When you say you’re an Americana fan, after trying to explain to people that it’s kind-of-like-country-music but not, you then face the immediate judgement from people that the genre and its fans is made up of a bunch of straight men who are intolerant to anyone who doesn’t want to “Make America Great Again”; true lovers of Americana know, however, that while there are always going to be a few rotten apples, largely this is far from true – something which is illustrated beautifully in Brandi Carlile’s ‘The Mother’, an ode to the daughter Evangeline she shares with her wife, Catherine.
“Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind,” the song opens, a simple but meaningful line Carlile was inspired to write after sound engineer Trina Shoemaker imparted the following, impactful piece of wisdom around the time of Evangeline’s birth: “Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind. You’ll never be alone in there again; there’ll never be a day where you don’t wake up wondering what Evangeline needs. Not when she’s 50.”
If that opening line didn’t cue you in, ‘The Mother’ is unflinchingly honest. Written by Carlile with her longtime collaborators Tim and Phil Hanseroth for her 2018 album “By the Way, I Forgive You”, it is a song that presents an unvarnished truth, and that’s what makes it that much more special than countless other odes to the perfect, natural ease of motherhood that already exist. “The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep / She broke a thousand heirlooms I was never meant to keep / She filled my life with color, canceled plans, and trashed my car,” Carlile confesses, although her daughter has also filled her with the revelation of the unimportance of such things: “But none of that was ever who we are.”
On the bridge, Carlile muses that while her friends may still have their “morning paper[s] and their coffee and their time” along with their “evenings with the skeptics and the wine”, she now knows a different kind of joy, since she gets to experience all wonders life has to offer again, “from inside of the ages” through her daughter’s eyes.
The third verse, however, might just be the most touching part of all: “You are not an accident where no one thought it through / The world has stood against us, made us mean to fight for you / And when we chose your name we knew that you’d fight the power too.” Evangeline never has to feel anything other than completely wanted and loved because she knows implicitly that she was no accident, her parents fought hard against societal norms to bring her into the world, and that brings with it a tremendous, unfaltering security and love. “They can keep their treasure and their ties to the machine,” Carlile ultimately concludes. “’Cause I am the mother of Evangeline.”
