Vancouver-based indie rockers Mother Mother are no strangers to success, but something unlikely happened during the pandemic. A few songs from Mother Mother’s 2008 album O My Heart began trending on TikTok, amassing millions of views.
“I think it made us more humble, more sensitive to our own shortcomings and our own inadequacies as a band and as musicians, because there was more eyeballs on us and we were passing more filters of judgement,” says vocalist/guitarist Ryan Guldemond. “I think it was good for us, it’s good to be humbled and pushed to strive to be your best self, in music or any facet in life. And the whole TikTok fame really catalyzed that for us.”
Guldemond says the experience of living through the pandemic and its associated shutdowns in Vancouver inspired his work.
“It was all very shut down and spooky and eerie,” he says. “And I became addicted to walking desolate streets and pulling sounds from the environment and recording them onto my phone and then putting that into the computer and building music from that. And that was a really positive creative evolution born form the pandemic.”
Guldemond says that the pandemic also led him to find a new, enjoyable part of the touring experience.
“Over the pandemic I fell in love with photography and have gotten pretty deep into that hobby, and so a new favourite aspect of touring is sneaking off and taking pictures of various cities,” he says. “That has certainly opened up a new dimension of beauty in what is otherwise logistically… challenging.”
Mother Mother recently announced that they would be joining Imagine Dragons for a European stadium tour. Guldemond says that there’s a significance of playing stadiums to the band.
“I think the modus operandi in all of this is to share your gifts with as many people as possible… And then you have to ask yourself, ‘Why do I want to do that?’ I guess at its core, it’s to make the world a better place, because music heals, and music saves; music is a medicine. So that’s why we want to play a stadium… [We] want to use that vehicle to spread as much light and love and medicinal properties that are found in music as much as possible.”
Guldemond compares playing live to a spiritual experience; he says being excited for the upcoming stadium tour is “kind of an understatement,” saying he’s “in awe of having an opportunity to partake in that kind of energy exchange.”
“Sharing the music with people in a room, that human connection, there’s so much synergy that happens there, there’s so much mounting of energy that you and the crowd get swept away in,” he says. “It can be a really spiritual experience, or however you want to describe those states of transcendence.”
Mother Mother
8 pm Friday, April 29
8 pm Saturday, April 30
$52.25 and up, Royal Theatre
rmts.bc.ca