shows to empty, cavernous venues.
“We’re touring Canada a lot, and some of the rooms are empty,” sighs Guldemond. “It’s sort of the nature of the gigs. They’re not the highest confidence level. We’re still nestled in the phase of ‘paying your dues,’ which is fine and good. It’s part of the process. When we get back to Vancouver, we’re still working day jobs to make it work. There’s still this financial goal for us–to be able to exclusively make music instead of working at something you [neither] love nor hate but feel totally flat about.”
Outside of their music, the group is also known for its famous trailer they used to pull gear from show to show. While the trailer itself wasn’t too big, the hitch was so massive that hipsters used to joke that you could always tell Mother Mother was in town by the 50-foot mechanical leviathan parked outside a venue.
“We’ve actually downgraded our trailer, funnily enough,” laughs Guldemond. “We just thought the entire prospect of having a trailer seemed horrendous. There were headaches around driving, unloading and parking the trailer. In the winter, the instruments were freezing cold because they’re in the trailer. It wasn’t the fact that the trailer itself was a beast, but it was the feet of [it]. Now we have stopped renting the trailers because we were touring so much and instead bought our own, which is definitely a degradation from the previous [one].”
Mother Mother is currently testing out their new trailer with Most Serene Republic, Dragonette and the Small Sins–an independent music mega-tour.
“We were trying to [tour] awhile ago [but] it kind of fell through,” explains Guldemond. “So, we ended up booking another tour, just a small one around this time. Then the tour with Most Serene came up and was an option so we took it because it was such a great opportunity for us.”
The band’s raucous, rollicking ho-down pop sound is a distinctive and piercing style in the amorphous entity known as indie rock. When the band’s latest LP, Touch Up, was released, some music reviewers put special emphasis on the overall lyrical meaning of the songs, noting that they seemed to be describing very specific and emotional scenes. But Guldemond thinks that while these interpretations are different from his own, he’s still appreciative of these insights into the writing.
“I think it’s great that people get different meanings out of the songs,” says Guldemond. “There are meanings for the band. Sometimes it’s hard to describe what exactly that is, or the source of the emotion lies in each song. It’s good that people find meaning that we don’t experience the same way. It makes me inspired to write more meaningful songs. Then I worry that maybe the reverse effect will happen and I’ll be striving to be more meaningful and, consequently, come off as meaningless.”