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Globally acclaimed alt-rock band Mother Mother just dropped their new single, “Love To Death.”
The track paves the way for their highly anticipated tenth studio album, Nostalgia, out June 6 (pre-order/pre-save here).
We chatted with lead vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Ryan Guldemond about his creative process, the line between partial and total sobriety, and what it really means to stay authentic. (NOTE: This interview was slightly edited for standard grammar reasons.)
Interview with Mother Mother Singer/Guitarist Ryan Guldemond
VENTS: What’s your process for translating personal experiences into something abstract yet relatable?
Ryan Guldemond: I guess the process would be to to not try and do that. I think when I set out to, okay. I went through this or I feel this way or I have this opinion. Let’s put it in the song.
It never goes well. I’m best off just picking up an instrument and just letting something through. And if it’s good, then I’ll pursue it. And if it’s not, I’ll move on to the next thing. But I don’t premeditate any songwriting.
VENTS: So you don’t really overthink it, in other words, really.
Ryan Guldemond: Not the, like, conception stage. Maybe once a song is up on its feet, then you can certainly get very thoughtful about how to best bring it to life. Like, I toil over lyrics, but I don’t toil over, like, what it means, what it’s about. Like, that needs to present itself clearly, without me getting in the way.
And then once the theme is born from who knows where or who knows how, then I’ll, like, okay. How can I really make this as compelling as possible? Like, should it be this word? Should it be that rhyme? Should it have this type of bridge?
Should the chorus repeat? Like, all the architectural stuff, that is where I get, like, pretty heady.
Mother Mother’s Evolution
VENTS: How has your relationship with songwriting evolved from your earlier work? And what’s harder now and what and what comes easier for you?
Ryan Guldemond: I think I have a bit of a return to form these days with doing things more instinctually and more intuitively and, like, less thoughtfully, like we just discussed. And I feel like that’s how we create when we’re first starting out when we are young, but we’re unwitting to it. Like, we don’t realize that we are channeling. We don’t think of it like that way. We’re just so excited to be acquainting ourselves with this new medium.
It’s so fun. It’s so new. It’s so exciting. Things just happen naturally. And then the deeper you get into it, you start to meddle with your brain, and you start to worry.
You start to think about how to make this more effective or more viable, and I find that’s when the spirit becomes, dulled and sanitized. And so I went through that. You know, I’ve been doing this a long time. Now I’m on the other side, and I think songwriting is the most pure and instinctive and, you know, dare I say, spiritual now. For me, it’s really this realm in which I feel very connected to things beyond my understanding, things beyond my own little identity structure, and it gives me this feeling of reverence for life, for, consciousness.
And I’m sure that was all happening at the beginning. I just wasn’t thinking about it. Like, that’s the beauty of being young. You don’t think about that stuff. You just embody it naturally.
But now I think about it, and then I I try my best to nurture that that energy.
VENTS: Mother Mother has had a major resurgence thanks to platforms like TikTok. How has that affected your sense of artistic identity or the way you approach new music? Has it altered your style at all?
Ryan Guldemond: I think it’s helped us return to what is our most authentic style. It would be very different if the songs that blew up on TikTok were, like, our radio hits. That would be such a different story arc, but, in fact, they were the songs that were more quirky, that were less viable, that were less commercial, which is which is a great gift. It was like, what people actually want is when you’re just being yourself, which so happens to be a little outside of the box. And so that was like, oh, right.
Of course. Like, that music was the most pure and authentic. Of course, that’s the music that is being, celebrated. And so it was it was a revelation, in returning to form. Sure.
Ryan Guldemond on Sobriety
VENTS: So, you’ve been open about your personal growth and sobriety. How has that shaped your creativity and the way you lead the band?
Ryan Guldemond: Yeah. It’s funny. Like, I was talking about this the other day. And for the record, like, I’m not sober. You know, I had a very destructive and [debauched] lifestyle up until a moment of clarity, as they say, and I took a year off of everything.
So I had a year of sobriety, and that that birthed just a whole new way of living. And on the other side of that year was, you know, a much more moderate and cautious lifestyle. And I I realized that I wasn’t addicted to the substance so much as the escape that it provided from things I didn’t like about myself. And so when you have the space and the clarity to go within and address those things that you don’t like about yourself, you can heal that part of you. And then coming out a little more healed, you don’t crave the substance to escape from a thing that is healed.
You know what I mean? So, yeah, after that big life shift in that year, I don’t really have a problem with drinking and stuff. It’s like here and there, you know Yeah. A drink or two, you know, special occasion. But I will say that when I first, you know, got sober, I threw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of certain writing sensibilities.
Because a lot of the early stuff was, like, dark and twisted and had a lot of, like, angst and torment in it. And I I saw that as being a a defect of my lifestyle, like an an unsavory byproduct of the way that I was living. And so I began writing much more about the healing journey and much more about positive things, I guess. And then I realized I missed all that torment, all that darkness in the writing, and that it’s really cool, that stuff. And so And society kind of brings that out anyway.
Doesn’t necessarily reflect the per the viewer. There is some good stuff in the world for sure. Yeah. And I think you can draw upon that that part of you without it being, the part of you that that is in the driver’s seat of your actual life. Like, the creative, realm is is a place where we can indulge in our darkness and our insanity.
And and so I realized that I was resisting that in the wake of my so called sobriety to the detriment of the writing. And so and now I’m like, okay. Cool. Like, I I can be a a level headed, grounded, relatively sober person in in reality. And in the writing, I can I can get demented, and that’s cool.
Those things are not mutually exclusive.
Does Mother Mother Have a Core Sound?
VENTS: The band sound shifted quite a bit over the years…So do you think there’s a core Mother Mother sound, or is evolution sort of part of the identity or the journey?
Ryan Guldemond: I think there’s a core set of sensibilities within the songwriting, but the production, I think, is what has changed and varied the most. I think you could probably sit down at a piano and play any song from any album in a set, and it would work together. It would feel like the same person.
But it’s how we’ve adorned the music in production that I think has made the biggest, like, drastic sweeps.
VENTS: Did do you write more from a place of catharsis, curiosity, or control? What would you say about that?
Ryan Guldemond: So it’s more about curiosity…And catharsis. Like, there’s certainly something very healing and there like, when I’m into something that I love, that feels like a worthy piece of music, ]it’s like] my cells change. Like, I can feel it in my body. I can see it in my eyes, and so can other people?
I just heard this thing the other day that, like, unused creativity isn’t benign. It metastasizes. And I really, like, dug that concept. Because when I am too caught up with all, like, the logistics of life and adulting and stuff, and my craft and creative practice is put to the side a bit. I kinda go a bit gray.
My aura goes pretty dark, and I get sad and flat. And then when I’m really into the muck of the creativity, like, everything just brightens right up. It’s like, really, it’s a palpable opening that I feel.
VENTS: So are there any songs in your discography that you don’t think really got the attention that they should have? That seems like a common phenomenon for most musicians.
Ryan Guldemond: I don’t know that it’s if that’s for us to say. Like, I think you need to move on to the next unborn song once you set the written one free into the world. And it it could take two weeks or it could take two hundred years before people find it. Sure.
I that’s sort of my philosophy. Because I think if you, like, have an opinion about a song’s worth and a song’s reception, then you’re setting yourself up for grave disappointment.
Commercial Expectations vs. Creative Freedom
VENTS: And, how do you navigate the tension between commercial expectations and creative freedom? You know, that’s, I think you kind of hinted at that earlier, but I think there’s a little bit more to explore with that question.
Ryan Guldemond: I think now we just choose not to struggle with that. We have in the past, and now the only reason to make a decision creatively is to make it feel better for you, the writer, the artist, the band, and not to make it more compelling for the audience.
VENTS: What’s something in the music industry you think most people, either fans or fellow artists, don’t really understand?
Ryan Guldemond: …Fellow artists probably understand a lot. Maybe people that are interested in getting into the business, probably don’t understand a lot. I think I’m trying to look back at to what I thought it was gonna be like and the ways in which I was shocked. I can’t even remember. My relationship with, like, first writing songs and getting really excited about sharing them with the world and having some career just kinda, like, form itself around that pure, innocent excitement was really strong.
I was just so excited about, like, okay. Like, if I feel this charged about this stuff, And if those 20 people in that coffee shop at the open mic we just played stopped talking and listened with their eyes lit up, then, of course, this is just gonna somehow manifest into a really beautiful, long standing career of some variety. That was that was my intuition.
And I think I probably just thought it was all gonna be really sweet and lovely and pure because that was the relationship I was having with the music. And then you get into it, and you just, you know, you realize there’s just so much darkness and corruption and personality defect in the music industry, in the world, but in the music industry.
Especially in the arts, entertainment business. And so maybe I just didn’t expect for that that pool of innocence and sweetness and delight to be polluted, to be to be so challenged the more I connected with the industry and the business of things.
