Track By Tracks: Love Interest - Motherwound (2023)

1. KURSK:

"Kursk" is a story about the government’s complete disregard for life, criticism of military apathy, the savagery of power, and the wounds that give us strength to stand up to these callous monoliths. The Kursk was an advanced atomic-powered Russian submarine that sank in the Barents Sea during a naval exercise in August 2000.

What made the event extraordinary is that the Russian government essentially lost their preeminent submarine after there was some kind of explosion, and then lied about it to the press and to the families of the crew. We still don’t really know what happened, but we do know that there was no sincere rescue attempt, and all 118 crew members died.

Ten days later after the sub went missing Putin held a televised briefing with family members. There was no formality left, just absolute rage and despair. Distraught mothers and widows were howling and demanded to know why they were lied to, and who would be punished for the deaths of their children. During the meeting, Nadezhda Tylik, the mother of Kursk submariner Lt. Sergei Tylik, was injected with a sedative. She immediately collapsed and was carried away. The incident was only shown on foreign news channels. It has been censored from all Russian outlets.

The moment Nadezhda is pleading has been seared into my mind ever since I saw the video. To me, it represented her strength and bravery and at the same time the absolute cruelty and power of the state. The lyrics in "Kursk" are a direct translation of her words that day. I didn’t want to change them because she had already experienced erasure, her story had already been silenced and taken from her. I wanted to preserve, in some way, the force of her appeals.

2. ENDLESS STING:

Most of us are one injury or one accident away from disaster. We live in a culture that claims to value motherhood and the working class but betrays working mothers at every turn. Childcare is unaffordable. Healthcare is unaffordable. Only a lucky few are provided time and space to breastfeed without income loss. This song is about a common experience. When you are doing all you can to meet the demands of the state but it’s never enough and there's never any give. It’s about the ongoing, generational struggle of the working class to organize to improve conditions for one another, and how this is the only way we find relief. It's an urgent call for collective attention.

3. WRETCHED SISTERS:

"Wretched Sisters" is a song about the unimaginably cruel Native American boarding schools which lasted from 1860-1978. During this time, the Catholic Church and federal government forced Native families to give up their children so that they could be assimilated into white America, stripped of their culture, and forced to abandon their languages and customs as a means to destroy the Native population. Many students died. Thousands of families were separated, forever. Thousands of unmarked graves have been discovered across Canada and the United States. This is recent history in the ongoing genocide of Native Americans.

4. MIDWINTER, VIOLENT AIR:

What would it be like if your children were playing outdoors in toxic air? This is where my head was when writing these lyrics. When the land is burning and the air is full of ash, when there’s been a chemical spill or train collision sending poisonous fumes into the air, what do we tell our children? Could you keep them safe indoors? What if your water is full of lead? How do you keep them safe when the environment around us is under attack and how would you comfort them to provide an unburdened childhood? This song is a meditation on this crisis. It's both spirited and despairing.