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Music from the Heart
Vancouver’s Mother Mother steps out of the studio in time to take the stage as a headliner at the LIVE At Squamish festival
by Holly Fraughton
Page 2 of 3
"...We want to be in everyone's face, but we don't want to make too many concessions to do that. We want the people on the other side to make the concessions. We want people to wake up and start liking cool music and not being afraid to veer in different directions."
While the Mother Mother crew does dig many different forms of music, they aren't actually aiming to create stylistic diversity in their own music. Rather, their instrumentation defines the genre of any given track.
"The song that survives by itself without the help of infiltration, I think that's kind of a good sign of whether or not a song is good. If you can just sit down with an acoustic guitar and sing it and it works and creates an energy."
The group's writing process is collaborative in some ways, with Ryan creating the framework of most of their songs - lyrics, melodies and chord progressions - or the "campfire version" of each song.
"It's like you go to build a house and the house has a certain feng shui, but what really brings it to life, I guess, is what you put in it," he reflected. "...So as a band, we decorate."
But as time passes, Ryan sees aspects of the industry starting to creep in.
"At the beginning, you have no real belief that it's going to go anywhere. You have dreams, but they're very much dreams. And that's a beautiful thing because you're free from the constraints of the reality, because you're living in a dreamland, and then all of a sudden your dream starts to take shape and become a reality, and people try and instill rules.
"We understand what it is that we've instigated, which is this relationship with the public - we're not doing this solely for ourselves, we're doing this to be heard and with that comes listening back to some of what the public wants. But also it's like a give and take relationship. As much as you should observe where the current state of music is at and where public consumption is at, you need to try and dictate some of that yourself."
While they've been spending a lot of time on the road lately, even making their way overseas for their first UK tour, Mother Mother has still managed to find the time to get some work done in the studio. They've just finished recording and are almost done mixing. They hope to release a new album early next year.
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