IN CONCERT: Mother Mother
Where: Royal Theatre, 805 Broughton St.
When: Friday and Saturday (April 29 and 30), 8 p.m.
Tickets: Sold out
Mother Mother found itself in a unique but fortunate position during the pandemic. While other acts were struggling to stay alive, the Vancouver quintet was enjoying its biggest gains in 15 years as a group.
And frontman Ryan Guldemond knew it was coming. “Years ago, I saw an astrologer, and he predicted that in 2020 and 2021 things were going to be very prosperous for me professionally,” Guildemond said.
“I kind of clung to that idea, and over the years just silently believed in it, and tried my best to manifest it. As we were inching into the pandemic, I was thinking he must have been way off, because there’s no way anything fortuitous was going to come of [the pandemic]. Nothing was going on and we were stuck at home. And then, out of the blue, this miraculous thing happened. He was right.”
Mother Mother’s music found a new audience on TikTok, the massively popular mobile app through which users create short videos set to music. There wasn’t anything specific Mother Mother did to elicit such a response, Guldemond said. TikTok is widely popular — the app has been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times — so it was likely a confluence of factors brought together by the world’s fastest-growing social media platform.
Guldemond called it “a bizarre gift horse from the universe” for his band of 15 years.
Surprisingly, it was the early singles Hayloft, Burning Pile and Arms Tonite — which are all found on the band’s 2008 album, O My Heart — that drove much of the traffic. “It was as organic as it could possibly be,” Guldemond said.
“And for that reason, it was all the more gratifying. It’s nice when people are buying something you’re not selling. It’s nice to not be solicitous, and just do your thing quietly.”
TikTok isn’t their only social-media presence, of course. On streaming site Spotify, Mother Mother have more than 7 million monthly listeners, far surpassing Canadian peers such as Metric (which has 2.3 million monthly listeners), Arkells (507, 160), and July Talk (175,875). That exposure eventually brought the group to the attention of producers at The Late Late Show with James Corden, on which Mother Mother made its U.S. television debut last year.
The appearance was in support of the band’s eighth studio album, Inside, which arrived June 25, 2021. Mother Mother has played mostly U.S. and European shows in the months since the album’s release, but will get back in front of Canadian audiences beginning this weekend, with two sold-out shows at the Royal Theatre. The band will eventually head east to cities such as Toronto, where it will compete May 15 for group of the year at the 2022 Juno Awards.
Finding success during a time when the world’s music fans were homebound was somewhat unsettling at first, Guldemond said. Mother Mother’s usual pattern has been to immediately follow a studio release with a cross-Canada tour. But the Quadra Island native and his bandmates, sister Molly Guldemond, Jasmin Parkin, Ali Siadat and Mike Young, have embraced the downtime ahead of the North American tour that will take them through November.
“It’s the best-case scenario for unnatural, heightened success to occur, because we were incubated by the pandemic. We were able to almost act as voyeurs, and use the very valid excuse of stay-at-home orders to not go and chase the success in a transient or overtly physical way. We got to sit back and watch, and consider how we might try to work off this success once the world opened up again.”
Guldemond recently reached out to the astrologer who predicted his success, and was told “this wave of energy would have a long life,” if the band continues to work hard and push forward.
No problem there. Hard work is the foundation of Mother Mother, Guldemond said.
“We’re very lucky that we didn’t ever pause, we just consistently worked — and that allowed us to greet this lucky moment as though it was 10 years ago. We’re just as fit for the stage, just as fit to respond to attention as we’ve ever been. I’m proud of the band’s consistency, and willingness to weather those lulls. Things don’t always go like you want them to, and it’s easy to get disillusioned in this industry.”
