If you’re looking for something to do this Valentine’s Day, stop by Cafe Berlin at 7 p.m. to check out the Athens-based indie rock quartet, Mothers. Their debut album, “When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired,” comes out Feb. 26. I recently spoke with drummer Matthew Anderegg about the upcoming release, their source of inspiration, touring with Of Montreal and the band’s origins and creative process.
**How did the four of you guys meet?**
We met through playing in different bands throughout Athens, just playing shows together. We’ve all been in several different projects throughout the last five years. We all moved to Athens for college with the exception of our bass player, Patrick (Morales), so that was the other thing; seeing people around campus sometimes.
**What inspired you guys to start making music together?**
Well, (vocalist) Kristine (Leschper) was performing under the name Mothers as a solo artist for almost two years before we made it a group. Me and Kristine had become friends in the months leading up to that and realized we had a lot of common tastes, especially in bands and complicated music.
We started playing together a little bit and then we started recording, just me and Kristine at a home studio-ish kind of thing we had. We would record Kristine performing a song she had written, then we would start overdubbing parts and trying a ton of different things and not keeping a lot of them, but just experimenting. We worked like that for a little while and then it came to a point where we realized that one of these songs we were working on really needed drums, so we started practicing with me playing drums and Drew Kirby playing guitar, and that’s kind of how it started. It was a long process of just figuring out how the band should sound, but we were mostly inspired to get together by a common taste.
**What are some of the bands and influences on your guys’ sound?**
Me and Kristine both like the band Hella a lot. That was one of the first things we bonded over, which you can’t necessarily hear in our music, but you can a little bit. We had both been fans of (math rock bands) for a while. We definitely wanted to bring an element of that into the writing process, and also stuff like Built to Spill and a lot of quieter, pretty music too (such as) Connie Converse.
**I can definitely see the math rock influence. You guys will sometimes play around with odd time signatures and complex rhythms. What was the creative process behind making the debut album?**
A good chunk of those songs were finished and completed as solo songs before we added any other instruments to them. “It Hurts Until It Doesn’t” for instance, was a song that (Kristine) had been playing for a while, and we just tried adding extra instruments to it and it worked out. That song’s really simple; that wasn’t really the complicated stuff. I guess the more complicated, time signature passages are written usually with the drums. The drums are a big part of how the rhythm comes out. That’s also just sometimes the easiest way if you want to write music like that. The drums are a good vantage point for working in that realm, at least for adjusting the rhythmic parts of it.
**You guys also toured with Of Montreal. What was that like?**
It was great. It was a really awesome experience and a great opportunity. We all really like that band. The shows were great, and we got to see them play every night, and their live show is quite the spectacle, so it was pretty inspiring.
**Where does the name of your debut record, “When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired” stem from?**
Kristine spent a little bit of time right after she graduated college studying under a painter in France. Somewhere on that trip, she found this book and she started cutting it up. It has a French translation and an English translation, and the English translations are really simple and beautiful. That’s actually a sentence from that book. We like how it’s a very plain statement that also implies more things if you want it to. It’s also just a simple statement about the human condition and the exhausting process of life.
**If you guys weren’t making music, what do you think you guys would be doing?**
Kristine would definitely be doing visual art. She’s done a lot of that in the past and she’s really talented, so I’m sure she would be doing that. I don’t really know what I would do besides play music, maybe record music. That’s pretty much all I do. I would say the same for Drew, our guitar player. He’s an avid recording guy, and our bass player would probably be doing something like arts and crafts. He’s a really handy dude.
**Mothers is a really interesting name for a band. Where’d you guys come up with it?**
Kristine came up with it a long time ago, before we were involved. I think it seems to carry a lot of gravity as a simple, one-word band name. It’s pretty vague too, but I prefer to explain it as a reference to the creative process.
**What is it about your sound that you feel makes it so unique?**
I don’t know if I feel like it is quite unique, but Kristine’s voice I think, if anything (makes it unique). I have a hard time calling it unique, but her voice and her lyrics are probably the most defining elements of Mothers. The way the music works around those things is really important, and the kinds of songs she writes are really important too. The very linear style (and) minimal chord progressions are really important elements too. The thing that we strive for is a stark minimalism that maybe doesn’t say as much as it implies musically.
