Motherhood Interview

[Transcript edited for clarity]

Absent Sounds: Alright, so we have motherhood here with us today. I'm gonna ask you a couple questions about the most recent album and just how they've been doing in general. To start off my first question, because I know when people are on tour, they usually have a lot of time to listen to stuff, podcast, music. So I just wanna know what you guys have been listening to or what's been in your ears recently.

Brydon: What did we listen to today?

Penny: You should answer 'cause you were playing some weird stuff in the morning. What were you playing?

Adam: I was playing, an organ record by a guy named Walter Wanderly. It was mostly like sambas and stuff. It's like Brazilian music. It was pretty fun. There were a couple of like tunes that I recognized. But yeah, it was fun. It's a nice. It's nice to start the morning with something kind of chill but energetic.

Absent Sounds: I think it's an interesting genre to start off with,

Adam: but yeah, maybe take it easy on the screaming and all that stuff.

Brydon: We did move on to Death Grips. Yeah, we did listen to Death Grips on one point and we checked out, we were listening to Gus Engelhorn new album was playing tonight. Very good. Very good album. Great new album.

Penny: Great new album. We love it. Yeah we, we didn't listen to any podcasts today. Sometimes we do, we don't really do like true crime. We're more like comedy or Jake and Amir. Stuff where we learn a lot. We wanna be smart.

Brydon: I don't love to learn, but if the podcast is on, I'll listen.

Penny: He's forced to learn.

Absent Sounds: I wanna go back to the tart of your musical journey. I know some people will start off with classical training. Some people just, you know, think of a guitar one day. So where did that kind of start off for each of you?

Brydon: I’m Brydon and I play guitar and I sing. My dad and his side of the family were always pretty musical, so guitars were just around. And then I played drums as a kid. I started out playing live in punk band. And then, I went to classical guitar school for six months, but I was really bad at it. And so I came home 'cause the band was at home and so I basically just learned in the band. I wasn't really very good until recently.

Penny: Yeah, I learned how to play in the band. I took like classical piano as a kid. So I was like classically trained in that, but it uh, it hasn't really come super in handy.

Brydon: You were always the most musically knowledgeable,

Penny: Yeah, I guess I have the most like, theory, theoretical knowledge of music, I was playing in like church bands growing up and I had a brief stint in a metal band in high school that didn't go too far. Motherhood was my first actual band. I joined when I was. 18, and we used to be five and then our, bass player quit. And I was like, I could probably figure that out. So then I started playing bass and I did figure it out. I think.

Adam: You figured it out. I'm Adam. I play drums and I sing occasionally on our records and in our live shows. I started playing music, just as a child, like piano lessons and stuff. Up until I was taking lessons with my grandmother and she realized that I wasn't taking in any theory, I was just like replicating what she was playing. She noticed that I wasn't making any progress between lessons. I would just learn based on what she was playing. I was basically just learning by ear, and so she was like, maybe you should do something else. So if you're like really not interested, in a very like kind, sweet way. And then my parents bought me a drum kit and I just sucked at that forever. And some might say I still suck. Anyway, we say that Brydon and I started playing together on occasion, in high school and then it just kind of went from there. When we moved to Fredericton, we met Penny and Yeah. So that's how it goes.

Absent Sounds: Awesome. If you had to describe the album in one word, what would it be for you?

Penny: sci-fi

Brydon: You say sci-fi? I was gonna say rowdy.

Absent Sounds: Rowdy feels like cowboy. Is that a little bit of that?

Brydon: There's some of that. Sci-fi Cowboy.

Adam: West World.

Absent Sounds: Is that your favorite sci-fi series?

Adam: I don't know. I guess maybe maybe it's up there. Sci-fi can be so corny, so I like when it like mixes other themes, other genres. And this album definitely does that. it has some western vibes to it. Some like kind of surf stuff. On occasion for sure. Some, NIE Marconi. Yeah. Or Anyo Marconi. Nio Marconi. I always butcher's name. Yeah. Stuff like that. And definitely a lot of bleeps and blos and sci-fi sounds too yeah.

Absent Sounds: Yeah. The music video for Grow - I can't really remember exactly the questions you guys were asking, but I was like, this is very “Thanks for All the Fish”

Adam: Hitch Hickers Guide to the Galaxy.

Absent Sounds: Exactly.

Brydon: All those questions were written by the guy that made that music video

Absent Sounds: Really? I thought they were perfect. They were very fitting for this song.

Adam: He's great guy.

Absent Sounds: Shout him out.

Adam: To make the most of that super weird thing that happened.

Penny: Did you get to see the solar eclipse? Was it a total,

Absent Sounds: I was supposed to go to Windsor to see the total eclipse. And I didn't, 'cause I missed my ride. So I was stuck in Toronto and I just we all went on the street and just looked up and that was it. It was cloudy

Penny: It was weird. The videographer Jordan wanted to capture like our natural reactions when it happened. So we were standing in a line just staring at the sky for a really long time, waiting for the thing to actually happen. And then in the video, it's like the music saws and you just hear us all go oh, holy sh-t!

Brydon: It was way more impressive than I thought it was gonna be. Yeah. And it was nice to be made to look at it like. The whole 10 mins. I don't know if I would've watched the whole time otherwise.

Penny: Yeah. And like a bunch of baths flew out of a tree and the animals started making sounds. We were in downtown Fredericton, all by ourselves in this park. It was very weird. Very magical.

Absent Sounds: So assuming that there was like a shift in the axis of the world, and we're all on a different trajectory of life right now, what do you guys see on this path going forward?

Penny: I was actually thinking about this the other day 'cause I was like, if we live in a multiverse where everything is possible, how did I get stuck living in the one where Trump is president? And then other universes, they probably laugh about that being the thing that could happen to someone. That's the one that I'm living in.

Brydon: Someone's gotta live in it.

Penny: And it's all of us, unfortunately.

Brydon: Is this kind of like, what we’re hoping for? What would we want? Ah, it would be a van thing we can rely on. You know, I think in an alternate reality we'd be driving like one of those nice, sprinter Mercedes square van.

Penny: you switched over to that reality.

Brydon: Not the Grand Caravan.

Penny: Not the Grand Caravan era.

Absent Sounds: For those who don't know, I guess earlier before this, they were on their road and the van broke down.

Brydon: If people know anything about us, they probably know that we have bad vans all the time.

Adam: Yeah. We keep getting dodge caravans, which is after your third one.

Absent Sounds: Someone I had knew who had a Dodge Caravan said the same thing,

Penny: vans are taking years off our life. Not by putting us in the ditch, but just like the stress level of these vans.

Brydon: When we made the hat, we were actually raising money for a van, but then we realized it's just always true. We're never gonna have a van that's gonna last forever.

Absent Sounds: This is a good segue into Flood.

Brydon: Flood two is just a little autobiographical, I used to walk across this bridge every day 'cause I was living on one side of it and working on the other. Just like in the story, it's just a snapshot of the character. And then the second part is the character seeing the cloud for the first time, which ends up being like the thing that changes the character's whole life.

Absent Sounds: The first question I wanted to ask you guys about was the title of the album.

Brydon: The title of the album came from this super old poem that got found with a bunch of gnostic texts, in a case, and I was watching I dunno, I just thought it was interesting and I thought the title of it was one of the cooler title that I ever heard,

Penny: which is what? It's not exactly under Perfect Mind. It's some something else too, right?

Brydon: No, it's Thunder Perfect Mind. The cover of it was painted by a guy called Kyle Stewart in Hamilton.

Penny: Yeah, we love Hamilton. Yeah. it was random, he is like a friend of a friend, that motherhood had just been following him online for quite a while and I don't know, all of our music is very playful and fun. So we wanted, and especially this album is like to us very like exuberant and has a energy. So just wanted something that. I basically had a phone call with him and described the album concepts and some of the characters and blah, blah, blah. then he just made this huge, mind map drawing of everything that he had envisioned and sent that to us and we grabbed things that we liked from it. And then he so we went back and forth a couple times and then, yeah, that finished colors are like. Trying to be a little bit retro, but still a little more. Anyway, he's good.

Brydon: The three figures are just like us and we're just like the narrators of the story, just watching things happen and reporting,

Absent Sounds: You guys are the prophets of this story. I was gonna say just like the fact that you talked about the exuberant nature of the album kind of connects to the next track, which the first track, flood two. And it feels so overwhelming in a sense where it's like the idea of a flood is overflowing, being underwater, but just this big force of nature that I think also fits into that picture. So if you would like to tell us a little bit more about that.

Penny: Yeah. It's called Flood two, I guess for a couple reasons, but the most obvious reasons for us is we have a song on our last album called Flood. And the main that runs through flood two is like almost, it's like a twisted version of that riff. And the original demo that bride had sent us, followed the format of the original song Flood pretty faithfully. And then we messed with it from there, but we see it as like sonically a sequel to that song.

Brydon: And then the second verse of that song, it's the cloud appearing for the first time and up the.

Absent Sounds: So this is getting into the more of the sci-fi version of the, not sci-fi version, the scope of what the album touches on.

Brydon: Yes.

Absent Sounds: That also goes next into the next track, which is Bok Globule which is such a cool title with the Deep Space reference, how does that tie into the album as well?

Brydon: Yeah I like that one because it has some of the most spacey stuff and some like country stuff or like living in the country style stuff. the Bok thing came because Adam sent me a Wikipedia article about it.

Adam: They're like an interesting concept because you can't see anything just like in space. And so it, it looks like a void in space. It looks like one of the regions where there's nothing, but it's, in actuality it's like a, it's a type of nebula. It's like a dense region filled with, all sorts of material. And it's actually described as like a nursery. So it's where all the substances, like coal things that appear like void. So it's the opposite of what it appears to be.

Penny: Black holes make love and make a stack that'll tell you when you're okay.

Adam: Yeah. The weird title named after the astronomer who describes it.

Absent Sounds: That's cool. When I heard Bok Globule, I was thinking of several things. Bok remind me of a Turkey. And when I heard you talk about it seems like there's nothing there. I was like, wow, that sounds like my brain. Which is my segue into Wandering because…we're all wandering in life. Is that something that you feel like you are doing now at the moment? You're a wanderer. Tell me about the aimless searching that could be part of the song as well.

Penny: Yeah, the song in the story, like the whole album is a story and this part in the story is still pretty early on Like the character has been fucked back to the dawn of time and is just living through all of eternity within this cloud. And so wandering is like just walking in a circle, finding the parameters, which the characters stuck in, and just like feeling maybe a little bit betrayed, but also just aimless. And, yeah, pretty relevant as like millennials living through what we're living through right now. I feel we're just wandering around. We're on tour right now too, so we're like, especially just wandering around towns we don't know. Doing nothing

Absent Sounds: Have you had the chance to wander around today?

Brydon: We wandered in the van onto the next town, and then wandered over to a tattoo shop earlier.

Penny: We wandered to an Italian sandwich plate. we wandered to the AQ a couple different times and then we wandered over to the hotel.

Absent Sounds: And you know what they say, the nothingness. That's where things grow, which is perfect for the next track- Grow high/Grow higher.

Brydon: That one's maybe the happiest one, like storywise because it's like in praise of the cloud. Like a hymnal, right? Yeah. The character has accepted their situation, and they're like, all right, if the cloud's growing, then grow high.

Adam: Just being in awe, something that's powerful and all consuming.

Brydon: Yeah. And then grow higher, almost the opposite where it's grow higher chronologically would be much later than grow high.

Penny: Good point. But you had said at one point, you had mentioned that if you were stuck within a cloud for billions of years and you were forced to just be there and witness it, like you would feel all sorts of different emotions about the cloud, I feel like, have different relationships to the cloud.

Brydon: A few hundred years into being stuck in the cloud and then Grow High would be later than that. But then by the time they're getting outta the cloud, it's been like millions of years.

Adam: A timeline for just on the side of the album jacket. On the B side

Penny: The demo was called Tropical Spider Dog, which is ridiculous. And it's got a bean to it for something. The main riff was written probably 10 years ago.

Absent Sounds: That's awesome. In a way that also makes me think of the different aspects of the praise towards a cult. I was like, oh yeah that definitely seems like not only cults, but more religious stuff too. But that is another conversation that we probably don't have enough time to get into today. When you're in a cult, sometimes you feel like you're sinking or swimming. Do you sink or swim?

Absent Sounds: You prefer swimming versus sinking.

Brydon: Yeah.

Penny: Yeah, for sure.

Brydon: I like to be underwater, but I can't breathe down there.

Penny: Hippos be under the water for six minutes at a time, but they can't breath. But they live 90% of their life underwater.

Absent Sounds: Same thing about lice. Maybe not that they don't breathe , but they can survive underwater for a really long time, which is cool.

Brydon: Oh, really?

Absent Sounds: Hate that.

Brydon: They're tough.

Absent Sounds: I don't remember who said this yesterday, mentioned that it was probably the track that they felt the most connected to, so I will give the floor off to them to say it.

Adam: what did I say last? What did I say last time? The lyric of “not inside, not outside.” I mean that being caught in a limbo. Just not really understanding where you are, but knowing it's not where you wanna be. Yeah, and just being, feeling like you're not really a part of something, but longing to be. I don't know. It's like that song to me has yeah. All sorts of, intersecting themes that I find interesting. It moves in a way that not a lot of our other songs do.

Penny: How did that song get written? It was started with your drum beat, or what did it start with? I wrote that bass.

Adam: That one came together in a different way,

Penny: We really didn't know what it was gonna be until we were recording it, yeah, like two days before we went to the studio, I was like, so we're not gonna get this on an album because it's not done at all. And you guys were like, we can figure it out.

Absent Sounds: And it made it here today, which is cool. I'm glad it made it into the final state that it is and that it exists now.

Penny: Yeah. It was really like, I really didn't think it was gonna make it. We usually go to the studio, we have most songs that have a form that. And a lot of it never makes it past the studio doors. But yeah, that one made it somehow

Absent Sounds: Amen to that. Which also brings us to propeller. Not only you guys have been talking about, the inevitability of a lot of things that are being driven towards an unstoppable force of nature, whether it's the cloud or whether it's religion or something than ourselves in this or theme of movement and change. But in your words, tell me about Propeller.

Brydon: Propeller is more general, about seeing all this stuff happening. Like it's about the feeling of being sucked back to the beginning of time in reverse.

Penny: To me, the end part, propeller out. I've always just connected that segment with the actual time when the character gets sucked up. Like I feel like that playing when they get sucked up into the cloud because it's like scary and intense and overwhelming.

Brydon: Yeah. Strong force. Strong force in that scenario is the cloud. Having a strong force outside of yourself propelling you, I find to be a helpful idea.

Absent Sounds: So answers for meaning?

Brydon: Yeah, like just, a strong force could be so many things. Even a band could be a strong force in the lives of the members of band to be very literal with our lives. There are just some, some kind of goal or some reason you think you're doing stuff.

Penny: That's prop everyone forward, whether they can acknowledge it or not. We're all headed towards somewhere.

Absent Sounds: Yeah.

Penny: That song started with a drum beat that Adam had. We were hanging out in Guelph for a couple days and we, got to use our friend's studio. The band was called Baby Labor. They let us use their studio for a couple days and we finally had time working our day jobs or like driving to just write and hang out. And so Adam had a drum beat and I had been working on a baseline and we spent a couple hours just trying to smash them together and it took a.

Adam: I think you were working on lyrics, right? Brydon? At the time? Yeah. Trying to finish lyrics.

Penny: You were writing it, but I guess as far as like the feeling of that section, I wanted it just to feel like there was the bass or the low end was like a worm that was just squirming around. You don't necessarily hear the individual notes, you just feel silly.

Adam: That's the vibe that we were trying to capture. It was hard to sort out, but got there. Yeah. I almost regret how busy that drum is because it's like it's a slow all overall. It has to interlock so perfectly with the base notes that Penny's playing on the keys. But overall I'm glad. I like the way it sounds. I like the way it sounds on the record. It's just one of those songs, some for each of us, like different songs are like a challenge.

Absent Sounds: You did great yesterday. Could you tell us a little bit about Kyle Hangs at Noon, which I love as a title?

Brydon: Yeah. That one came originally as a different song that we also recorded called Kyle Hangs 10. So Kyle is our manager and he surfs in Nova Scotia, which is wild to do. So we wrote this surf song like Fast surf song, and we were like, we'll call it Kyle Hangs 10, because he's the only person we know.

Penny: So the intention was that by the time the song came out, he had to know how to hang 10

Absent Sounds: Did that happen yet?

Penny: I don't think, the song isn't out yet.

Brydon: We were trying to figure that song out and one of our ideas was just to slow it down

Penny: I think it was Kyle's idea actually.

Brydon: Then when we floated down, it was like a spaghetti western song. So then we changed the title to Kyle Hangs at noon, which is more of like a Western type of deal. And then we just really liked it. I think, a nice, like, all right, the album's done. Here's a little, I don't know, it's a lot more like soothing and nice than the rest of it. It's like after the movie's done, you get like whatever, this little theme song moment where you get to like chill for a second, take in everything that just happened to you. To me, movie credit.

Absent Sounds: After the existential crisis to despair, the isolation, the propelling nature of everything else. It's a nice little way to end.

Penny: Then you just get to think about someone hanging up there and leave the theater.

Brydon: You don't have to think about that.

Penny: We love Kyle. We don't want him to hang.

Brydon: Yeah.

Penny: It just had to fit the vibe,

Brydon: No shade.

Absent Sounds: Yeah. With that, we will hang…up the phone. I'm just kidding. But, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. I can't even describe like, how much, this means a lot to me, so thank you.