Songfacts®:

• Brandi Carlile unearthed a lot of emotions when she was writing her memoir, Broken Horses, which recounts her poverty-stricken childhood bouncing around the outskirts of Seattle with her family, and they found a voice on her album In These Silent Days. In "Mama Werewolf," Carlile is afraid of exhibiting the same toxic patterns as her parents and passing the trauma onto her own children.
  
  "'Mama Werewolf' is about passing on generational dysfunction and watching yourself do it in real time, and trying to reduce the impact of it," she told Stereogum.
• In the lyrics, Carlile compares herself to a werewolf who needs a silver bullet to stop her in her tracks when her toxic traits come out. In this case, there are two bullets: her daughters, Evangeline and Elijah.
  
  "I don't expect it to be their responsibility, although I’m so innately codependent and I just keep doubling down on that, but that's why I sing the song because of that measure of lines," she explained in Glennon Doyle's We Can Do Hard Things podcast in 2022. "If you catch me doing what I endured, just show me."
• Carlile has also recognized some of her own traits in her daughters, which inspired the album's previous track, "Letter To The Past."