‘It Always Felt Like A Place We’d Never Go’: Q’s With Mother Mother From Lollapalooza India

While at Lollapalooza India 2026, Pollstar spoke to both local and international artists in order to gage the state of the Indian live market. One of them were Canadian indie rock veterans Mother Mother. The band’s Ryan Guldemond and Jasmin Parkin met with us backstage after their Saturday afternoon slot to talk about the show, which marked their first-ever visit to the country, their 20th band anniversary and their 10th album released as part of the celebrations.

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Pollstar: 2025 was your 20th anniversary as a band. How was the year, and did you celebrate in any special way?
Ryan Guldemond: We celebrated by working harder than we ever had. It was one of our most juicy touring years, and we released an album. We just keep doing what we’re doing. We put out 10 albums, so that’s an album every two years, and then you do a touring cycle. Some are bigger, some are smaller, but it’s been non stop.

So, no party?
No, we didn’t have a party.

Jasmin Parkin: The album we released is called Nostalgia; we tried to bring some of the spirit of the early days of the band back through new music. So, we kind of celebrated the anniversary in that way.

Is this your first time performing in India?
Guldemond: Yes. And just being here as people. We had never thought about it before, it always felt like place we’d never go, and then we were invited by Lollapalooza, which we have a relationship with – we’ve done a lot of Lollapaloozas around the world. There was a cancelation, and we had two hours to reply to the email. We knew we had to say yes; what an amazing opportunity. But we never thought about coming here.

Parkin: Well, we thought about it, but always concluded, there’s literally no possible way, it doesn’t seem like a market, it’s so far.

Do you think you’ll incorporate some of the more remote markets in the future?
Guldemond: Our philosophy is to go to where we’re invited, where there’s reason to go. So, if this show creates some energy and a cause to come back, then, of course, we will. But it’s also a huge investment, which we have to consider, because if you go to a place and lose $100,000 just to go there … you have to be smart about that.

You’re not touring other Indian cities on this visit, it’s a one-off, correct?
Parkin: Yes, which is crazy. It’s such a long way to come for one show, but it was so worth it.

Guldemond: It’s kind of like a vacation.

So, you get to spend a bit more time in India?
Guldemond: Yeah, I’m going off by myself for two weeks.

What’s your itinerary, if I may ask?
Guldemond: I asked the internet where it was good to go for a spiritual as well as creative journey, and take good photos, and it told me Varanasi and Jaipur, so I’m going to those two places.

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Is the rest of the band heading back to Canada?
Parkin: Unfortunately, yes, though I wish I didn’t have to go back.

Guldemond: I wish I’d decided to go somewhere more calm, somewhere pretty by the water, like Goa, but I’ll come back.

How hands on are you with your tour routing, or do you leave that all to the agents?
Guldemond: Yeah, mostly. Sometimes we’ll look at and go, that looks too challenging. Or, why are we doing this? But mostly they decide.

And I guess they simply look at the data to see where your fans are based.
Guldemond: Oh yeah, you basically just go off your track record, and if it warrants to tap into a new market, you have a discussion, and weigh the pros and cons,

How important is the live show to you?
Parkin: The live show the most important thing. We love playing live, and also think it’s very important. And, in a lot of ways, we are more of a live band than a studio band.

Guldemond: It’s probably not my favorite part. I like being in the studio and creating more than performing, but I still love performing.

Are there places on a bucket list that you want to play at some point?
Guldemond: I guess we would like to do more of Japan. We’ve only played one Tokyo show, but it’d be nice to do more.

Can you talk about the cost of touring, the price of tickets. Have these factors been affecting your tour routing?
Parkin: The worst part is that you hear from fans, who can’t afford to go to the shows, that’s what bothers us the most, I know it bothers me personally a lot. But there’s some people doing some really cool things, like Yungblud, who’s trying to make music more accessible.

Guldemond: I don’t feel like our tickets are astronomical. But it is expensive to tour. We got lucky five years ago when TikTok opened up the world to us, and we’ve been able to go on some international tours, and make a enough money to not lose any. At the end of the day, we are coming out on top, we’re not losing money, but no one’s a millionaire. But we got lucky. If we tried to tour the UK, or Europe before TikTok, our ship would sink.

So your songs going viral on TikTok boosted your general visibility more than the song placement in the Kraft ad?
Parkin: Oh yeah, it’s not even close.

Guldemond: It was like a one-in-a-million unicorn gift from the universe.

What’s next for Mother Mother? Are you going to continue the two-year album cycle? Can you reveal any touring plans?
Guldemond: We have around 10 festivals sprinkled over 2026, so we’ll have lots of time at home, and we’re gonna try to write an album that doesn’t feel rushed. We’ve been trying to meet deadlines for the last 20 years, and this time…

Parkin: …we’re gonna just take our time. But, knowing us, it’ll still happen quite quickly.

Have those been self-imposed deadlines, or label pressure?
Guldemond: Both. You have to work. It’s a funny thing being in a band, because everyone else in the world, they work eleven-and-a-half months out of the year, they take two weeks of vacation, they go back to work. Why are bands any different? It’s work, it’s our job, that’s our mentality. Creativity adds a weird element, because it’s so abstract. If you build tables for a living, you go to work, you build a table. If you write songs, you could go to work and work all day and not write any songs. It’d be weird for a carpenter to go to work all day and be like I didn’t build anything. But it’s very normal for a songwriter to go, “I worked for two weeks, I didn’t write a song.”

How was the Lollapalooza gig? And how would you sum up your first India trip?
Guldemond: It’s amazing to come here and see people sing along, the energy was amazing. I found that I personally felt a bit rusty.

Parkin: Yeah, we haven’t played a gig in four months.

Guldemond: My guitar felt like a cardboard box, dry, it was hard to play.

Four months is enough to do that after 20 years of playing together?
Guldemond: Sometimes it happens in the middle of a tour. Again, it’s abstract, there’s no rhyme or reason why it’s easy or hard.

Parkin: Some days are just like that. But the overarching theme today was still, it was a beautiful show, so many people came, so much love, so much singing. It’s just amazing to show up in India, and people are singing the words to a song you wrote 20 years ago verbatim. It’s just wild.

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