Nothing is off limits for Momma

A few days after our conversation, Momma strutted through a cool-as-hell performance on Jimmy Kimmel. Not bad at all for a band who formed in high school over a decade ago and tell me that, “up until now, we’ve pretty much just been a support act.” Entering the big leagues has meant that Weingarten and co-conspirator Etta Friedman – as well as producer and bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks – have had to challenge themselves. At first, this meant scrapping most of the album they’d written before stumbling on the notes for lead single “I Want You (Fever)”. Something clicked, Weingarten explained. “We’d set a new standard for ourselves: our songs can’t just be good. They have to be great.”

Sonically, the change is evident. Momma are shrugging off an identity placed atop them greedily by avid fans and lazy critics, who have tended to pigeon-hole them as a “nineties revival band.” Instead, they turned to contemporary influences such as Alex G, Brennan Wedl, and Narrow Head to cast away the heavy instrumentation, drawing in a newly reflective, personal lamentation.

“With this album we were less concerned with sounding cool, with heavy and rock and roll, and were much more focused on good, clean songwriting.”

As a conduit for this emotional upheaval, Momma had a single focus point for Welcome to My Blue Sky: the summer of 2022, during their first tour. Even through the screen, wide eyes sparkle with dormant joy reignited when they speak about it. The sheer joy. The mess. The emotional chaos of “infidelity, loneliness, heavy drinking, and the start of new romance” finally caught up with the band, and, says Weingarten, they had “no other choice but to write about it.” The need to process and re-live through this project gives the music a vivid, restless sensibility. “I feel like we really captured lightning in a bottle. We’ll never be that carefree ever again,” Friedman muses.

Jam-packed into the album is the fervour of moments dizzily re-lived in the way only the mythic, dream-like, and nostalgic can be. Friedman says that Blue Sky, to them, feels like “when you start to have a crush on somebody.” Like the burning-forever of a little secret pearled in space and time.

The summer of 2022 offered carnival delights to the songwriters. But eventually, consequences came knocking. Crushes fizzled. Secrets unravelled. “It’s weird. Even in the happiness, we sorta messed up our lives. A lot our writing dealt with the fact that we did that. Our lives will never be how they were when they left,” Friedman shares. Take the opening track, “Sincerely”, which waves farewell to their former lives with free-flowing acoustic guitars. From the get-go, the album is displaced, set apart from their discography to date. To explode such myopic mistakes on such a large platform takes guts. But for Momma, true art has to be honest. “Nothing could be off limits, or else we weren’t going to tell the truth.”

It’s startingly refreshing, the lack of inhibition, the lack of excuses. We made mistakes, they told me, plain and simple. It’s a fiercely brave and fervently necessary stance. I raise the word ‘shame’ and ask if they feel it, waiting for grimaces that never come. Rather, Weingarten levels: “there’s two different types of shame. There’s the emotion of shame that maybe we experienced in the summer of ‘22 that we’re gonna write about, and then there’s the shame of reading about it, or admitting it. And I felt like we made a pretty solid point to not feel any shame about writing about it, because nothing could be off limits, or else we weren’t going to tell the truth. And the truth is always the best when it comes to music.”

This is echoed in the track “Rodeo”, written from the perspective of former romantic partners. “We used that as a vessel to look at ourselves and say: ‘we’re not innocent, we’re not perfect.’ This was a really cathartic way for us to kind of dissect ourselves and also honour the people that we hurt.”

It’s one thing to reckon with your own failures and shortcomings, but to share this with the world means the suggestions harden with the weight of outside perspectives. The blurred fountain of memories become stony pebbles, passed around fans and friends. Weingarten and Friedman are torn in the reactions they expect. For Friedman, it’s ignorance: “there’s no way they’re checking that out. I promise, they’d rather do anything else.” Weingarten, on the other hand, seems self-assured that any probable consequences are under control. “I’m not nervous for him to hear it. I get off on writing songs about people and knowing they’ll hear it.” A lavish brush of hyperbole, here, with a giggle: “it’s, like, the best feeling in the world.” This specificity isn’t isolating; they’ve made sure of it. They’re certain that it’s the most relatable of their work to date.

And yet, their life is increasingly pulled into corridors of fame, discussion of tours with household names – a few, though they wouldn’t mention who, that were more tortuous and upsetting than rewarding. “We’ve been treated like princesses before, and we’ve been treated like we just don’t exist at all.” Momma paint a familiar picture of an industry whose demanding nature grows by the day. “The industry pushes so much. If you don’t get things moving, there’s an understanding that you will be lost to the sauce,” Friedman reveals, the cute Americanism painting a cartoonish picture of the throngs of forced creativity.

In the throws of relative hostility, the singer-songwriters rely on each other for sanity. Even in their separate bedrooms, they speak each other’s thoughts before they have time to consider their own.

The industry is hard, sure, but no one is harder on Momma than themselves. Ten years in the same band might do that to you, success markers being the only way of differentiating between a thread that pulls, upends, and cartwheels across and alongside time passing, lives lived. “It would be amazing to break into the mainstream,” Weingarten says with serious resolve, “like Beabadoobee, or Waxahatchee.” The pair are beady eyed, self-professed “career nerds” who seem to measure other successes as a means of evidencing their own, adorned in the garments of comradery, not competition. They want it, and bad.

As our interview winds down and they look towards the future, the duo fizz with anticipation, though that might just be a consequence of the now-empty coffee cups, clanking with the dregs of ice-cubes worn thin. But the band aren’t fooling themselves. It’s a lot, and they know it. “We’re swimming in everything. We haven’t really gone above the water yet,” Friedman laughs, half-afraid, half-enthused. With Welcome to My Blue Sky, Momma put everything on the line. In doing so, they prove that wearing your heart on your sleeve is the only way to aim for the shore.