“Mother” is one of many songs on The Wall, Pink Floyd’s 1979 behemoth double-album, which came partially from the life experience of chief songwriter Roger Waters. Waters told Mojo magazine in 2009 about how the mother in the song was partially inspired by his own. “My mother was suffocating in her own way,” he said. “She always had to be right about everything. I’m not blaming her. That’s who she was. I grew up with a single parent who could never hear anything I said, because nothing I said could possibly be as important as what she believed. My mother was, to some extent, a wall herself that I was banging my head against.”
The song is structured as a dialogue, with Waters playing Pink, the rock-star protagonist of The Wall who, even as an adult, peppers his mother with life questions so that she can essentially dictate his choices. His queries zigzag wildly from concerns about the state of the world to the quality of his latest single: “Mother do you think they’ll drop the bomb/Mother do you think they’ll like this song?” He eventually asks her to suss out the competition for his affection: “Mother do you think she’s good enough to me/Mother do you think she’s dangerous to me.”
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