Songfacts®:

• On June 15, 2014 Brandi Carlile and her wife Catherine Shepherd welcomed to this world their first child, a daughter named Evangeline Ruth Carlile. The singer plays tribute to her little girl and her experience with motherhood in general during this song.
  
  "Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind," Carlile said of the track. "To some, this sounds like the realization of their most sacred dreams - true companionship. For some, this sacrifice is too much to bear and requires its own brand of radical forgiveness. For the most part and for me, it's equal measures of both. I am not just a mother, but it's all that I am."
• Directed and produced by an all-female team, the song's music video portrays the day-to-day roles a mom plays. The clip features New York City-area mothers Cheyenne Baer, Victoria Joseph, Snehi S. Kapur, Helena Paek, Sheila Williams, and Emily Rosario, along with their families.
• "The Mother" is part of Brandi Carlile's sixth album, By The Way, I Forgive You. Led by the single "The Joke," it earned Carlile many new fans and got the attention of Grammy voters, who awarded it Best Americana Album. Carlile was already well known among musicians but now the accolades were coming in too. She became a fixture at the Grammy Awards over the next few years.