Have you jumped on the TikTok train yet? It wasn’t until the Christmas Holidays, sitting at home, with no home work and no where to go, that I created my TikTock account. I still haven’t created and actual TikTok myself, which I don’t think I will ever do but I also said I’d never use TikTock and here we are, fully submerged down the rabbit hole.
I don’t fully understand how it works, even after a month. One of my classmates, Vanessa, has been trying to teach me the ropes of the app. I usually just end up sending her videos of hot hockey players or something Taylor Swift and she gets mad because it messes with her “for you page.” No idea what she’s talking about.
Although, I’m confused by the app, it has helped local Vancouver band, Mother Mother. The band “blew up,” as the young kids say, on TikTok. Tracks from their 2008 album O My Heart was being used as music on the app. It first gained traction back in August and has been in the background to thousands of videos since. Their top songs on TikTok are Hayloft, Arms Tonite, and Wrecking Ball.
Many TikToks trends are from hashtaged “Challenges” but for Mother Mother, that was not the case. It just happened all of a sudden. The band is still trying to figure out how their music and #mothermother became so popular. The hashtag has over 56 million views.
Lead singer, Ryan Guldemond told CBC, that luck, good timing and “a little pixie dust” was the reason for their recent popularity.
Through the pandemic, the band noticed growth in their fanbase and when they looked to YouTube, people were surprised that Hayloft was not a new song. The band wrote it in high school, twelve years ago. They also found their songs on Spotify playlists with the titles like “tik tok songs that are actually good” with 142,000 followers.
Guldemond explains to Rolling Stone that social media is more accepting of self expression and the band’s genderless music has “a wider and richer vocabulary for people to use to identify themselves.”
In September, the band was No. 11 of Rolling Stone’s Breakthrough 25 Chart, which monitors the fastest rising artists each month.
Not only has TikTok helped Mother Mother, remember the man riding on his skateboard, drinking cranberry juice and listening to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac? Well the 1977 song topped the charts right after that trend exploded.
After Mother Mother gained their popularity the band finally made their own TikTok account to interact and talk with fans. Guldemond says, “We’re making the effort to reply, like their comments, and in one way or another tell them that you see them and appreciate them.”
Right now, the band is currently in the midst of recording a new album after taking a very short break between their 2019 Tour and the pandemic. Guldemond calls it a “pandemic album.”