Album of the week – Mother Mary: Greatest Hits
A fictitious popstar played by Anne Hathaway releases an album of hits penned by some of pop's biggest names.
Mother Mary, who she? And a Greatest Hits already, really?
Certainly, the American pop phenom has big hitters in her corner. Charli xcx, fresh from her work on the soundtrack of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, has written some of these songs. So has fellow English star FKA Twigs, hot from packing them in at the Mojave stage at Coachella. Also on board is Jack Antonoff, taking time off from his dayjob band Bleachers, winning 13 Grammys, and from being studio wingman to Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, St. Vincent and Sabrina Carpenter. And this fortysomething music biz survivor around whom these red-hot creatives have coalesced is now signed to the record label offshoot of A24, the powerhouse cinematic provocateurs.
That star-chamber of collaborators neatly triangulates everything we need to know about Mother Mary without seeing the movie that bears her name. She’s a fictitious superstar, played by Anne Hathaway, in A24’s psychological thriller written and directed by David Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Green Knight). As the Mother Mary trailer teases, she’s Lady Gothic Gaga, an arthouse glamour-queen with a parasocial relationship with an adoring fanbase. And now she’s plotting a comeback tour, with killer costuming to match, which necessitates a reunion with her estranged former stylist/designer (Michaela Coel).
“You are standing under the lights,” intones Coel’s Sam in voiceover. “Here you come. Marching down that aisle. You’re doing what you’re born to do. You open your mouth. You sing your song. Mother Mary. We’re reinventing you.” Cue… a flash of body-horror, the phrase “psychosexual affair”, a script Coel describes as “witchery”, and a two-year-plus filmmaking process Lowery has likened to Apocalypse Now.
Mother Mary, then. Spice World: The Movie it ain’t.
This default lead song on this seven-track soundtrack album – there’s also an 11-track Original Score album, by violinist and composer Daniel Hart, a frequent Lowery collaborator – is ‘My Mouth Is Lonely for You’, which we see Hathaway perform in the trailer. A breathy, burbling disco confection, it’s the poppiest, least, well, witchy song here, which is remarkable given that it’s the contribution of Twigs, the artist whose current album Eusexua could have served as a thematic template for the torrid, feverish passion at the heart of Mother Mary.
More on-message is ‘Blue Flame’, glitchy, spooky and spectral, and the result of the collective songwriting efforts of Antonoff, Sounwave (Kendrick Lamar), Charli and George Daniel (of The 1975, and of Charli’s wedding vows). ‘Burial’ is equally illustrative of the pop star Mother Mary is likely meant to be: Catholic-curious, mainstream-adjacent and a bit try-hard transgressive. Written by the same grouping, minus Sounwave and with the addition of Hathaway, it’s throbbing, moody electro with the feel of late-period Madonna reaching for some edge. If Madge took a vaycay in Brat Summer, ‘Burial’ would be the theme song.
Then, from a whisper to a scream, comes ‘Cut Ties’: a plinky, pretty-in-pink ballad which blooms into intense, multi-voiced, strings-and-things melodrama. ‘Holy Spirit’ is a death-disco anthem which is unashamedly what I’m calling “dark ABBA”. It’s mirrored by ‘Holy Spirit 2’, which is the mic-drop track that the holy trinity of Benny/Björn/Gaga would surely conjure. In reality, it’s the compositional work of Hathaway, Lowery, Claire Givens of a band called People Museum and composer Aaron Boudreaux. So, mega kudos to those guys.
Leading from the front on all of these is, appropriately, Hathaway – on the strength of her contributions here, a Hollywood A-lister who could more than hold her own alongside diva-whisperer Antonoff’s other studio clients.
“Everybody has a true angel,” she sings, gloriously, in the Tori Amos-channelling ‘Dark Cradle’, “everybody has an obsession, everybody has a dark idol… everybody has a secret…” In times of trouble Mother Mary comes to us, speaking words of, if not wisdom, then meme-worthy caution. Overall, Hathaway – the Hollywood A-lister who channelled Oscar-winning tears as tragic Fantine in Les Misérables – again proves she has serious vocal abilities. She dreamed a dream… and so what if, for the character of Mother Mary, it turned out to be a bit of a nightmare? With this bespoke, bejewelled, bijou soundtrack, it was worth it.
Mother Mary is in cinemas on 24th April. The album is out now
