Motherhood revisits their album, Dear Bongo,, with a new video for “#224” featuring Fredericton drag queen Freeda Whales. The instrumental track provided a blank canvas for the video, and with a perfect opportunity to lean into the album’s storyline of a painter’s descent into madness, Motherhood take to some unconventional canvases and get liberal with their arts.
The band themselves take a backseat in the video, content in their roll as coverall-clad background painters (with a surprise appearance Stefan Westner (David in the Dark, Jane Blanchard)), while Freeda steals the scene with a subtle paint-splattered tease.
Much like Motherhood, Freeda Whales has become a formidable figure around Fredericton, New Brunswick. She has almost single-handedly willed into existence the unmistakeable presence of the city’s drag scene. She’s regularly engaged the community through performances, training up-and-coming drag daughters, and organizing fundraisers for groups such as AIDS-NB.
For Motherhood, the opportunity to focus on Freeda Whales in their video was another chance to indulge in their regular bread and butter: shaking things up.
“Motherhood is perhaps associated with chaos, intensity and humor, but never sexiness. Our music doesn’t make people want to dance, and especially not provocatively. “#224″ is quite a harsh, aggressive song, so pitting a beautiful drag queen against dissonant synths was a really enticing concept for me,” says the band’s Penny Stevens. “Rock n’ roll is such a played-out genre, and even with all the work that non-white-cis-males have been doing, it’s still stuffed full of puffed chest hypermasculinity. Subverting those notions by handing the interpretive reins over to a drag queen is basically my best dream.”
Tour Dates:
11.01.19 – Fredericton, NB @ The Capital
11.06.19 – Toronto, ON @ The Monarch
11.07.19 – Guelph, ON @ eBar
11.08.19 – Boston, MA @ Trixie’s
11.09.19 – Hadley, MA @ Motor Goose Inn
11.09.19 – New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge
11.13.19 – Sackville, NB @ Thunder & Lightning