Photo by Andrew Quist

San Francisco Bay Area-based American rock band The Mother Hips have detailed their newest offering, When We Disappear, which will release on Jan. 27, 2023, via Blue Rose Music. They celebrated the news by releasing the project’s lead song and title track.

The project started to come to fruition in November of 2021 when The Mother Hips co-founders Greg Loiacono and Tim Bluhm welcomed fellow bandmates Brian Rashap and John Hofer, along with the Ghost Ranch and Blue Rose Founder Joe Poletto, in Santa Fe, N.M., with the intention of creating a follow-up to their 11th LP Glowing Lantern. From there, they went to The Kitchen Sink to create the nine-track, When We Disappear.

“It was pretty much just us and Jono working closely for the week,” shared Loiacono. “We had one drop-in from our friend, Jon Graboff, who lives in town. We were lucky enough to get him to put some pedal steel guitar on a song. We had a fine and productive time in Santa Fe.” The LP was self-produced, and the songs were written by Bluhm and Loiacono, who were inspired by literature, and psychology and also covered Buffy St. Marie’s “Codine.”

Of the title track, Bluhm said, “Greg sent me a rough demo of this song, and I thought it was promising. What he was singing was place-holder gibberish, or sounds mixed with some actual lyrics, including what would become the title.” He went on to share, “I went through it and matched words to his sounds and then tweaked the words to tell a kind of impressionistic history of our adventures together. In this way, I believe both Greg’s and my own subconscious worlds revealed themselves. The music is simple and loose, helping with the devil-may-care attitude of the singing.”

Listen to The Mother Hips’ “When We Disappear” below: