The 20 Most Dysfunctional Mother’s Day Songs

When you’re putting together a Mother’s Day playlist for May 12, be careful—the songs might not all be lovey-dovey for Mumsie. Some might mean the opposite, and others might not be at all about Mum.

Here are 20 to watch out for.

Eminem — My Mom

According to Eminem’s songs, Debbie Mathers was no Hallmark card contender for Ma of the Year. My Mom claimed she put him down as a kid, killed his dog, fed him paint thinner, sprinkled Valium on his steak (“So every day I'd have at least three stomach aches”) and caused him to be hooked on Valium.

Debbie sued him for $11 million. It did not have a happy ending. The judge ruled she only got $25,000… and $23,354.25 of that was to go to her lawyer, leaving her with $1,600.

Queen – Tie Your Mother Down

Queen guitarist Brian May recalls writing the guitar riff on a volcanic mountaintop in Tenerife in the Canary Islands while working on his PhD thesis about “zodiac dust” that collects in the solar system.

On returning to London, he played it to the band, who high-fived the riff. “What’s it about?” they asked. He said, “All I’ve got is this title – Tie Your Mother Down – which obviously we can’t use.” 

Freddie Mercury responded, “What do you mean, we can’t use it? Yes, we can!”

May would later reveal:  “This is a song about growing up and being frustrated with your parents. And it’s got a sense of humour to it. And it was quite quick to write those lyrics, which I’m quite proud of because, at that point, I was still a boy, not quite a man. And that song is the cry of a boy’s frustration.”

The Pharcyde – Ya Mama

Los Angeles hip-hop team The Pharcyde’s first single came from an early ‘90s beef with R&B singer Joe Mama. It went: "Your mama’s so fat… We drove her to the drive-in, and she didn’t have to pay / Because we dressed her up to look just like a Chevrolet."

David Peel & The Lower East Side –  Happy Mother’s Day

In this track by New York City band David Peel & The Lower East Side off their 1968 debut album Have A Marijuana, a model son runs away to New York and celebrates by “Living on the East Side, always getting stoned/ Always getting high, I’m glad I’m not at home!”

Hole – Teenage Whore

Courtney Love’s free-spirited nature in her teen days in Portland, Oregon, went down like a cup of cold sick with her mother, Linda Carroll. Mum packed her off to a youth correctional facility until she was 16. When Court supported herself as a stripper, Carroll kept asking, "Baby, why are you a teenage whore?"

P!NK – My Vietnam

“Momma was a lunatic; she liked to push my buttons/She said I wasn’t good enough/ But I guess I wasn't trying.” P!NK recalls her childhood in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, as a war zone.

She remembered: "I had a chip on my shoulder. Basically, I grew up in a house where every day, my parents were screaming at each other [and] throwing things. They hated each other."

The singer said that her arguments with her mother were terrible as a teen. One fight got physical, and Mom fell downstairs. Pink now calls that her one regret in life. She's since reconciled with her mother.

Kate Bush – Mother Stands For Comfort

The most skeletal track from Kate Bush’s 1985 Hounds Of Love, the song is about how the character’s son is a mass murderer. But she protects him even when “She thinks that I was with my friends yesterday/ But she won’t mind me lying.”

Bush explained: “There are many different kinds of love and the track’s really talking about the love of a mother. In this case, she’s the mother of a murderer in that she’s basically prepared to protect her son against anything. 

“‘Cause in a way, it’s also suggesting that the son is using the mother as much as the mother is protecting him. It’s a bit of a strange matter, isn’t it really?”

The Doors — The End

“Father?” “Yes, son?” “I want to kill you. Mother, I want to….” The Doors singer Jim Morrison’s mother, Clara, got her revenge for this Oedipal clanger. 

When a reporter rang her up after news of Jim’s death in Paris broke, she replied, “He stopped being my son the day he exposed himself at a Miami concert” and hung up.

The two had a tense relationship because Jim and his two siblings were brought up with strict military discipline due to their father being an admiral in the Navy. Clara was a heavy drinker, as was her son.

Suicidal Tendencies – I Saw Your Mommy…

In a great diss track off Suicidal Tendencies’ 1983 self-titled album, singer Mike Muir imparts the news “I saw your mommy, and she’s fucking dead” but digs the knife in with, “I wonder how much you had to pay/To get your mom killed in such a bloody way.”

CHVRCHES – The Mother We Share

In the 2012 debut single by Scottish indietronica band CHVRCHES, an emotionally cold mother leaves her daughter unloved and wanting some sign of affection. The music video flashes from the young girl played by Gossip Girl actress Alexandra Chelaru, walking lonely through the streets of New York City and CHVRCHES playing the UK Top 40 song.

John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band – Mother

In 1970, John Lennon attended psychotherapy sessions with Arthur Janov, who created primal therapy, which encouraged patients to scream out their repressed childhood traumas.

Out of this came Mother, an attack on both his mother Julia, who was hit by a car in his teenage days and his father Alf, who ran away to sea when he was a baby. Alf returned after John’s success with The Beatles and had the door slammed in his face.

The song ends with Lennon repeating, "Mama don't go, daddy come home," with increasing desperation, the track ending with a piercing scream.

At a concert, he told the audience the song was not just about his parents but was instead "about 99% of the parents, alive or half dead".

Kacey Musgraves – Mother

Although the song describes a character who can’t express herself because of a domineering mother, Kacey Musgraves insists it’s furthest from the truth. It’s about missing her mum after leaving their small Texas town of Golden and heading for the big smoke to kickstart her career.

In real life, Musgraves says, her visual artist mother Karen was always supportive of her ambitions, taking her to singing and guitar lessons and encouraging her to write songs.

Martha Wainwright — Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole

Martha was the product of singer-songwriters Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle. After the parents split, Loudon only kept in touch with his children by writing songs in which he depicted them as whingers. 

"For most of my childhood, Loudon talked to me in song, which is a bit of a shitty thing to do," Kate told The Guardian.

Life with mum wasn’t all that pleasant either if lines from the song like “With the mother of gloom/ In your bedroom/ With her hand in your head” suggest.

Pink Floyd — Mother

The central character in Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall seemed so intertwined with that of major songwriter Roger Waters that it was easy to presume that Roger’s mother, Mary, was also overbearing, and their relationship was best described as “testy”. 

Nothing of the sort, Waters insisted. He said his mother was not overprotective, and the main fault he found in her was “her inability to listen to me.”

Both his parents, Eric and Mary, were school teachers. After Eric died in 1944 during World War II in Italy, when Roger was five months old, Mary took him and his brother to the college city of Cambridge and brought them up there.

Waters told Mojo magazine that the song is about "the idea that we can be controlled by our parents' views on things like sex. The single mother of boys, particularly, can make sex harder than it needs to be."

The Rolling Stones – Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In The Shadow?

While The Rolling Stones’ more famous Mother’s Little Helper was specific—a lonely housewife dependent on pills to keep on going—Keith Richards insisted that fans should have their own interpretation of this 1966 song.

The more fanciful suggested that the mummy dearest character in the song was living a shadowy life working as a sex worker and brought her son into the game to help with the family finances.

Genesis – Mama

Penned by Phil Collins, who provides the sinister laugh through the synth track, the character is having a heart-to-heart with mum to be understanding – he has a mother fixation with a hooker he’s just met, and she’s not returning his affection. Why, mum?

Fountains Of Wayne – Stacy’s Mom

It’s OK to say you love your mama on Mother’s Day, but what if you have a crush on someone else’s mum? 

This came from an incident when songwriter Adam Schlesinger was 11 or 12, and his best friend told him, “I think your grandmother’s really hot”. Schlesinger responded: “You’re stepping over the line”.

Danzig – Mother

The accompanying video featuring a chicken sacrificed on a cross caused such a backlash (“Satanist!”) that few realised that the “mother” was social activist Tipper Gore, founder of the Parents Music Resource Center, which in the ‘90s was pushing for parents to censor what their kids listened to. 

Leader Glenn Danzig admitted, “It was the song I always wanted to write. The first time we played it, people went crazy.”

Goldie Lookin Chain – Your Mother’s Got A Penis

This wasn’t an insult song to mums or transgender women by Welsh rap trio Goldie Lookin Chain, but revealed the character had a sex change operation with lines such as "She walks around proud, with a short dress on/ Which sometimes exposes the tip of her dong."

Paul Simon – Mother And Child Reunion

It's not the sort of thing that’ll be happening on Mother’s Day. But the 1972 reggae track by Paul Simon was so fascinated with the name of a dish of chicken and eggs he saw on a menu in a Chinese restaurant in New York City that he wanted to write a song about it.

That came when his pet dog was run over. “It was the first death I had ever experienced personally. Nobody in my family died that I felt that,” he recalled to Rolling Stone at the time. He wondered how he’d have reacted if that’s how his then-wife Peggy Harper went.

“I don’t know what the connection was. Some emotional connection. It didn’t matter to me what it was. I just knew it was there.”