As September came to an end just a few months ago, and fans of Mother Mother have been surprisingly well-fed in the past couple of months: on August 27th, the band shadow-dropped an extended version of their album Eureka, with two songs that had also been unreleased on streaming platforms until just recently. And just a month later on September 27th, the Mother EP was also released to streaming services, with “first drafts” of two of their most popular songs and four songs that had been a part of the band’s very first album Mother, but were cut when it was later rereleased as Touch Up. Seeing as I’ve already reviewed and analyzed three of their albums, I figured it’d be fitting for me to do the same for the new songs.
Although “Forever and a Bit” wasn’t available on streaming until just recently, it’s still available for purchase as part of the ten-year anniversary edition of Eureka on the website of Last Gang Records, the band’s very first record label. The song itself isn’t very straightforward with the narrative or message it’s trying to convey—not that I think that’s a bad thing—but if I were to take a guess, I would interpret it as being about someone locked in an eternal struggle to coexist with an undisclosed mental illness, which they’ve chosen to personify as a living, demonic creature. Like the rest of the songs in Eureka, the song’s instrumentation is jaunty and upbeat, putting it directly at odds with the heavier subject matter of the song. However, this dichotomy between the lightheartedness of the instrumentals and the darker tone of the lyrics is what made the song an instant favorite from the moment I listened to it for the first time, and made it feel right at home with the rest of the album.
Tracking down “Had It All” was an even stranger process than tracking down “Forever and a Bit,” because while the latter can at least be bought as a physical copy as part of the rest of the album, I ended up finding “Had It All” on Mother Mother’s SoundCloud profile, where the song had been uploaded there by Last Gang in 2011—the same year Eureka was released. That aside, the song seems to be about someone who, for lack of a better phrase, had it all—only to lose everything because of their own reckless decisions. “Had It All” keeps in tradition with the rest of the album by using more cheerful instrumentation to contrast the lyrics, with this song in particular reminding me of “Two” by Lenka, who utilizes the sound of rhythmic clapping in tandem with the instrumental to produce a song that leans more towards electro-pop, as opposed to Mother Mother’s more rock and country-leaning sound.
“Dirty Town” and “Oh Ana” – Mother Versions
For a bit of context, the addition of “Mother Version” to the titles of both songs is a callback to when Mother Mother’s band name used to simply be Mother, before Last Gang encouraged them to change it to avoid legal issues. Aside from that, both songs are nearly identical to their touched up—pun intended—iterations from when they were released as part of Touch Up. The lyrics were unchanged across both versions, and the only noticeable difference I could find was the significantly toned-down percussion in the Mother versions compared to the Touch Up versions; it was most noticeable in the Mother version of “Dirty Town,” and while the lack of percussion was still present in the Mother version of “Oh Ana,” I almost missed it the first few times I listened to both versions back and forth.
“Fat Kids” is easily the most downbeat song on the EP in terms of its instrumentation and content, wherein the singer is an overweight kid who has internalized the fatphobic sentiments of their peers, and laments about how they can only seem to find comfort in the act of consuming junk food or spending time with other children who are ostracized for being fat. It’s an understandably morose song—which is likely why it wasn’t on Touch Up—but I do believe it could have found a place on the album among the other songs that are less lighthearted in their subject matter, such as “Touch Up” and “Neighbor.”
“Babies” almost has a sort of lullaby quality to it, which is fitting considering the song’s subject matter. It’s interrupted when they go a bit harder on the electric guitar about halfway through, but only for a brief moment—it did surprise me, but didn’t detract from the overall song when I first listened to it. The song itself is about the cyclical nature of reproduction, and the fact that we’ll never truly know how they’re going to end up when they’re older. The song is fairly innocuous for the most part, but hints of its darker subject matter persist with lyrics such as “We all were once babies/But now we are just animals in these hospitals/Making babies who make babies who make babies”, which likens the process of childbirth to being an animal trapped in a pen, forced to give birth over and over again for the rest of its life. It’s a poignant statement, and surprisingly relevant given the current state of reproductive rights in the United States.
“Mamma Told Me” is arguably the song with the most tragic subject matter, with the lyrics detailing a child looking back on their upbringing with their divorced parents—their deceased mother in particular—and realizing their mother inadvertently projected her own sorrows and trauma onto them, which contributed to the child’s deep feelings of loneliness in the present day. This song is my favorite on the EP because whether we like it or not, our parents or guardians couldalways pass down negative behavior to us, and all we can do is ensure we don’t pass it on to our children if we choose to have them. The desire to be better than our parents is a universal one, and is the main reason why I was drawn to this song over the other two.
“Home Recording” is just that—a home recording the band decided to tack onto the album when they first started out as the band Mother. It’s short and unpolished, there are parts of the song where they don’t sing in harmony and there’s even random screaming in the background. The lyrics are painfully self-deprecating, with even a bit of audio of Molly Guldemond, one of the three vocalists, making a comment at the very end about how she doesn’t want “Home Recording” to be added to the album. And despite being rough around the edges, the song still manages to hold up with its endless charm and sincerity.