Momma Wanted To Be A Household Name. They Looked To Nirvana And Liz Phair

By Mia Hughes


The five best choruses you’ll hear this year are probably all on Momma’s Household Name, the third album by the Los Angeles-born, New York-based alt-rock musical group comprising 23-year-old Etta Friedman and 24-year-old Allegra Weingarten, and also 23-year-old Aron Kobayashi Ritch. Armed with a real studio for the opening time, they took the possibility to lean all of the way into their major-label ’90s influences — artists like Nirvana, Liz Phair, and The Smashing Pumpkins — resulting in a polished and unrestrained singalong sound.


However more than any specific musical group, Household Name is a tribute to the mythology of the rock star, with all of its cockiness, allure, and mystery. The indelibly catchy tracks “Speeding 72” and “Medicine” have swagger and scale not often noticed in indie anymore, while “Rip Off” and “Rockstar” fantasize about making it to the big leagues.


Meanwhile, the second half of the record also sees Momma dip into more personalized songwriting for the opening time (their last record, 2020’s Two of Me, was a concept record about “morality, youth and punishment”). Friedman’s lovestruck “Lucky” and Weingarten’s broken-hearted “Brave” are highlights, intertwining sensitivity with the album’s hi-fi sheen. Perhaps it speaks to a change in the genre’s culture; that a rock star façade is no longer impenetrable, that vulnerability also can be celebrated and encouraged.


MTV News: How did you guys meet and begin Momma?


Allegra Weingarten: We met in high school, this college prep school in Calabasas. It was really preppy and sporty and not very arts-based. We were kinda the only people who'd similar taste in music and didn’t play team sports, so we certainly gravitated towards each other. We just began hanging out and eventually became inseparable at school.


Etta was playing with someone else under the name Momma, as well as putting stuff on Soundcloud by themself. Then that person couldn’t make a show so Etta invited me to do it, and we basically wrote a whole new set. Ever since then, we’ve been writing together.


MTV News: Have your intentions with Momma changed since then?


Etta Friedman: I don’t know what we thought it was gonna be. I think it was just a way for us to chill and kinda be outdoor of whichever else we were consumed with. Then I think we were playing a bunch of shows in L.A. And just sort of [realized] this is something we may probably do.


Actually, there’s this phone note that we noticed recently of our objectives, and we’re still ticking everything off. It’s been cool to be able to see things that were so crazy, like ‘oh, this will never happen,’ actually happen.


MTV News: What are a few of the objectives on the list?


Friedman: The one that certainly seemed super “there’s no way this is gonna happen yet it could be cool” is a billboard, and that happened.


Weingarten: The earlier stuff is like, play a full musical group set, release a physical copy of an album, get 1,000 Instagram followers. And then as it goes down, it’s like, play Audiotree — that’s something we still really wanna do. “Jack Black understands anything about us.” Episode of Song Exploder was the most recent one on there. And album reviewed by Pitchfork, which is sort of a scary one.


MTV News: Tell me about the writing and recording method of Household Name.


Weingarten: We began in summer 2020. Then in the fall of 2020, I moved to New York, so we were writing and demoing with Aron [Kobayashi Ritch], who plays bass along with produces and co-writes with us, basically three days a week for eight months. It was a really intensive process. We ended up with like 17 songs, and songs were getting rewritten and scrapped, and we suggested everything out to the exact BPM before we ever even stepped in the studio.


MTV News: The album has all this influence from these big, major-label bands of the ’90s, so you emulated that glossy sound. What sort of production or songwriting choices went into that?


Weingarten: We certainly were just pushing a lot of really big guitar tones, because we had never really done that before. We really wanted it to be like Nirvana’s Nevermind, loud although really tidy and polished. There’s also a lot of really cool production specifics that Aron put in there that are very subtle nevertheless make all of the variation. We had never really used octaves in our songs before, and that was a big one. The second you put octaves on a song, it makes it sound so ’90s.


MTV News: You often write from the perspective of this rock star personality, nevertheless on this album, there really is more susceptible lyricism. What made you hope to write from a personalized perspective?


Friedman: Sadly, I think it was a product of having to be in lockdown and separated from each other. I think there were a lot of personalized things that we were each dealing with that maybe weren’t mutually shared. “Lucky” was something that I wrote because I was separated from my partner, for I didn’t know how long. Although at the same time — like, I might have written “Lucky” [alone], however it wouldn’t have been as excellent as it was if I didn’t get the possibility to also bring it to Allegra. We really understand each other and are harmonious together.


MTV News: I know you guys are big fans of Liz Phair. I was reading a article recently about how, back in the ’90s, people were really, really cruel about her and her songwriting because she was a woman who was writing about her personalized life. How much does that side of her songwriting influence you? 


Friedman: She’s so inspirational to us. Something that I respect about her songwriting and her lyrics is how unafraid she is to mention the shit that everyone’s thinking. She can talk about sex in a really intimate way and put that all out in a song, and if it makes people uncomfortable, fuck it. She’s expressing herself [in a way] that we can grow up alongside and be like, yeah, I completely get where you’re coming from, and I can imagine myself there. I habitually look back to her lyrics and think about some of the most intense things she says, because they’re what sticks with me.


Weingarten: One thing I’ve habitually loved about her lyrics is that she’s writing as a lady in this boys’ club. Any time whenever she was coming up in Chicago, there were a lot of male-dominated bands. And I think a lot of girls stray away from writing about males, because they think it’s not feminist of those or whichever. Nevertheless she writes about gentlemen, she writes about being with boys, and she writes about being surrounded by boys. And that’s something that I related to in college, especially, any time If I was the only girl making music in an all-guy friend order. It was cool to have this songwriter to look up to where she was in the same boat.


MTV News: Compared to the ’90s as soon as Liz Phair was breaking out, it feels like there’s a lot more space for young ladies in pop and rock music to sing about their feelings. Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, even the way the mainstream is reevaluating Taylor Swift — it seems like artists like Liz Phair paved the way for that. Do you know music is in a higher class of place for that now?


Weingarten: Yeah, in terms of the indie scene, Phoebe Bridgers is certainly one of the greatest musicians out there. And Mitski, and Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail. There really are so several female-fronted guitar bands who are super susceptible in their songwriting, which is really sick.


Nevertheless some days, it sort of gets a little bit dicey, ’cause people like to tokenize femme-fronted bands, as well as a lot of the time it’s like, do you even listen to this fucking musical group? Even with us, folks are usually like, “They sound exactly like the Breeders.” Like, no we don’t. We don’t sound anything like them. So there’s a lot of that, which is really, really frustrating and discouraging.


Friedman: I will mention the one thing that I got reminded of whenever you mentioned Billie Eilish — I have a step-niece who’s obsessed with her. I think it’s really easy for media to spin a sexualization on a young, up-and-coming female star, and I know that [Eilish] is taking this stance of like, ‘I don’t need to sexualize myself, the music’s good, and I wear what I’m comfortable in.’ I remember hearing that and being like, it’s cool that my step-niece is listening to that. Because, shoot me, I don’t really care for her music that much, nevertheless it is cool to be able to see [young] people get influenced potentially in the correct direction.


MTV News: Another difference between right now and the ’90s is how touring has become super expensive and unsustainable, especially throughout the pandemic. Does that make it harder to aim high or dream of getting big like bands did back then?


Friedman: Yeah. We’re worried about going into debt every time we tour, and that’s shitty. We had this talk with one of our managers that was like, well, you sort of have to bet on yourself. Where it’s like, this tour could maybe get you all of those fans, then the next tour that you go on, you’ll be making cash. Although how do we know that’s gonna happen? Are we gonna routinely plummet? On top of that, it’s worrying about rent and shit.


Weingarten: Yeah. People underestimate what level you really have to be at to actually make some cash from touring. Like, it’s insufficient to sell out a 600-cap room. You can do that for a full tour, however you are still paying out management, booking agents, agency managers, your musical group, van, hotels.


MTV News: What do you suggest the phrase “rock star” means in 2022?


Weingarten: I mean, I don’t think that real rock stars even exist [anymore].


Friedman: I agree. ’Cause I think to me, a rock star is a way of carrying yourself, like a ‘I don’t give a fuck’ thing. Nowadays, you really have to be cautious and give a fuck to prepare it to rock star level, so it’s a completely different vibe. That’s why Kurt Cobain or the Gallaghers were cool. They’re just like, fuck off, I don’t really care about any of this. Yet we can’t necessarily mention shit like that without fully risking a lot of things we’ve worked hard for.


Weingarten: Yeah, there really is a set of manners that are really essential to follow. You can’t roll up to soundcheck and get wasted and fuck around. You mention hi to the sound guy so you introduce yourself to whoever’s doing the production. You must be kind and respectful or else you won’t get gigs and also you won’t get invited back to places.


MTV News: So what about you guys? What are your wildest ambitions?


Friedman: I just wanna have the ability to preserve a career with this. I love spending time with my best companions and traveling and creating with each other. I was shocked any time we went to the U.K., ’Cause it was just like, how the fuck do you guys know our music? Like, that’s so trippy.


Although on a more hopeful or materialistic side, I think it could be really sick if we went to Japan, or we score a movie and then we win a Oscar. Imagine that!