ABOUT
ABOUT
"You scared?!" Ann Courtney dares the rapt audience. A guitar amp had just shorted out, cutting the sound. While a tech scrambles to troubleshoot, Courtney keeps her eyes locked on the crowd, scanning the room of nervous faces, commanding the tension. Her eye makeup, migrating to her chin in wet black tributaries, makes her appear like a horror movie siren on a heavy flow day. "You scared?!!” she taunts again with steely confidence, eyes darkening. She lets the discomfort in the room reach a squirming apex and then roars, "YOU FUCKING SHOULD BE!" The crowd goes wild. It's just a typical Friday night for Mother Feather, the band the Village Voice called “as gritty and New York as it gets” and Interview Magazine labeled "a staple of NYC's underground music scene.”
Cortney Armitage
Only a few months later, Courtney’s dare took on a different resonance in the raw, helter-skelter landscape of pandemic-era New York City. With no audience, no band, and no shows, this outspoken champion and torchbearer of NYC’s storied artistic reputation found herself just like many of her cohorts: upended and isolated, wondering how to proceed. "Mother Feather is the muse, the embodiment, and the mission. Nothing made sense without the communion at our shows,” she says of the band's performances, marked by towering riffs, outsized showmanship, an abundance of flying limbs and liquids, and a promise of catharsis for all in attendance. “To have that massive wheel I’d been running on for so long just...stop? For an indefinite amount of time, maybe forever? To have my north star just go dark? It was devastating. And I made things worse by trying to convince myself it wasn’t ‘so bad’.”
Even with notable successes—multiple independent releases, two LPs on renowned Metal Blade Records, a coveted slot on the Warped Tour, performances at stadium rock festivals alongside acts like Metallica and Dillinger Escape Plan, an invitation to record a session at legendary Maida Vale Studios London for BBC1, and multiple songs licensed to Showtime’s TV drama “Shameless” and Syfy’s “Z Nation,” Courtney sees Mother Feather as typical of many hardscrabble NYC bands, capitalizing on the momentum of their regular live shows while juggling bartending gigs and side jobs to make it all work. What sets them apart is the passion and fervor of the fanbase they amassed along the way.
“MF’ers”—the affectionate term for fans of the band—continually blew up the band’s DMs with a question Courtney struggled to answer: When are you performing again? After so much time spent tumbling in the turbulence of the world’s seemingly ever-increasing crises and badly breaking her foot in a freak home accident (cementing an even longer hiatus from the stage), Courtney, began to revisit some of the most urgent reasons why she started the band in the first place. "Mother Feather began as a way to soothe myself, to have a totally awesome place to put my discomfort and rage, and to push through self-doubt. Then somewhere along the journey it became about all these MF’ers as well, exploding into unforeseeable new dimensions of magic and power," she says, her reverence palpable.
"They've believed in me when I haven't believed in myself," she says. “I owe them something.”
Eventually, Courtney realized she had an opportunity within reach, turning to something she could believe in: the strength of her artistic partnership with Grammy-nominated producer J. Valleau, who produced the band's 2018 LP Constellation Baby. "J. Valleau is one of NYC's greatest music producers," Courtney says. "And he is a Believer."
Songs quickly took shape with Valleau at his Brooklyn studio, The Glass Wall. Courtney pushed hard into the sideways reality, with new-world practicalities calling for an inverse approach from previous Mother Feather recordings. She doubled down on recording an album, without deadlines, without the band, or any of the the lodestars that shaped the previous decade’s hustle and pace. Ultimately, it proved exhilarating for the songwriter. Courtney wrote what would become some of her best work on KICK3R, writing songs to the rhythm of her new limped gait, diving deep into her "What now?" anxieties, the racial reckonings lighting up Brooklyn and the country, her father’s cognitive decline, and the radical power of telling your own story—developing her home demos into an ambitious, deeply intimate concept album.
KICK3R’s formidable opener "Believers" finds Courtney in an unmoored, liminal place, only to be grounded by the album's dedication. To all the Believers, she cries over a salvo of careening fuzz guitars at each explosive chorus. The acknowledgment is followed by an aside: Well can you believe it that it's the end of fun? Is fun—a core tenet of the Mother Feather agenda—in jeopardy? You wouldn't think so by the neck-breakers that follow. Still, other looming questions remain. Can Courtney frame this unprecedented experience, give it meaning, and alchemize it into art? Bring it into being / easier said than done, she laments.
Believing comes up a lot on the new Mother Feather album, with three songs sharing variations on the title and multiple lyrical mentions peppered throughout KICK3R's ten tracks. So does a preoccupation with death, often couched in Courtney’s wry humor. Whatcha doing in your downtime? You'll soon-be-in- the-ground-time? (“Downtime”) I'm cool as a cucumber, but one that's burning in hell (“Social Anxiety”). Caustic coastal kiss-off "L.A." picks up where the band's 2020 revenge anthem "You're a Dead Man" left off, this time with a snarling report of some of their music industry experiences. With its seasick call-and- response guitars and pop-rock woohoo yeah! refrain, "It Ain't So Bad, It's Worse” blows the whistle on toxic positivity. Do I have to pretend? Or have I earned the right to catastrophize? Courtney keens.
Valleau's precise, rich production allows the strength of Courtney's voice—artistic and literal—to exist at the forefront of KICK3R. His musical thumbprint is evident on tracks like "Downtime," with its buoyant synth bass and sizzling breakbeats. A wry look at NYC's hustle culture ground to a halt, the song's glistening, near-hyperpop choruses release the listener into Courtney's dissociative fantasy like freed helium balloons. Valleau's grand, Vangelis-esque treatment on album closer "Curtains" leans into the inherent drama of endings and revelations, with Courtney's throaty alto and straight-ahead pop melody reminiscent of a quintessential Pretenders ballad.
Nowhere is Mother Feather’s new perspective more evident than on "Believers Pt. II," KICK3R's most enigmatic cut. With a cyclic melody and long phrased rhyming couplets more typical of an American folk hero than a rock and roll bad bitch, Courtney flits between precise lyrical details and broad tropes, demonstrating how seemingly contradictory truths can exist simultaneously in a meta moment of reflection. Valleau bolsters and soars on the Hammond, with the clicking of the drawbars and warm buzz of the Leslie breathing life into the song as it steadily swells to its eventual, matter-of-fact climax. "That's my Dad's instrument," Courtney says wistfully, remembering the Hammond organ her father played at home when she was a child.
It was eventually time to get the band members back into the recording studio. "Once we'd reached a certain point, it was abundantly clear where their voices were missing," Courtney says of NYC rock mainstays drummer Gunnar Olsen, guitarist Chris Foley, bassist Seth Ondracek, and powerhouse performer and vocalist Elizabeth Carena. Courtney and Valleau continued to build the album with intimate sessions, bringing one player into the studio at a time. They also called in Jamie Krents, a longtime musical comrade of Courtney and Olsen, to play bass on the pulse-pounding "Hot Firework Nights.”
What happens next for Mother Feather? “I’m getting the band back together!” Courtney says, relishing the task of regrouping and building the live show in support of this deeply felt, hard-won new Mother Feather album. “I’ve learned that looking too far down the road can set you up for a lot of heartache. Do I have a 5-year plan? No way! But I'm a lifer. Mother Feather is the ultimate shape shifter, I’m just the mirror.”