Synopsis

In the primary video, an older woman goes about her household chores while Tracy Bonham appears singing on the television. The contrast between the woman's calm routine and Bonham's intense performance mirrors the song's uneasy emotional tension: a daughter insists that everything is fine while hinting that life away from home is anything but. A second version places Bonham and her band in a large clothes closet, where she performs before a mirror and experiments with different outfits.

Factoids & Trivia

• Two different music videos were produced for "Mother Mother" in 1996. One was associated with MTV, while the other received exposure through VH1.

• Bonham's real-life mother appears in the television-centered version, performing the household-cleaning scenes.

• The song was the lead single from Bonham's debut album, "The Burdens of Being Upright," and became her signature hit.

• "Mother Mother" topped Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1996. It was also a major international success, reaching the Top 10 in Australia, Canada, Norway, and the Netherlands.

• The video won Best Video at the 1996 Boston Music Awards and received a 1997 MTV Video Music Award nomination for Best New Artist in a Video.

• The video's domestic setting helped underline the song's central tension between reassuring family language and the singer's increasingly desperate reality.