Mother Feather
ON ART AND HOME CONFINEMENT: TALKING WITH ANN COURTNEY
by Joey Cutler
Since Mother Feather released their self-titled debut full-length via Metal Blade Records back in 2016, they’ve been making noise far outside of their Brooklyn birthplace and proving grounds. Two years later, Mother Feather have returned to the public light with the release of their anticipated second album, Constellation Baby. Not long ago I spoke with band founder and proverbial family matriarch Ann Courtney. She speaks with sincerity and deliberation but what’s more is that she’s a blast to talk to, so it’s always a good time speaking with her.
During the summer of 2016, Brooklyn’s Mother Feather was a part of Vans’ Warped Tour–hot afternoons outside during the summer months, reaching temperatures of 90 degrees and better with equal humidity. Their live show is completely demanding–physically, vocally, emotionally. They’d never played so many consecutive shows and never to so many young people in that capacity over and over again, everyday. All in all they exceeded their own personal expectations, so that was a win on its own. She says, “I don’t think people really knew what to expect. I really appreciated being in that position.”
After completing their successful run of Warped Tour shows they began to think about the next record. Ann spent the fall of 2016 writing new material. It was a time of sequestration and isolation that she readily admits imposing upon herself. “I felt a lot of pressure at the time to deliver,” she explains. “But that was mostly me doing it to myself because I wanted our new record to be even better than the first one was. I knew that the expectations were higher all around. So, I put myself under house arrest, I just lived in my self-imposed isolation and began concentrating on writing the album. I would say that to finish a lot of the songs for this album the discipline piece came in hard and I really forced myself to work on this music. It was so painful at times, but it was also so rewarding in the end.”
Ann tends to assign a lot of pressure to herself when it comes to her writing, and 2016 was a nerve-wracking time anyway, to say the least. “Songwriting is just an emotional thing for me,” she concedes. “There’s a certain amount of magic and alchemy in writing a song, but there’s also a big portion of it that’s just work and doing it. Metal Blade has the pick-up option for the record, meaning that if they didn’t like what they heard, there’d be no new album. So, the stress and pressure she was enduring was with good reason. Ultimately however, Ann says he showed the band full support by letting Mother Feather be Mother Feather. “Brian told us to make the record that we want to make,” she says he told her, which put her at a degree of relative ease. “I know that I can take him at his word.”
Once the songs were ready she says the band met in an intimate set up where they and their producer, Joshua Valleau, hammered some things out for the pre-production phase of the process before everyone converged on the recording studio. By the time spring 2017 came around, Mother Feather was back in the studio recording new music. I could tell that this part of the process really meant something to Ann–the rest of the band making their own contributions and helping with the finishing touches on the new songs. “This was something new to us,” she says. “We only played some of these songs out live after they’d been recorded.” Most, if not all, of the songs from their last album had been seasoned by years of live play.
When Ann talks about working on new songs in the creative process I happened to notice that she’ll often use words like isolation, anxiety, painful, pressure, struggle, discipline, etc.–words I’d expect in a true artist’s lexicon to describe their personal creative journeys. “My music is definitely the most revealing part of me ever,” she explains. But that is in fact a hallmark of a true artist.
As Mother Feather continues their trajectory onward and upward Ann is many things–singer of a party band, a bartender, voice actor–but she’s always the artist. “If somebody wanted to get to know Ann Courtney they would just have to pay attention to the lyrics and listen to the songs. I feel like this record is so such a demonstration of my taste… and such a reveal of what mother feather is and can be. The eclecticism and style of music on this album is just who I am and it’s what I care about.” So really, all you have to do is listen to learn.
Fun Fact: These days Ann is putting her best foot forward to live a vegan lifestyle, but prior to that she could really go for some good chicken, say a basket of wings, for instance. Where she says she likes wings, she means that she likes the wings — gristle, cartilage, marrow, random little bone fragments, etc. Very impressive!
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