Tag: Natalie Merchant

Natalie Merchant Captures the Ephemera of Love on ‘Keep Your Courage’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: Concert photos by David Iskra.)

From the moment Natalie Merchant gained fame as the lead singer and lyricist for 10,000 Maniacs, it was clear she was no conventional pop star — in fact, during her dozen years with that band and subsequent decades as a solo artist, she has resolutely avoided the entire notion of stardom. Merchant has instead simply followed her muse, whether it has inspired her to create music, step up as a political activist, work with underprivileged children as a Head Start volunteer, or devote herself to raising her daughter, Lucia, now 20. 

Since her multiplatinum solo debut, Tigerlily, came out in 1995, Merchant has released music sparingly; her new album, Keep Your Courage, is her first collection of new material in nine years. Though she has a reputation for writing songs more focused on external issues than her own heart, on this self-produced effort she takes a deep dive into the subject of love, surveying it from multiple angles via thoughtful, engaging lyrics sung in her deftly nuanced, yet strongly sure voice. Weaving rich — yet never overdone — orchestrations around gospel-soul grooves, bits of Bourbon Street, catchy pop and sometimes Celtic-influenced balladry, Merchant crafts a sound imbued with both elegance and earthiness. 

During a long, sometimes quite amusing, dialogue stimulated by her enormous intellectual curiosity and vast range of interests, it becomes clear that “elegant, yet earthy” might describe the woman as well as her art. Surprising tidbits she shared include the fact that she’s named after the late actor Natalie Wood and that she appreciated learning square-dancing in grade school. (“It was so inclusive; everybody got a chance to be someone’s partner.”) She also divulged a penchant for graphically describing the eating habits of avian predators hunting the acres surrounding her home in New York’s Hudson Valley, and confessed that, as a TV-deprived kid seeking thrills in the small upstate-New York enclave of Jamestown, she indulged in all sorts of reckless activity — including hiding near stop signs on icy roads, then leaping out to grab car bumpers and be dragged as far as possible. (“I think it gave us all character,” she says of weathering those risks, though she admits with a laugh, “If I saw my daughter doing that, I would say, ‘Look at yourself. What are you thinking?’”)

BGS: I’m so charmed by this album; the orchestrations are just beautiful. But I want to start with the Joan of Arc image on the cover; you refer to having kept it in your ephemera collection. I love the phrase, and the concept. Can you tell me more about that?

NM: Oh, my ephemera collection — I think I was 14, 13 when I started collecting junk. It’s very well organized. I’m going upstairs to look at it so I can tell you. There is an entire cabinet of glass-plate negatives; tintypes, daguerreotypes … 10 boxes of postcards, catalogs, Victorian parlor photos. I collect real-photo postcards, from the turn of the century to the 1930s; you would have your photographs made into a postcard. … Mentor (magazine) folios, advertiser cards — which I love — studio portraits, childhood images, “Museum of Mankind” — for some reason, I named that box — ethnic costumes, flowers and insects, large photographs, children’s book research, sketches … I started collecting it because I lived in a small town where there wasn’t that much to do. I basically wanted to create my own little museum in a box, so I did. [Laughs] When 10,000 Maniacs started making records and having to make posters and all that, I was responsible for doing a lot of the design work, and I would use my ephemera collection.

That leads to the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center and your appointment to the Board of Trustees. I understand that you’re passionate about making the archives more accessible for research and education. Can you tell me a bit about how you regard those archives and what you’d like to see happen with them?

Well, my appointment happened at the end of November and had to be passed by Congress, so I didn’t get official word that I could be in the building with credentials until Christmas. I went down in early January just to meet the staff and have a tour, then went back a few weeks later because I was so excited. It’s awe-inspiring. They have millions of articles and artifacts, and it’s not just folk music. For instance, they’re in charge of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and all the objects that were donated with the quilt.

When I first heard of the appointment, all I thought [was] it was the Lomaxes, because that’s what I’m familiar with. I did a little research of my own when I was down there last time, just to see how the archive works, and just to be holding the field notes of John Lomax and see the equipment that they recorded with, and they had a card catalog – I love card catalogs! The quote from one of the people on the staff was, “We’re not just about banjos and quilts.”

Your song “Sister Tilly” is an accounting of a time in history and women who created it; that’s folklife. 

I found a website that had all sorts of feminist posters from the 1970s of International Women’s Day rallies and things like that. That’s folklife — it certainly is.

And your little museum in a box; man, you were destined for this. 

If I hadn’t been a musician, I would have been a librarian or teacher, or a historian. 

Your bio contains the statement, “For the most part, this is an album about the human heart,” and you reference both Aphrodite and Narcissus, two ends of the spectrum. You’re beckoning the goddess of love on one hand and singing about the ultimate rejection on the other. Care to elaborate about those choices?

Well, the album’s about love in so many different forms, whether it’s platonic or romantic, or love for a family member. Or in the case of “Sister Tilly,” it’s expressing love and gratitude toward an entire generation of women — my mother’s generation, who transformed our society; women who came of age in the mid- to late ‘60s and up to the mid ‘70s. I really consider those women responsible for making the society that we took for granted.

And in the romantic love column, there’s the ecstasy of falling in love or wanting to fall in love, or invoking the goddess to bring love into my life. And then, in “Big Girls,” I say love can be deceiving and harmful, but [it’s] also encouraging people who’ve been injured in love, both in “Big Girls” and “The Feast of Saint Valentine,” to persevere, to keep their courage, to keep moving forward. The worst thing that can happen is your feelings get hurt. And the best thing that can happen is that even if you’re injured in love, there’s opportunities to grow. I think most of us will admit the most difficult things we faced in our lives were the experiences that made us grow the most.

Let’s talk about another literary figure in your life, Walt Whitman (the subject of “Song of Himself”). When did you fall in love with him?

Uncle Walt. Maybe 20 years ago. I wanted to write about Walt Whitman because I found a lot of solace in his poetry during the recent times of unrest in our country. He had such an expansive, radical love. All inclusive. In a time when people were really limiting the people who were worthy of loving. And he believed in equality — for women, Native Americans, enslaved people, just everyone. And when he went to Washington — he spent three years in Washington — he originally went because his brother was in a hospital in Washington, but he ended up staying. He got a job working as a clerk, and every day, he would go after work and spend time with the soldiers. He didn’t discriminate between Confederate or Union soldiers. They were just injured young men, or dying young men, oftentimes. He would write letters home for them, as they were dying and after they died, to tell their parents what fine, fine men they were. 

He saw the humanity, not the side of the argument they were on.

Yeah. And when you’re sitting at the bedside of a 15-year-old farm boy from rural Alabama, I don’t think he understood why he was fighting anyway, other than it got to a point where you were fighting to defend your own family. I don’t think there was a lot of ideology involved in the farm boys from villages all over the North and South.

The funny thing is, Walt Whitman being a great American literary figure, our greatest poet, I wanted [the song] to sound very American. But I tried putting fiddle on it three times, I tried putting banjo on it, and it just wanted to be a song about guitar and piano. I just couldn’t fit those other instruments in. Then it occurred to me that Walt was more of a sitting-in-the-parlor-with-the-parlor-piano [type], and he also loved opera; he went to the opera all time, so I thought, this is probably more representative of him anyway.

How does “Hunting the Wren” fit in?

To me, “Hunting the Wren” is loveless love. That was written by an Irishman named Ian Lynch, who’s in a band called Lankum. I thought it was a traditional song, but when I found out that he had written it, I found an interview with him. The wren is just a metaphor for these outcast women who “flock ’round the soldiers in their jackets so red for barrack room favors, pennies and bread,” and I wanted to know the story behind this brutally simple description of prostitution, the redcoats — obviously, the British — and barracks. What I found out from his interview, it was about a group of women who lived in the most abject poverty and privation you can imagine. The local authorities wouldn’t even let them construct shelters. They lived on the outside of these British barracks, on an open plain called the Curragh, and they would dig holes in the ground and cover them with rags and sticks, to live in. They would go into the village to get food and they would be spat on and beaten. Most of these women had lost their families in the famine. Some were common-law wives of the soldiers, but they weren’t allowed to live in the barracks, and some were prostitutes. The act of sex can be called lovemaking, but if it’s bought and sold, then there’s the loveless love. 

So this is an actual story. 

This is Irish history. There’s an amazing account that was written by Charles Dickens. The thing that Dickens points out is they had this mutual protection for each other. Some of the women were old, just homeless women; they had different generations. The older women would take care of the children while the other women went to get food or make money in any way they could. They lived like this, I think, 50 years. It was that or the workhouse, and in the workhouse, there was a good chance you would die of disease or be raped or destroyed by working. It was forced labor. It’s pretty grim, but I really was moved by the song and I wanted to include it. And it wasn’t like I was setting out to write a song cycle about the human heart. But when I was writing the liner notes, that’s when it occurred to me that I had written these songs that had some very close connections, and then some very distant connections, but they were there, and it fit in.

Photo Credit: David Iskra

Kronos Quartet and Friends Salute Pete Seeger With ‘Long Time Passing’

Posted on by Editor

“There’s no place like home,” says David Harrington, co-founder and leader of the venerable Kronos Quartet, with a little chuckle.

It’s not just because of the smoke from California fires or the pandemic lockdown at his San Francisco home. With the new album Long Time Passing — Kronos Quartet and Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger, Kronos, after more than 47 years of redefining the very nature of a string quartet through explorations of music traditions and contemporary composers from around the world and, to many ears, exotic, is having something of an Oz moment.

Seeger, of course, was one of the key figures of American folk music, from the early 1950s until his death in 2014 at age 94. The album includes interpretations and adaptations of some of the most beloved songs of the folk canon, among them “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (which gave the album its title), “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” “If I Had a Hammer,” and “We Shall Overcome,” which Seeger helped bring to national prominence during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. All are transformed through the Kronos prism, which has made magic with everything from Thelonious Monk tunes to Bollywood soundtrack songs to young Iranian and Afghani composers and, spanning decades, an ongoing relationship with American avant-garde composer Terry Riley.

Among the friends on board are young American folk singers Aoife O’Donovan, Brian Carpenter, Lee Knight and Sam Amidon, Spain’s Maria Arnal and Ethiopian-born Meklit. Amidon is making a repeat appearance, having been one of four singers along with Rhiannon Giddens, Natalie Merchant and Olivia Chaney, who joined Kronos for 2017’s Folk Songs album. That collection of American and English-rooted songs is something of a precursor to this new one.

Harrington resists the notion that this is somehow a break from what Kronos has done in the past. “I think all of our work is related,” he says. “For me, Pete Seeger’s work is an extension or a variation of [composer George Crumb’s] ‘Black Angels’” — a keystone in the Kronos repertoire and the work that inspired the group’s formation in the first place — “and Bartók and Beethoven and all kinds of music.”

Making that point emphatically is the piece that is arguably the core of the album: “Storyteller,” a 16-minute sonic collage combining Kronos’ playing with audio of Seeger from interviews and on-stage talk throughout the years, all composed and assembled inventively by Jacob Garchik, a regular Kronos collaborator. The ambitious work made its concert debut last year at Kronos’ San Francisco festival.

“He has been part of our work for probably 15 years,” Harrington says. “It’s so wonderful to see him flower as a musician. Jacob and I have had innumerable conversations about all aspects of music from traditional cantorial music to pygmy songs. It seemed really natural that Jacob would be part of Long Time Passing and that he would make a piece that would bring Seeger to life.”

As well, there is no lack of global cultural reach here. There are songs in Spanish, German, and a South African dialect, plus the instrumental “Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram,” associated with Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March protest, which Seeger learned on the instrument bhajan on a trip to India and made a regular feature of his concerts. In one “Storyteller” passage, Seeger himself is heard singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” in German. Arnal sings two songs, recorded in Barcelona last year, one being the Spanish Civil War ballad “Jarama Valley,” a bloody tale of fighting the fascists, written to the tune we know as “Red River Valley.”

And then there is “Mbube,” the South African tune that transformed into the international staple, “Wimoweh/The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” This serves as tribute to Seeger’s lifelong dedication to finding and sharing songs from other cultures, following in the footsteps of his father Charles, a musicologist, folklorist, and composer.

“Alan Lomax [the famed folk archivist and producer] gave him a pile of LPs that they were going to throw out at the Library of Congress,” Harrington said. “Lomax said, ‘I’ve got these LPs from Africa. Would you like to listen to them?’ Seeger comes over and in the middle of the pile somewhere is that song. I mean, what a story! The Weavers [the ‘50s group Seeger was in that launched the folk boom] started singing it. Then the Tokens had the big hit. And then Disney picked it up for The Lion King. I mean, that’s culture. That’s the way it works. But what an ear Seeger had!”

Meklit’s performance is not in Ethiopian. Rather, the Bay Area-based artist was asked to do the elegiac “The President Sang Amazing Grace,” a relatively new song by songwriter Zoe Mulford, inspired by President Barack Obama singing the hymn at the pulpit of the Mother Emanuel American Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, shortly after the 2015 mass shooting there.

“I have always been a fan of Pete Seeger and his empathetic yet passionate advocacy for the people,” says Meklit. “This is a song about how music carries us when the limits of language can’t meet our deepest grief, anger, and heartbreak. It’s about a President who understood that and offered us empathy made of melody. It’s about how the violence of racism and white supremacy continue tear at us and cost people their lives. Ultimately I hope the song provides the smallest bit of catharsis in our ongoing season of reckoning with America’s ghosts.”

Having an East African-born singer do this song honoring Obama, with his Kenyan ancestry, brings a lot together, and while it’s the only song on the album that was not part of the Seeger canon, coming after he died, it fits perfectly in his sensibilities.

“There are all sorts of connections,” Harrington says. “They just happen. It’s part of the texture of our society.”

The real magic of the album is finding the new, the current, in the old material, of bringing into vivid life Seeger as an artist, an organizer, an explorer. It’s there from the opening song, “Which Side Are You On?” a question that as much in Kronos’ hands, with Knight almost channeling Seeger, demands a definitive answer. And it’s there in “Garbage,” again with Knight and a child’s chorus, linking today’s concerns with climate change to the environmental concerns Seeger championed through his life, from well before it was a “movement.”

“In terms of the moment in which we live now, obviously Pete’s music and his sensibilities and his spirit came from troubled times,” he says. “He grew up privileged and he knew it. And he paid it back. He was able to adapt throughout his life and address the struggles and issues that were coming in. He saw a real continuity of it. Now we’re talking about civil rights. Not we’re talking about the environment. Now we’re talking about racial divisiveness. It felt like it was all one thread, the same thing. You can see [today’s issues] through that lens, and you can see it through the continuity of what Pete was through his life and what he experienced.”

Harrington stresses that while the album itself seems like something different for Kronos, he can connect it to the very first work written specifically for the quartet back in 1973, “Traveling Music” by composer Ken Benshoof which quoted “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” And that is by no means the only thing on this album with which Kronos has history. He notes that his kids and more recently his grandkids have been raised on Seeger recordings, and that a few years ago the group played “We Shall Overcome” for a third-grade class taught by his daughter. But the song has been in their world for much longer than that.

“The idea of doing ‘We Shall Overcome’ is something that we tried out in New York in the early 1980s,” he says. “At that point we did not have the right arranger. I didn’t know how to do it. We tried it, but it didn’t work. But the flame was always there.”

They finally had success with it a few years ago, in a concert that included a piece featuring tapes the voices of gospel great Mahalia Jackson and Chicago writer, labor activist and radio host Studs Terkel, on whose show Kronos had played a few times. Also in that concert was a piece incorporating recordings of Clarence Jones, Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer, telling the story of the “I Have a Dream” speech.

“The only thing we could imagine doing as an encore was ‘We Shall Overcome,’” Harrington says.

So yes, Long Time Passing is, for the Kronos Quartet, an act of coming home.

Photo credit: Jay Blakesburg

Natalie Merchant and the Power of Reflection

Posted on by Editor

Natalie Merchant was only 18 years old when she first joined 10,000 Maniacs back in 1981. A handful of years later, the politically inclined folk-rock ensemble was taking the world by storm as part of a generation of musicians who used their art as activism. When Merchant departed the band in 1993, it was to find her voice … which also happened to be the voice of her generation. Finding it, becoming it was something she accomplished right out of the gate with 1995’s Tigerlily.

In the 20 years since that stirring solo debut, Merchant has mined Shakespeare, traditional folk music, environmental concerns, parenthood, and more to create a discography that is equally potent and poignant. This year, she turned her gaze back to Tigerlily, reworking the old compositions and releasing the new collection as Paradise Is There: The New Tigerlily Recordings. She also made a companion documentary that serves as a visual memoir, tracing her footsteps back from here to there and bringing us all along for the journey.

The first thing you say in the documentary is about, essentially, do-overs — what they mean and if they are even possible. The premise is that, if you could do anything differently, the butterfly effect, everything after it changes. Though it wasn’t exactly a do-over, what have you gleaned from this experiment?

Well, I just made a record of everything I’ve gleaned over the last 20 years about these songs. The catalyst for the whole project was the string arrangements that I’d had written over the years for some orchestral shows. People really enjoyed the orchestral versions, so we decided to adapt them to string quartet and put them on the album. And then the 20th anniversary came up and it seemed like the right time to release the record.

If you had to pick one word to describe how the process went, how it felt revisiting these songs, what would it be?

Educational.

Even working off those arrangements, were you and the players able to go in without any other preconceived notions about how the songs have always been? Sort of deconstruct and rebuild them anew with your more mature musical vocabulary?

It’s interesting because several members of the band weren’t even born … [Laughs]

[Laughs] I was thinking that as I watched the documentary, actually.

[Laughs] They were in diapers when this record was made. And they had never listened to it before they started playing with me, so they had no preconceived notions of the songs, which was great. They may as well have been brand new songs. Then there were some of us in the band who have played them for years, like Gabriel [Gordon] who has been playing with me for 17 years, so he’s been here for almost the whole ride.

I think we sort of reinvented the songs over the years every time we went on stage and played them. They’ve evolved into the versions we’re doing now. A few of the songs, like “Where I Go” and “I May Know the Word” and “Jealousy,” had been sort of left by the wayside years ago. And it was actually fun to rediscover them, especially “I May Know the Word.” That was kind of an illumination. It was a song that I never felt I completely captured and then I left it behind. I think it turned out to be my favorite song on the whole project.

“Beloved Wife,” in particular, hits me that much harder with 20 more, or maybe fewer, years on my relationships clock. Was that a similar thing for you? It’s tricky, because you’ve been with these songs all along, but …

When I wrote that song, I was observing my grandfather’s grief. Since then, I’ve lost my parents and other people I had decades-long relationships with, so I understand death now in a different way. I’ve sat with many people who died. It’s just part of the age, I think, and experience. My father actually just passed away in September. And, since it was his father I wrote the song about, it made the feeling in the film different for me — seeing that photograph of my grandfather, having just watched my father pass. It makes the circle complete, in a way.

Right. How do you process having touched so many people with your songs, especially “Wonder”? Is that something you can get your head around, or your heart?

It continues to astound me, how many people have been impacted by that song. I think it’s also — it’s a powerful song — but it’s also such a scarce topic. There aren’t a lot of songs about children, to begin with. [Laughs] If you were to make a bar graph of how many songs are about break-ups, initial romance, and sexual craving … and then when you got to what all that leads to, which is children … [Laughs] Nobody has anything to say about that. Maybe they’re too busy picking crumbs off the floor, but …

[Laughs] The romance is gone, at that point.

But the romance, for me, really began with my child. The greatest love of my life is my child. And, to write a song about a child with special needs, takes it into an even scarcer part of the graph with a fraction of a percentage of songs. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Yes. Exactly one song. We can probably safely say there’s just this one song.

Yeah. There’s one song. And I wrote it. And people have radar for that. They are looking for their own experience in art. When they see it and recognize themselves, it’s powerful. And it’s positive.

That’s the other thing: So many people with a special needs child feel like they are the object of pity. And they really feel their experience is so much more than the challenges. There’s so much joy and connection … and achievements. Incredible achievements. And they are made even more profound and more powerful because of the challenges. I think they are valued more. I think those kids, when they do achieve … like in the film, when Kate and Kelly graduated from college, I was there. It was a massive accomplishment for them to get those bachelor’s degrees. They would have agonizing nursing care, sometimes eight hours a day, and they were still able to write the papers and study for the exams. And they both graduated with honors.

Wow. Those kinds of stories certainly put so much into perspective. Not to belittle anyone else’s strife or compare people’s pains …

And that’s the thing that Kate and Kelly used to say to me all the time: “We don’t quantify pain around here. Pain is pain.” I would always say, “Oh, you don’t want to hear about my problems.” And they’d say, “We don’t put it on a scale. We understand pain, so you can talk to us about it.” [Laughs]

If In My Tribe or Blind Man’s Zoo came out today, how do you think those would be received? “Gun Shy,” “Jubilee,” and “Hateful Hate” … they are just as relevant and could all certainly stand a comeback right now with everything that’s happening.

I don’t know. The music industry is a very mysterious creature these days. There’s an artist like Adele who can sell millions of records in a week, and artists like myself who used to sell millions of records and now … It’s just harder to reach the audience. I don’t know. I don’t know how receptive the culture is to more serious pop music that examines the soul or examines society.

I came up with 10,000 Maniacs, R.E.M., Tracy Chapman, and Indigo Girls as my influences and idols. And I’m not sure I see the same kind of art as activism pouring out of younger musicians these days. Do you feel like the upcoming generation has that in them? Or is your group still carrying the flag for now?

I recently met Aloe Blacc and I think his music is definitely of the same character as Tracy Chapman’s or my music. I’ll be honest with you, I’m not as aware of pop music as I used to be. But someone like Ray LaMontagne is out there making thought-provoking music.

I think there are certainly singular examples, but it felt to me, back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, that there was a whole class of artists who were in the same vein. But maybe I was in a little bit of a bubble.

There’s also someone like Billy Bragg. He really remained true to his principles and became very active in politics. I can remember the first time I saw Billy Bragg. I was playing a club in Brixton with him and he was passing a bucket for the miners who were on strike. I’d never seen that before. It felt like something from the Woody Guthrie days.

Is it safe to say that artists like Mavis Staples, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie … are those elders some of the artists you look up to? Because they are all still going. They all have new projects.

Yeah. I’m hugely influenced by them, especially Joan Baez. Talk about someone who has remained true to her principles since day one. She’s a powerhouse of integrity. When Pete Seeger died and everyone said, “No one will ever take his place!” I was like, “What about Joan Baez?” [Laughs] She’s still playing in prisons.

Yeah. They’re still carrying the flag, themselves. Considering all that’s going on in the world, is your perspective at all different whether you’re looking at it as an artist, an activist, a parent, or a woman? Does one of those identities feel more or less pressure to step up? Or are they indistinguishable?

I think that, over the last six years, my activist facet of my work and life has become much more pronounced. It’s a result of feeling older and more responsible and more experienced — knowing how to accomplish things like organizing big benefit concerts or making films about something. I made a film about domestic violence and I was really involved, for four years, in the the campaign to have fracking banned in New York. We succeeded and everyone credits the film we made, and I was the person that decided we needed to make that film, that we needed to have that concert and have those filmmakers collect the film and photographs that presented evidence and the testimony of people whose well water had been contaminated in other states where hydraulic fracking was already happening. I just didn’t have the skill set and the confidence to do that [when I was younger].

And the film about domestic violence was the same thing. When I was in my 20s or 30s or, even, 40s, to have the wherewithal to contact special prosecutors from two counties and have them at the table with me and say, “I need to know what the statistics are in our region.” And say, “I want to create an event and a film around that that’s going to be moving and motivate people.” I just didn’t know how to do that then. The music, as in making albums and going on tour and promoting my own work, has taken a back seat to the work that I’ve done trying to use music as a tool for advancing social justice.

And, yet, two records in two years from you.

Yeah … [Laughs]

[Laughs] Fertile time or fluke timing?

I feel like the domestic violence film and the campaign around that was the moment … When I finished that, I realized, “I need to make a record again.” [Laughs] I really hadn’t made one since Leave Your Sleep in 2010. It’s funny because people would say, “Oh, you’re not very prolific.” And I’d say, “Well, for somebody who’s not prolific, I feel like all I do is work!” [Laughs] But the work that I’ve been doing is more community organizing and creating these multimedia protest pieces and being a mom.

Photo credit: Dan Winters