So the road we took to get to posting this literally right the hell now is long.
You see, I had another Mother Mother song slated to post right now. We will call back to this post in that post, which is fully written and probably won't see the light of day until 2026.
As I researched that post - and this band, by the way, is from British Columbia - and realized I had so much for this March I could not fit them in until 2025 at least, I started exploring some of their other catalog.
And I found this absolute gem.
"Hayloft" was one of Mother Mother's first singles, originally from their 2009 album O My Heart. Written by lead vocalist Ryan Guldemond, he wrote the very "angular" melody first. He then wrote lyrics to match them - and started with the lyric "my daddy's got a gun"..... and it takes 40 seconds to get there. The song, about young lovers hiding in a hayloft, soon followed - and the song ends with the young lovers being caught by her daddy in the hayloft - and yes, he's got his gun.
The song ends ambiguously. Which is super frustrating.
The video is very much in the style of Franz Ferdinand or the White Stripes. It's cool as heck.
On its initial release, it was not a big hit song. It was still a fan favorite - and so they performed it live. This performance in 2019 is a great example of that. The energy of the song really comes through.
However, in 2020, TikTok became a thing, and people discovered the song. It made a lot of money. And people wanted to hear it.So they performed it when they could. Here is a 2021 version of the song performed acoustic.
And, this prompted the band to write a followup song, "Hayloft II", but not before renaming their biggest hit "Hayloft I" and making a new video for it.
The new video tells a less ambiguous story.
They followed it in 2022 with "Hayloft II", which is a very different song - very fuzzy, very angry, and very much tells a continuation of the story of "Hayloft" in which revenge is extracted and the hayloft is burnt to ashes.
Now, of course, they perform BOTH songs live - although not exactly back-to-back, putting a third song - 2021's "Girl Alone" in the middle of "Hayloft I" for some reason. Here they are performing "Hayloft I" in Chile in 2023.
Here they are performing "Hayloft II" in Europe/
And, here they are, as performed live, with all three songs in the Rolling Stone studios.
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