When indie-rock band Mother Mother started in British Columbia, no one — especially lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist Ryan Guldemond – could have imagine where they’d be 20 years later. Everyone in the Guldemond was shocked when Ryan recruited his older sister Molly, who had no musical aspirations or experience, for the group, and early on in Mother Mother’s career, Ryan and his bandmate Jasmin Parkin, who were also a couple, broke up but kept making music together. Ryan also dealt with substance abuse issues that strained his relationships with all of his bandmates, but they eventually soldiered on and became closer than ever. Still, success outside of their native Canada remained elusive, and after 15 years as a band, they began to wonder if it was time to get realistic and focus on other career goals.

And then, exactly five years ago, in August 2020, Ryan downloaded TikTok. And the rest was history. Mother Mother’s 2008 single “Hayloft” suddenly became a viral sensation, going platinum in the U.S., and other TikTok hits followed. Mother Mother have since racked up more than 8.6 billion streams globally across their catalog.

Now Mother Mother have released their 10th album, Nostalgia, which is in many ways a return to their roots not just sonically but in spirit. As Ryan takes stock of their career, he pauses to chat with me and open up about interpersonal bandmate relations, how he deals with his shyness as an onstage performer, why Mother Mother’s music appeals to Gen Z fans on TikTok, and what the next 20 years might hold.

LYNDSANITY: Congratulations on, incredibly, 20 years of Mother Mother being a band!

RYAN GULDEMOND: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it’s crazy. And also, it’s life. Time passes. You do stuff. I guess it’s not crazy. I guess it’s what happens.

Nostalgia, your 10th album, coincides with this 20th anniversary, so my very obvious first question is about the title — why you would call this album Nostalgia, at a time when perhaps you’re feeling nostalgic or your fans are feeling nostalgic.

It all aligned itself. It was all very neat and tidy. Numeralogically, it all sort of worked. But we don’t really premeditate stuff. … I just sat down and wrote a song called “Nostalgia” that just sort of spilled out and I was like, “Oh, this is a great title track.” It’s that innocent. I think the less premeditation that happens in art, the better it is.

Well, premeditated or not, would you say this album is a return to the band’s roots?

Yeah, definitely. We were looking back and asking ourselves why that early music worked so well, and that did have to do with spaciousness in the production. It did have to do with the spirit of how those songs were written — very innocently, very naively. When you don’t know about the rules, you break them, and that can have great results in the creative space. So yeah, those ideas were being hearkened back to, certainly.

You started Mother Mother when you were young, and it included someone you dated at one time and well as your sister. There are unique dynamics within the band. What are your reflections about how this little family you have, literally and figuratively, has grown and evolved together? You guys grew up together in some ways.

Yeah, we grew up as adults together, which is a sloppy affair. Going through your twenties can be really sloppy. For me it was. And I think who I am innately, which is quite shy and insecure, being in a band and being the frontperson in a band and dealing with all of that led to tricky interpersonal dynamics. I look back and go, “Wow, it’s a miracle we survived the sloppiness of becoming adult people,” in the context of a band with relationships like a sister and an ex. But yeah, I’m really proud of us for not quitting.

There are some bands that have had ex-couples in the lineup that keep going and have success, like the White Stripes, X, No Doubt, and Eurythmics. But then there are others like ABBA or Sonic Youth where when the romance ended, so did the band. So, how did you manage to navigate that? I know it was a long time ago, but it must’ve been tricky at the time.

Yeah, no one’s a total trainwreck, so there’s decent humanity in the band. So, I think it was the type of people that could evolve. That was certainly a part of it. And then also there was always this audience — there was always something a bit bigger than ourselves at play, which was the relationship that other people had with this music we were making. And that relationship was healthy. That was for the greater good. It felt like we continued to nurture and facilitate the relationship with music and strangers, and that was worth more than our comfort at that time, going through some of these tricky spots.

Were there times in the presumably distant past when you did think the band was going to break up, or you considered breaking up?

Not truly. But maybe, yeah, there were some very shaky moments. I think for myself, I always knew that I was going to write songs and find a way for those to be shared, and Mother Mother felt like the best vehicle for that. And it was devastating to think of the vehicle changing. But if it did, I would’ve been like, “I’ll be OK. Foundationally speaking, I’ll still be writing songs and getting them out there some way.” I’m very happy that it continues to be this particular arrangement.

You also have a sibling in the band, your sister Molly. I guess the cliché of siblings not getting along in bands is usually brothers — like Oasis, the Kinks, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Black Crowes — but I imagine there must have been some issues that you and Molly had to deal with. I don’t know what the age difference is between you…

Three years. She’s three years older than me, and yeah, we didn’t get along so much.

You mean when you were growing up?

No, in the band. And growing up, yeah. We were a bit at odds, and that has definitely been the hardest aspect of Mother Mother — mine and Molly’s relationship. … Why was that the case? I don’t know. Childhood trauma manifesting itself in a tricky situation such as being in a band, probably. I think at the root of all of our triggers, it’s early formative stuff. And I kind of had my own little moment with getting quite lost, getting into substance [abuse] and addiction and going off the rails a bit. And that was very challenging for Molly; it strained our relationship deeply. But at the bottom of it, there’s a lot of love. And again, we’re good people at our core, so no one is corrupt. Even when you really go off the deep end or go the wrong way in life, if you’re a good person at your core, you can kind of figure it out. You can retain the relationship. And so, that was the case.

What made you and your sister start a band in the first place? Were you like the Partridge Family back in the day?

No, it was actually the opposite. It was very awkward for our family to absorb this information that we were going to start a band together. It was like, “You and Molly? That’s weird!” It was almost embarrassing that we were starting a band together, because it was so unlikely.

Why were your relatives so surprised?

Because we weren’t the Partridge Family growing up. Molly was going to graphic design school. I was going to jazz school. Molly wasn’t a singer, had no aspirations to be a musician, and I started writing songs. I was living with Molly, and Molly has the coolest speaking voice in the world, and I knew that that would translate if she could stay on tune. I knew that she would be a killer harmony singer, that these songs that I was writing would sound better if Molly sang on them. It was a weird vision. And when I brought it to Molly, I’m like, “Would you sing on these songs?” She was like, “That’s weird.” I said, “I just have a feeling it would work out, just by the way you sound when you speak.” And so, we gave it a shot, and I was right. There was a chemistry there that really worked. And so, we tried an open mic, and things happened so quickly at the beginning there wasn’t a chance for us to assess or put the brakes on. She had to [be in the band] because there was an opportunity that was suggesting this thing had potential. So, she was in the position where she had to carry on without even giving herself the opportunity to really stop and go, “Do I want to be in a band? I never thought I would be in a band.”

That’s crazy! I assume you had musical aspirations for my young age, but she did not?

No. I mean, she took piano. We all took piano. She’s music-lover, a singing-in-the-shower kind of person. But yeah, certainly not. Molly is devastatingly shy, and so when we used to play our first gigs, she would turn around and not face the audience. It was hell for her to perform. … Molly has really gotten over that. She’s just a triumph onstage now.

You just described yourself as shy as well, so it’s interesting that both of you ended up in a profession that involves doing one of the least shy things imaginable — going onstage.

Well, going onstage is an unfortunate byproduct of creating, which is a shy act —like, shutting out the world, going deep within and making art, is very introverted, and it’s very becoming of a shy person to do that. And then the funny byproduct is that you share it and people like it, and then they want to experience it in the performance setting. I think that there’s a really funny irony to that.

Eventually Molly flourished onstage. What about you?

I definitely have no problem doing it now. I’ve gotten quite good at doing the thing in the context of Mother Mother onstage. I can’t say I feel 100 percent at home in the skin of that grand performance. I think sitting down with a guitar and singing more quietly without all the bombast is probably more who my soul is. So yeah, it is a bit of an effort to effort put on the uniform and do that job. … It doesn’t feel like my true self. Singing loud and being athletic onstage is not where I am most myself. But in life, we do expand. We don’t have to be exactly our authentic selves all the time. It’s part of being a person —you try different stuff on. And so, it’s OK. At least that’s what I tell myself. It’s OK that I’m in a rock band, that I’m fronting a rock band, even though I probably would be more comfortable whispering into a mic at a folk open-mic setting.

So, we’ve covered how Molly unexpectedly came to be in the band. I don’t know if Jasmin joining was also kind of an accident…

It’s all an accident!

A happy accident!

Definitely! Jasmin and I started dating the year Mother Mother started being a band, right at the beginning. I went to this college to study jazz, and then the year after I graduated, Jasmin joined that college. So, I was alumni, she was a new student there, and I had to go there one day to help do their little performance. I was backing a friend up. And that is when Jasmin and I first laid eyes on each other. And then sometime after that, we connected. For the first two years of our relationship, she was not in the band, and then the other woman who was in the band left, so we needed a new female singer. I asked Jasmin if she would join, and she did. And then two years after that, we broke up.

Did you have a band meeting and sit down and say, like, “Mom and Dad are breaking up, but the family still staying together,” that kind of thing?

I guess Jasmin and I would’ve talked about it. We didn’t have a band meeting! It felt sort of assumed. I think Jasmin said, “Yeah, I’m not quitting the band. There’s no way I’m doing that.” And then for three years it was hard. And then after that, it was great.

Do your respective partners or people you date understand this dynamic, or has it ever been an issue that you’re in a band together?

No, that’s great. It’s always been good. We’re the bestest of friends. Jasmin is just a confidant, a total angel in my life. I can’t imagine life without Jasmin. We’re so close and it’s so platonic — it’s so familial, almost. It’s hard to even imagine that it began as a romance really at this point.

We were talking about developments in Mother Mother’s 20-year history being “accidents,” or not being planned. A few years ago, another unexpected thing happened, when your music got this whole new life and gained this whole audience via TikTok. And I think around that time when that happened, the band had not been in a great place.

Yeah, we were 15 years deep, and it didn’t appear that things were growing exponentially. We were getting older and our career was plateauing a little bit. And so, the conversation was not to break up, but just like, “OK, maybe the dream is not over, but maybe it’s time to loosen the grip on the dream and not run at this thing full steam and shutting everything else out” — which is kind of what you have to do when you’re trying to make it. So, it’s like maybe we want to diversify, maybe people want to think about what else they can do in life career-wise as we move into middle-age. That was the conversation. And then the next week, it was like TikTok is a thing and we’re going viral. Virality is a thing; I didn’t even understand virality at that point. And it’s a pandemic. So, the whole thing was super-weird and shocking and surreal, to say the least.

Do you have any theories as to why your music connected with people on TikTok, especially during a pandemic?

It was August of 2020. I remember I was in the studio, working on our album unwitting to all this stuff, and getting a call: “You gotta go on TikTok!” It’s like, “What’s TikTok?” And the people in the studio are like, “Don’t download that app, it’s like a Chinese spyware app!” And I’m like, “Fuck it, I gotta do it. I gotta see what’s going on.” But to answer your question, that early music is very unconventional. It’s very quirky. It is catchy. It’s weird. It’s clever. It speaks to alienation, not fitting in, anti-establishment stuff and being highly creative. And it appealed to this community of Gen-Z subculture: Goth, LGBTQ, people, cosplay people, the misfits. … Just looking at that community, which was a community we weren’t very aware of until the music found them or they found the music, it made sense. The marriage made sense when you assessed the traits of the music and the traits of the people.

I’ve read theories that your music resonated with LGBTQ+ and non-binary or gender-nonconforming fans because your voice is a bit androgynous. Do you agree with that?

Yeah, I do agree with that. Especially the early music. I wasn’t a singer and I was trapped in my throat. It was a very restrained voice and it was very androgynous, and I wasn’t accessing the guttural place that I can access now. I was very insecure about being a naked voice in this music, so I wanted all this harmony to cover me up and obscure me. And so, it created this alien, androgynous, genderless sound. I totally agree with that. I listened back to the early Mother Mother and vocally, it’s so strange. Extraterrestrial. So yeah, it makes sense.

When you were coming up on this anniversary and making Nostalgia, I mentioned that in some ways it could be considered a return to your early days. Were you trying, either consciously or subconsciously, to recapture that vibe of those early records that have found a new audience via TikTok?

I think I was just trying to create from the instinct of emotion, and from not thinking, which is how early music is often born. When you’re young and you discover the craft, it’s like you don’t know about the rules. You don’t care. You’re too seduced by this new, exciting thing. The energy of that produces people’s best work quite often. It’s so different from practical skills. People, if they’re building tables in 20 years, they’re going to undeniably build a better table than 20 years prior. You get better. Whereas with the arts, you don’t get better. You more often get worse, because it’s about spirit and it’s about your energy. That’s what makes good work. And as we get to be adults, our spirit and our energy flattens and we have to work harder to summon the childlike instinct, to be awestruck, to be filled with wonder and to create and express from that place. And so, in making Nostalgia, it was more realizing that and living in a way that fostered that energy, so that when it was time to pick up a guitar, to go into the studio, that’s where we were at. We were like, “OK, we’re going to make decisions based on how our heart feels and our goosebumps and the soul stirring” — no left brain, like “Is this going to appeal, is this the right or wrong thing to do?”

In 2020, you were wondering if should still keep running towards this dream. Before this Mother Mother renaissance, did you get into that mindset of trying to write a hit, trying to write a record that would appeal to the masses or get on the radio?

Well, gosh, it was so different 10 years ago, for us being a Canadian band that couldn’t get traction anywhere else in the world forever. For the first 15 years of our career, we could only really find meaningful success in Canada. And that was a byproduct of getting on radio. That’s what ruled the roost. … You do start thinking about writing so that it fits the radio format a little bit more. And yeah, we were just trying to survive. I don’t think we ever sacrificed the integrity of the music so much that we lost ourselves, but you can listen back and I think you can hear a certain degradation or a certain muting of that free spirit in the music, during a time where we were too concerned with writing for external acceptance.

I know a lot of things about Mother Mother were not premeditated and you had no idea how things were going to go, but was “breaking America” — or breaking anywhere, breaking Europe or whatever, world domination — ever the dream?

I think we just believed in the music and believed in the feeling that making the music created, so much that we just wanted to proliferate that feeling. It’s simple. It’s innocent. You just want more people to receive the medicine of whatever that is. It’s less about, “We want to be big!” We just want to be part of that alchemy, part of that exchange. The more the merrier. Like, there’s this venue in Vancouver called the Commodore that holds about 1,100 people, and it’s a great vibe. It’s enough people to feel like something big is happening, but it’s intimate. And graduating to play the Commodore in Vancouver is a big deal as a band. I remember the first time we played the Commodore, it was a big deal, and I just thought to myself, “Man, success to me would be playing ‘Commodores’ all around the world. That would be making it.” I remember thinking that to myself. And now we do that, and maybe probably a little bit more. It’s funny because man, there’s always room to grow. That’s the curse of reaching a place. There’s always a higher place to go.

Where would you like to go next?

It’d be so cool to do arenas, just to have more people taking part in that exchange. We played our first arena tour in Canada, and it was cool to occupy that much space and to elevate the lightshow and to put on that kind of a show. It’s a little more theatrical. And so, then you get a taste of that and you’re like, “Oh, man, it’d be cool to do that everywhere!” And then the bar changes.

It’s an interesting dichotomy that playing live is something you still struggle with, and yet you also want to play arenas. It seems like you guys are just getting started. Do you feel that way?

So, it was five years ago almost to the day that I downloaded TikTok, and that’s half a decade now. Which is crazy, that the pandemic was half a decade ago. So, I feel like we’re at the end of that era. I don’t know what the future holds. Nostalgia just feels like the punctuation of this crazy wave that we’ve been riding, and now it’s time to take a little break from touring and really think hard about what kind of next album we want to make and how we want that chapter to look and how we want to do things. Right now it feels like a pause, to be honest.

Well, I hope it’s not too long a pause, but I look forward to the next era, whatever that holds for you. Congratulations on everything, and thank you for such a thoughtful interview.

This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.