Mom Rock
On Expectations, Artistic Freedom, Choices & Having It All
I grew up in a world of rock’n’roll. Most of our family friends were musicians, but on recent reflection I realised that few of them were musician mothers - with the notable exception of my namesake Loene Furler (aka Big Lo), whose daughter Sia you may have heard of.
Among other musical activities, Big Lo played bass in a cool ‘all girl band’ I admired, The Subtonix (along with another cool musician mother Sheree Goldsworthy), and was/is an amazing painter/artist. In a reflective interview she recalled ‘Most bands wanted to play late but because we had children, we’d try to get the early slot so we could get home and relieve the babysitter.’
I’m grateful to have had such a shining example of creative music and art and mothering badassery. And I relate to the hoping for early shows thing, having had my first child at 20, just before I started my first proper band at 21.
But when I think about all my favourite female artists from when I was a kid and my early teenage years, I realise none of them had children at that point in time: Chrissy Amphlett ( Divinyls), Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, Dolly Parton, Renee Geyer, Robyn Archer, Wendy Saddington, Rickie Lee Jones, Linda Ronstadt, Madonna, Kate Bush, Olivia Newton John, Kim Wilde, Chrissy Hynde, and Suzi Quatro (some of whom went on to have children later, in the 80s and 90s).
I presume this was by design - the default was an either/or kind of world, you were an artist or a mother. Show business is all consuming, relentless, demanding and has never been a world designed for those who have children to take care of. There is not a lot of room left for the inescapable daily grind of laundry, supermarket shopping, school runs or providing dinners and lullabies.
Touring and recording artists have traditionally been expected to be self absorbed/absorbed in their careers and/or barely be able to take care of themselves.
Of course whether a male musician was a father or not has not had a lot of bearing on his career, as fathers have not traditionally been expected to bear the consistent, everyday burdens of childrearing.
Despite being a mother for as long as I’ve been a working musician, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking on it, probably because I’ve been too busy just doing it - although I have often thought how much better a guitarist I would be if I spent more time practicing and less time washing dishes and going to the supermarket and driving kids around.
I didn’t have any contemporaries who were musicians and also mothers when I started out although along the long road since I have met, befriended and witnessed a lot of them. I will never forget rehearsing with my bandmate Cathy Green when she was somehow standing up playing bass and also holding her two year old sleeping son on her hip. I’ve watched many who have found creative ways to manage it successfully and also many who had to sacrifice their musical ambitions to be carers to their children because there was no other option. But doing both certainly seems more normalised, more possible these days than it once was.
After listening to the Groupies podcast (as mentioned in another Loose Connections missive The Dallas Butter Queen), I read this GQ article about the making of it and was really struck by this little moment that was described by the co-host/creator Dylan Tupper Rupert, that didn’t make it into the final edit:
DTR: So Dee Dee Keel of the Whisky a Go Go had, like, married the guy from the Stooges’ road crew by this point. And she was pregnant with her second child with him. So she's like, pregnant as fuck upstairs at the Whisky answering her phones, and her and Elmer [Valentine, the Whisky’s co-founder] had booked Patti Smith's first shows in LA — and this is before Horses comes out. So [Patti] comes upstairs and is, like, milling around the office, says hi to Elmer and Dee Dee. And she stops, and she's like, “Oh my God, you're so pregnant.” And she goes down and starts talking to her pregnant belly, and giving the baby advice and stuff about how to make it in the world. And then she stands up and she talks to Dee Dee and she was like, “You are so brave for having a child.” And Patti Smith lifts up her shirt and shows her her stretch marks. And she was like, “I had a baby, and I had to give my baby away. Because I couldn't take this baby on me with this path of life that I was on.” And this was before it was public knowledge that Patti Smith had ever had a child. And we asked Dee Dee—Jessica and I were sitting there—“Was that the only time you ever saw, like, another mom in the rock music business?” And she's like, “Oh, yeah. Of course.”
Though modern day popstars like Beyonce, Pink, Jennifer Lopez and Katy Perry have seemingly seamlessly integrated motherhood into their public branding, and even welcomed their kids into their recording and performances, there’s still a gendered discourse and expectations around parenthood for female artists that is in serious contrast to the expectations for male artists.
"I think the most stressful thing for me is balancing work and life. Making sure I am present for my kids — dropping Blue off at school, taking Rumi and Sir to their activities, making time for date nights with my husband, and being home in time to have dinner with my family — all while running a company can be challenging" Beyonce in Elle Magazine, 2019
A 2021 People magazine article headlined Celebs That Are Musicians — and Also Moms! These musical mommas are balancing their busy careers and motherhood is a long list of female artists who are also mothers talking about how sure its hard sometimes but they wouldn’t change a thing and how blessed and blissful they are etc etc, which is undoubtedly true but something about that one note angle feels patronising and regressive and unrealistic. I have trouble imagining a version of this that blares Celebs That Are Musicians — and Also Dads! These musical papas are balancing their busy careers and fatherhood.
There are plenty of articles about famous dads with famous children but even now in 2025, I couldn’t find any that were just male artist and dads talking about balancing parenthood and career, or even extolling the joys of fatherhood - although I did find one titled 18 Musicians Who Have Way Too Many Kids.
But female artists are telling their own stories and the culture is adapting.
In Girl In A Band: A Memoir, Kim Gordon wrote about her daughter Coco “Yes, she changed our lives, and no one is more important to me. But the band played on.” She also wrote “Like most new moms, I found that no matter how just and shared you expect the experience to be, or how equal the man thinks parenting should be, it isn’t. It can’t be. Most child-raising falls on women’s shoulders. Some things, like the laundry, are just easier to do yourself than to have to explain in detail to someone else. Other things were biological . ..This doesn’t make men bad parents, though it can make women feel alone in what they’d hoped would be an equal division of labor.”
In an interview for her memoir Girl To City, Amy Rigby said that she thought getting pregnant and having a child would mean that she would “put all this foolishness away and that I would find something real to do with my life”. Instead she made an album. “By the time I was making Diary of a Mod Housewife, I was singing for my life. I decided I was not going to get down on my hands and knees and scrub the bathroom floor unless I could get up on stage and sing about it.”
wrote this incredible piece for Talkhouse that I read years ago and have always remembered because it was the first time I had read anything resembling my experiences with being a mother who played shows and toured.I had traveled on my own that day with my daughter in a sling, a diaper backpack, favorite toys and a stroller, so it has already been a long day for the baby. In the few minutes before the show, I had not eaten and at the very last second I would shake my hair and put on lipstick and hope for the best. There was nowhere quiet, private or clean in sight. In a hallway chair, in the view of band mates and bartenders, I nursed my baby. I have, for many years, feared this very scene. I worried she would cry the whole set or worse, something would go wrong while I was on stage for which I’d never forgive myself. I mumbled something to MC Taylor (from HGM) about how maybe this is all crazy. Tears were in my eyes.
“No, he says, “It’s like 1972. You are doing this. You’ve got this.”
He held Jean for me while I pulled myself together. MC is a good father and a great friend; I was so grateful for his hand on my shoulder. I put Jean in her stroller and surrendered her to Judy. I walked on stage opening a beer. It was the first two hours I’d had to myself in a long time. It felt like heaven. Between songs, I prayed Jean was sleeping; during songs I tried to sing with my whole heart, to be someone she would be proud of.
My first post baby tour with my four month old (who has just turned 18!) was super fun but had its moments. The musicians I play with were/are so kind and such great sports at pre/post show baby entertainment and wrangling and sharing a backpacker’s dormitory room with us. But when the babysitter I had lined up fell through and we were desperately seeking a new one just before soundcheck, with only a potential possibly heroin addicted girlfriend of a friend in sight, the challenges felt pretty real.
‘you’re up all night, usually with a bottle in your hand, there’s vomit on the floor and your boobs are always out’ Katy Perry
I have always thought that parenthood and the rock’n’roll lifestyle share some common ground in terms of just having to roll with whatever is thrown at you and constantly deal with a lack of sleep and predictability. Katy Perry joked on the Ellen show that being a mother and a pop star were surprisingly similar; you’re up all night, usually with a bottle in your hand, there’s vomit on the floor and your boobs are always out.
During the later stage of pregnancy, Cardi B appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show, after doing Saturday Night Live. He asked her if she had slept, noting she probably needed rest - she told him the foetus was giving her strength and making her hungry to succeed; she was up late rehearsing for his show, up at 4am for a radio run, then had another show, another radio run, another party….she said she was doing it all until she gave birth and then planned on going out on tour with Bruno Mars when her newborn would be 6 weeks old.
However Cardi pulled out of the tour after her baby girl was born and got very real about the demands of motherhood on social media, sharing in an Instagram story “This mommy job requires full day, all day, all night attention. I didn't [think] that it would take so long for my body to heal. I thought six weeks was going to be good enough — no, bro. My ass is broken. This baby broke my ass.. And my mind is so weird … Postpartum shit, it's real. It's really real, y'all.”
In other posts she declared “I met my match. She is very demanding… She wants everything.” and said “Let me tell you all something, no matter how many books y'all read or advise y'all get you will never be ready for mommy mode. I'm so busy, so tired, in like a different world, a different dimension. My eyes are so dark and puffy, like I'm wild pale ...”.
Mandy Moore cancelled a tour she was on after ‘admitting’ it was more than she could handle and she was “a shell of herself”, living on a tour bus with her toddler while pregnant. Jesus, no pressure at all.
recalled in her book “there were three of us girls, and then we'd bring a friend along to kind of keep an eye on my daughter while we were actually onstage. But we were in an un-air-conditioned van. We had baby food jars floating in a beer cooler of melted ice. And just trying to get my daughter to go to sleep at night after a gig was really hard. She would be just so easy while it was all going on, but then she'd kind of react when all the excitement died down and we were all trying to go to sleep.”Kids and endless hours on the road are always tricky to navigate. My mother has described how she somehow toilet trained my big brother Josh how to pee into a bottle when he was just a toddler and my dad was on tour in the UK with a reggae band in the late 60s and she was travelling with them in the ramshackle tour van because they were stone broke and that was the only option they had. Necessity is the mother of invention.
There’s no easy answers and the drive to push ourselves to thrive and enjoy all the opportunities life throws at us can be a tightrope to walk, but sometimes that’s a choice that needs to be made for your own sanity. We all just do the best we can to rise to the challenges in front of us.
A Harpers Bazaar interview with business mogul and pop star Rihanna revealed that she had returned to in person business meetings three days after giving birth. She said “Every decision I make revolves around them, but everything that I do that I love robs me from them. So I have a weird resentment with the things that I love. You almost feel like something is always suffering for you to show up somewhere. And even when you show up there, it’s not 100 percent because there’s something else on the wheel. It’s actually given me a lot more self-guilt. I don’t like letting people down, but I also know that most of that is me letting myself down, which means something has to change, but everything is on the wheel at all times. I have to keep reminding myself that I asked for this, I love this. I try to figure out a balance so that I can feel fulfilled when I show up to something, so I can feel I don’t have any guilt.”
Finding a balance of keeping everyone happy gets harder as kids grow bigger, are less portable and have their own plans and schedules and places to be - essentials overtake optionals and for many musician mothers without resources in place to make touring possible, it just becomes too overwhelmingly difficult to justify. Even now with teenage sons I find it incredibly challenging to make any touring work, but I do whatever I can to make it happen because I feel like I owe it to myself to not give up on what I’ve spent my entire adult life working on. And because there is nothing more satisfying and gratifying than playing my music live, and I honestly don’t care what I have to go through to make it work, so long as my kids are OK. I’m really lucky to have wonderful family around me that make it possible occasionally.
Even Cher spoke out about the difficulties of taking her kids on the road, saying “When they were young, I could just drag them with me. So we would go all over and they liked it, I mean, it was their life, they didn’t know that it wasn’t fun. And for them, it was. There were around a whole bunch of people who loved them to death, dancers and singers who would take them everywhere so that they had a good time. But then there were times after that, it’s just not that much fun.”
Lily Allen made waves when she stated “My children ruined my career. I love them and they complete me, but in terms of pop-stardom, they totally ruined it. I get really annoyed when people say you can have it all because, quite frankly, you can't. Some people choose their career over their children and that's their prerogative, but my parents were quite absent when I was a kid. I feel like it left some nasty scars that I'm not willing to repeat on mine” on a Radio Times podcast. She hasn’t released an album since 2018, although she is apparently working on one currently.
Australian poster Renee Geyer’s incredibly rare honesty in confessing she’d had six abortions in her 2000 memoir - the first autobiography by a female pop artist in Australia - also caused shockwaves in the media. She said “I regretted it every time I’ve had to do it, but I have no qualms about doing it.” Her first hit as a solo artist was a cover of James Brown’s scorcher ‘It’s A Man’s World’.
U.K. pop star Charli XCX has a song ‘I Think About It All The Time’ on her hit album Brat pondering the idea of motherhood versus freedom.
I think about it all the time, that I might run out of time, but I finally met my baby, and a baby might be mine. 'Cause maybe one day I might, if I don't run out of time, would it make me miss all my freedom? I think about it all the time.
There’s still no easy choices. Its a fact that if Patti Smith hadn't made that incredibly hard decision to adopt out her first baby when she was 19 and options for young single mothers were all but impossible, we likely wouldn’t be revelling in the art she has been able to create for us to enjoy all these years now.
Without wanting to denigrate fatherhood in any way, it does strike me that if Dad Rock as a genre is a kind of mellow, classic rock rock, that if Mom Rock were to be its own genre it would probably have to be complex, challenging, both soft and steely and likely not for everyone.
Your thoughts?
When I was just starting my songwriting journey I had to choose whether I want to commit to a collaborative project meaning another person’s livelihood would depend on me. I had a long-lasting mild panic state about whether I could still have kids if I went for it - and spent quite a while working on it with my therapist.
The truth is I can’t not give music a go so I guess I’m just telling myself I still have time, giving my best to music and hoping things will work themselves out naturally…
Apart from musical women who are moms, I was also writing a newsletter yesterday that leaned into the concept of “dad rock” and I stopped to wonder: why is it dad rock? Why is there no such thing as “mom rock”? I realized that in my life I’ve encountered too few moms who were big into music. And those women that are often wouldn’t have kids either. I found that extremely saddening.
I think about this topic a lot Lo, thanks for including me in here. I think it couldn't have been too bad for my daughter (even though I agonized and wished I could give her more stability) as she plays music, DJs - lives it and breathes it. The family business carries on!