MEMBERS: Kristine Leschper (guitar/vocals), Matthew Anderegg (drums), Drew Kirby (guitar), Patrick Morales (bass)
BACKSTORY: A solo hobby turned full-time, full-band project based in the South’s most famous creative town
FROM: Athens, Georgia
YOU MIGHT KNOW THEM FROM: Their single “No Crying in Baseball,” which brought the band attention despite not being on (or sounding anything like) their debut full-length, When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired
NOW: Bringing their redlining live show on the road for most of April and May
Largely thanks to its standing as a college town, Athens, Georgia has been a fertile breeding ground for bands since the end of the ’70s, bursting into full bloom in the early ’80s when R.E.M. started to get known. Along with The B-52s, Michael Stipe and co. are the biggest names to emerge from the home of the University of Georgia, but there’s always been a wealth of musicians who have called Athens home—Neutral Milk Hotel, Drive-By Truckers, of Montreal, Elf Power, Widespread Panic, Pylon, Olivia Tremor Control, Dead Confederate, and the late Vic Chesnutt (to name but a few) all made their bones there. And now, with the release of debut album When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired, four-piece Mothers are slowly but surely making their way up that rather prestigious list. Not that frontwoman Kristine Leschper is paying any attention to the weight of that musical history.
“There’s always a lot of music and visual art going on here,” she explains over the phone. “There’s such a collaborative atmosphere that it’s just like, ‘I can do that!’ This was originally just a way to fill up my time and something I enjoyed doing, so I didn’t feel any external pressure from the history. It was originally just a hobby.”
“One of the things that was empowering for me about that record is that it was [made] during this time of self-discovery… Music was a way for me to say things to people that I’d never been able to say.”
Thanks in part to the attention their song “No Crying in Baseball” garnered from both the music press and the general public, it’s now become a full-time thing. The B-side to album track “It Hurts Until It Doesn’t,” that spiky, snarling, quasi-post-punk track is much more abrasive than those on the record itself, which is imbued with a more delicate and fragile sorrow. Recorded between December 2014 and January 2015, When You Run’s eight songs allowed Leschper to say things she feels she otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. Mothers, which she initially started as a solo project, remains a cathartic outlet for her.
“I’d just started studying art in college,” she says, “and I was feeling very empowered, feeling like I had a voice, and so music became this self-indulgent way for me to express myself. One of the things that was empowering for me about that record is that it was [made] during this time of self-discovery. I was in my very early twenties, and music was a way for me to say things to people that I’d never been able to say, to retaliate from my injuries and call out people who had done me wrong when I hadn’t really had the guts to confront them about it.”
Having made When You Run on their own dime, the band sat on the record until they were able to release it on vinyl, exactly the way they wanted to. And while Leschper may have moved on from the situations that inspired the songs, they remain powerful and poignant snapshots of where she once was.
“It’s interesting to sit so long on something, because you do grow apart from it. It starts to feel sort of distant and you feel disconnected from it,” she says. “But even though I feel like I’ve moved past the record musically, it’s still an incredibly important part of my past and it’s incredibly validating to have it out in the world.” FL
