Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten have been writing songs together as Momma for a decade now. The duo met as high school students in the Los Angeles valley, each informed by their love of power pop and indie rock — from 1990s staples like The Breeders, Veruca Salt and That Dog to contemporaries like Girlpool and Alex G.
Friedman and Weingarten relocated to Brooklyn in recent years, adding bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks along the way — perfect complements to the duo’s dreamy, sneakily addictive interweaving vocals and guitars. Momma gained notice with their third album, 2022’s Household Name, a collection of crunchy guitar gems that couldn’t help but recall their influences while simultaneously delivering a personality all their own.
Now comes this year’s Welcome to My Blue Sky, a cohesive and endlessly catchy concept album centering on its lead duo’s respective relationship issues, which they describe as “parallel chaos.” CityBeat recently connected with Friedman via cell phone to discuss Momma’s creative evolution, the benefits of having Kobayashi Ritch as an in-band producer and the inevitability of writing about their own lives.
CityBeat: The new album has now been out for four months. Making a record is such an insular thing. How do you feel about the response to it now that people are hearing it and it’s out in the world?
Etta Friedman: Honestly, I feel like it’s always super weird. The songwriting process is so insular. Allegra and I went back to our roots of like how we first started writing music together, and that was just the two of us with an acoustic guitar. It feels really intimate, so then to share it is great. But then to share it and have people resonate with it, it always feels surreal. This past headline tour that we did in May, that was kind of our first real headline tour. It was really cool to see how our audience has grown and who shows up for us. That’s always interesting. I like seeing who’s there. It feels just crazy. It definitely feels strange.
CB: The new songs seem like a natural extension of what you’ve done in the past — the dreaminess has been there from the get-go — but there’s also a tighter and sleeker aspect this time. Was that evolution something you talked about as you wrote and recorded the new songs?
EF: We’ve never intentionally tried to make a dreamy-sounding record or a grungy record or a poppy record. We’ve always just made music that we would want to listen to at that time in our lives. Household Name was a very guitar-heavy, kind of a rippin’ rock record that we were trying to accomplish at the time. We’re not classically trained musicians and being able to understand the structure of a song — we weren’t writing bridges before Household Name. There’s a lot that has changed as we’ve grown. The constant, which I’m proud of, is that we kind of just stuck to what we would want to listen to and what we liked at the time. So, it’s never really been intentional to do a whatever-sounding record. It’s just been where we’re at in our life.
CB: What’s it like having the producer be in the band?
EF: It makes everything so much easier, at least for me as someone who is not well-versed when it comes to recording generally. It’s easy to demo things. He’s really quick with it. He’s so, so talented. He just has a different type of ear. There are a lot of times where Allegra and I are stuck on something, we will bring it to Aron, and he’ll either add some weird production noise or a type of drum sound or something. Allegra and I would be like, “Wait, why would you do that?” at first, and then it comes together and we’re like, “Oh, it sounds so much better now.” It’s cool that we have a different brain to see outside of ourselves. We’re blessed to have him so dedicated to us while also doing his thing and his passion. I’m just proud of him. I love that guy.
CB: You and Allegra have talked about the personal nature of the new songs and drawing from what was going on in your relationships in terms of break-ups and infidelity. Why were you interested in delving into that so intensely?
EF: This whole record is about an experience that we just happened to have at the exact same time. And we were both there for those experiences with each other, so it was pretty easy emotionally to write from the same place because we were just going through the same things. We were lucky that we had each other during that time. I think writing helps us process. We kind of had no choice but to write about what we wrote about, to be honest with you. Anytime we tried to stop writing about what we ended up writing about, it would come back somehow. We both ended up at a certain point looking at each other and saying, “OK, this is just what’s going to happen.” In that sense, it was easy for this record.
CB: As an Ohio native, I have to ask about “Ohio All the Time.” It seems clear that something happened in Ohio or, at the very least, it is a metaphor for something. What led to the use of Ohio in the song?
EF: (Laughs.) So, something did happen in Ohio. Honestly, it’s almost like an inside joke in our band. We always somehow end up there. We’ll be going through a tour and hit Ohio like five separate times somehow. The song is a nod to the touring life as well. But, to answer your question, there was a pretty pivotal night that was had in Sandusky, Ohio.
CB: You guys threaded the needle in terms of the record being quite specific to what was going on in your lives, yet there is also a universal aspect to it. How did you go about keeping that balance?
EF: Totally. We really laid our hearts out on the table with this one, whether that’s blatant or cryptic or however the listener wants to think about it. We’re talking about an experience where you’re surprising yourself as you’re growing. Maybe you thought you were a different person than you actually are. Maybe you all the sudden acted out in a way where you are like, “Well, I would never do that.” And then you have to come to terms with the fact that sometimes you’re going to make a mistake or do something that maybe shocks you, but at the end of the day, sometimes you have to do things like that to make yourself happy.
With something like infidelity, you never really think like, “Oh, shit, I’m really going to hurt this person you love so much right now.” But then you’re like, “Oh, shit! Wait, why did I do that?” But it needed to happen. When my brain, my body and my heart are telling me something and I wasn’t listening to that for so long, I had to mess up to learn that I’m actually not a bad person and I’m OK. People mess up. It is what it is. It’s life. It sucks. I just hope if someone is going through something like that or if somebody is making someone feel bad, they can maybe find some solace in what we’re writing about.
Momma plays Woodward Theater on Sept. 13 at 8 p.m. More info: woodwardtheater.com.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Sept. 3 print edition.