Madeline Rhodes, the musician, actress, and storyteller who releases work as MuMu, shows up for our virtual interview maximally pregnant, apologizing for any unclear communication that may result from her sleep-deprived pregnancy brain. "It never really goes away," I shrug, though my REM cycle interruptions are less body-governed, more anxiety-induced or situational these days, in my current era of tween/teen parenting. In many ways, we can relate as we swap stories of pregnancy discomforts and delivery prep. For example, we were both adamant about processing our own childhood wounding before bringing our own kids into the world. For me, that looked like popping into Al-Anon meetings or writing the occasional song to emotionally prepare myself for motherhood; for Rhodes, that has entailed writing and producing an entire autobiographical documentary in album form—thus, The Brothel: A Musical Memoir was born.
Composed of secretly recorded Zoom sessions with her father; voice memos; field recordings of family levity; pop-tinged, musical-scale ballads; and one poignant Bruce Springsteen cover, The Brothel tells the story of the dissolution of Rhodes's parents' marriage and subsequent paternal abandonment, translating her shifting emotional landscape from childhood to present as she reconnects with her father after years of limited contact. There is sadness in it, sure, but also validation. Her father really hears her as she shares how she experienced his neglect throughout her teen years. Her mother infuses these recordings with hope: the optimistic take that there was love at some point in her marriage to Rhodes's father, and her loving recollections of raising children in her New York City apartment, dubbed "The Brothel" by "The Brothelites" who grew up there. It is this environment of unfettered creativity that made Rhodes into the artist she is, and this album allows listeners to witness her reclamation of the parts of her father that also shaped her.
Conversing virtually about The Brothel: A Musical Memoir, through the same platform that hosted Rhodes's weekly appointments with her dad that provided so much inspiration and dialogue for it, felt, in a way, full-circle—so, too, did the fact that the release of this album aligned so closely with the due date of her firstborn. Now, Rhodes's album is out, her child has arrived, and this interview is here to serve as a documentation of this special moment in The Brothel's press cycle.
The transcript has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.Meredith Hobbs Coons: So, you've made this amazing album about your family of origin, and now you're about to give birth. Is this your first child?
Madeline "MuMu" Rhodes: Yeah, this is my first. First concept album, first child, all at once.
Meredith: How did the process for making a concept album, let alone a concept album about something so personal, differ from the way that you've made music in the past?
Madeline: This was really different. It started as a therapeutic attempt to heal things, just for myself. I didn't intend to share it with anyone. I've always tried to make music that feels true to how I feel and what I believe in, but, for example, I love to cut drums out in the middle of songs, like, six times, then somebody in the room is always like, "You can't do that. People want to be able to dance." There are guidelines if you want to try to be successful, but this project had no guidelines. It was just me as far as audio and the podcast element of this, just me piecing the story together for myself up until the end. Then I got pregnant, and I was like, "I want to share this, to let it have its own life, and so that I can move forward to start the next chapter."
Meredith: So your pregnancy was what inspired you to share it. Otherwise, it would have been just for your own personal use.
Madeline: Yeah. I recorded all those sessions with my father, the ones you hear on the album, just for me to have. I started this to explore a lifelong mystery I had been wondering about: what happened to my parents. Then, I got pregnant and felt compelled to embark on this project. I played it for a friend who had a hard, fractured relationship with her father, and it made her cry. She was grateful to have heard it, which was really generous of her to say, and then I realized that I had a really special opportunity to be able to mend something with my father, and so many daughters don't ever get to do that. I got to hear an apology, talk through things, and have conversations that most people don't have. I think before the pregnancy put a fire under my ass, I wanted to allow healing for the previous generation. Hopefully, it can help other people who need some healing as well, who deserve to hear an apology.
Meredith: And you have five sisters.
Madeline: Yeah, I have three biological sisters, two stepsisters, and then all the random people that my mom took in over the years that have become honorary sisters.
Meredith: How has this album landed emotionally for those sisters who share parentage with you?
Madeline: One of my sisters, who is a musician as well, was really moved by The Brothel. She has a fraught relationship with my dad, and I think it has complicated the feelings she has about him. One sister is taking it piece by piece and hasn't fully finished listening, because it's hard for her to get through. The last I heard from her, she was like, "I don't want to make the same mistakes of not prioritizing family," so she's reflecting. The other sisters haven't listened, I don't think, and I'm not at all pushing it on them, because it's heavy for someone who isn't in the family, let alone someone who is.
Meredith: It is heavy. You cry on this record! And the way that you juxtapose your mom's hopeful, upbeat outlook on the relationship, where she's saying, "Of course, we loved each other," with your dad's take, which is heartbreakingly opposite, is striking.
Madeline: And as far as the sisters go, yes, we all came from the same family, we grew up in "The Brothel," we had each other, but there were also a lot of differences in the experiences we had, and that's what's so interesting about life: there are so many perspectives. You can be in the same room with someone on the same day and have completely different takes on what happened in that room—the same goes for my parents. They were in the same marriage, at the same time, with the same kids. As far as the details go, they lived the same story of getting pregnant and getting married, but their experience of their feelings is so different. One felt love, and one says he never did. My mom listened to this thing, and—I hated this reaction from her—she ended up calling my father to apologize. She had nothing to apologize for, but she did.
Meredith: Maybe it made her feel at peace. It sounds like she's had a lot of experience creating abundance from loss, so maybe that's part of her practice.
Madeline: Yeah, and I think that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. There's no way it was perfect, right? But there's no way there wasn't love at some point.
Meredith: It also sounds like accountability is important to her. Maybe she wanted to take accountability for the part that she saw herself playing in their marriage ending, because it's a value of hers.
Madeline: I get frustrated because women always take the blame, they always take the fall, they take care of everyone else, and I hate to see her do that over and over. But it's true that taking accountability for our side is freeing. There's a lot of freedom in that, so I like that. I'm going to adopt that perspective.
Meredith: And she was able to create abundance from loss through the environment of "The Brothel" itself, right? You characterize it so appealingly on the album.
Madeline: Yeah. "The Brothel" is my mom's apartment where my sisters—our honorary sisters my mom took in—and I grew up. I don't know when we started calling it "The Brothel." I'm the youngest of the sisters, so I don't know. I was probably calling it "The Brothel" a little too early for my age, but to clarify, the tagline was "all whores, no johns." It was just us. My mom called us the "Brothelites;" we called her the madam, and it was complete chaos. There were so many girls and women, so much freedom, and it was shocking to learn about the patriarchal systems in our society as I entered the world because I was like, "What are you talking about?" Women are really loud and opinionated and creative, and they get really angry—all of these opposites that I grew up with compared to what women were apparently supposed to be doing out in the world.
My sister is a musician, I'm a musician, and a lot of us sang, so there was always music around. My mom would just sit, listen, and kind of bop along. And we were definitely the trouble apartment: too much noise, always letting the bathtub flood over. The downstairs neighbor (who we called Doctor Evil) would come up to scream at us for leaking through his ceiling again—which was fair; that sucked for him. Our dog would poop on the roof, which is really bad, and then we'd get caught. But we had some advocates in the building that would be rooting for us and be like, "There's no way it was their apartment. That dog would never do that." Then we'd be like, "He did. I think he did. We were up there last night. We're guilty. There's no other dog in the building."
We had a friend we called Uncle Steve across the hallway. He'd come over and fix whatever we broke. Then, one day, my sister got held up in the elevator with a knife, and Uncle Steve called the police and hunted the person down and got him arrested. Uncle Steve showed up. He was always there for us and always protected us. He was at my wedding. He was at my baby shower.
Meredith: Wow, that's pretty incredible.
Madeline: It was a really fun place to grow up. There was also a lot of mental health stuff in my family, and my mom has struggled with that for a long time. "The Brothel" was complicated, which I prefer over simple, I guess, because it made things more colorful. It made the bright colors brighter because of that contrast.
Meredith: You bring in a lot of sensory details to this album: the chaos of overlapping voices, the sound of someone noodling on the piano, people chanting, all elements that make you feel immersed in that world that you grew up in. But then you also do something beautiful: even though your dad is the one who left, you humanize him. And the very fact that he was willing to show up for these conversations at all is pretty incredible. He says, "It's okay for you to be mad at me. I understand"—self-aware, powerful stuff, though he still carries some victimhood. One of the moments that humanizes him and honors his experience most on your album is when you cover Bruce Springsteen's "The River," which he says could help you understand his experience of his relationship with your mom. How does that song make you feel now knowing that context?
Madeline: There were different versions of this, earlier edits where I wasn't showing those parts of him, and I needed to do those versions so I could feel that anger, but I'm so glad that this thing ended up where it is, which is like, "Yeah, he did mess up, but he also really showed up for these conversations, and it was very helpful to me." We tried to have conversations in the past.
I remember, in high school, sitting down with him and begging him to be more present—telling him that my mom was struggling, that I needed a parent, and that I needed help—and he moved out of the state the next week. There were a lot of times when I was an angry teenager or adolescent and wasn't able to communicate, and neither of us could see where we were. I say that because it didn't happen easily, and if anybody else wants to try to connect with their estranged parent, it's okay for it to go terribly wrong for a while—maybe one day it will click, or maybe it won't.
During the pandemic, he was in Ohio. He's like me: he likes to move, he's fast, he likes to do a lot of things all the time. For the first time, he had to sit, slow down, and take stock of his life. He was in his late sixties and reached out, and that's how it all started. He said he wanted to talk, and I said I'd talked a lot and had tried to ask him to be what I needed for a long time, so I wasn't willing to talk much, but I was willing to listen. Then he started telling me his whole life story, and over time I started talking more because it was different this time. He said, "If you want to know what I felt like at the time, go listen to that song, 'The River,' by Bruce Springsteen." He told the story of how he and my mom were casually seeing each other—according to him—then she got pregnant, and a few weeks later they had to have a shotgun wedding in the backyard of her parents' home.
God, I loved the Bruce Springsteen song. My favorite part of the song was the bridge. The bulk of the song is like, "I had to marry this girl, and there's so much pressure, I had to grow up so fast, and we're strangers to each other," but then the bridge, which my dad never acknowledges when discussing his relationship with my mom, is about how he remembers the love; he remembers the river where they would go, and he could just stay awake listening to her breathe, and how those memories haunt him. I don't even know if he can acknowledge that, but I know that those memories haunt my dad. I know the love was there at some point, and it has to haunt him, because it's hard to lose love. There's a lot to grieve, and I don't know if he has done that. He couldn't acknowledge the love with my mom, but the song did, and that's what really moved me to put it on this record and sing it.
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Meredith: Music does have a way of giving you the pieces that you need to integrate into your life. I've heard songs where I have felt like every word makes sense for me. I've also heard songs where parts of them feel true enough for me to disregard what doesn't fit—speaking as a listener. But what you say is interesting, because he did leave, and I think it would create cognitive dissonance for him to acknowledge love still being a part of that equation. It's probably too much to acknowledge, because losing it is a consequence of his choice to leave.
Madeline: It is cognitive dissonance. It's incredible how strong denial can be, and the things that we do in order to survive the pain.
Meredith: Were there any other songs like that that you had considered covering for the album that didn't make it on? Anything that you ended up having to leave off that a part of you misses?
Madeline: No, this thing feels so complete to me. I took out things I had written, and I feel fine about it. What was so fun about this is that for every song that people end up hearing, there were, like, one hundred little ditties that never got completed, didn't get recorded, or maybe got recorded but aren't being put out, and I got to sprinkle my little ditties, my little voice memos, throughout this album. I wrote these ditties while I was having these conversations, and while my mom was getting sick; everything I wanted to say, everything I wanted to sing, ended up on the record. Whether it's full production or a voice memo on guitar, it's all there.
Meredith: I love that you got to have this experience before giving birth to your first child.
Madeline: I never got to have a narrative of what happened with my family until I built it, until I had these conversations and built this record, and I like the idea of this kid one day being able to hear it, to get to know that story, and to have their own take on it.
Meredith: If they ever want to know, they can access the story. You've provided that for them.
Madeline: Yeah, and maybe one day they'll write a terrible, hardcore story about me and their dad. I'm also humbled by how imperfect I'm going to be in this role as a parent, and no matter how much work I do on myself, how much service I try to contribute to the world, or how good I can be to my kids, they'll have their own story to tell, and I can't control it.
Meredith: Going into parenting is definitely the kind of work that makes you self-examine in ways that wouldn't have been possible had there not been a child right there depending on you.
Madeline: That's exactly why I wanted to put this out, to deal with this so that they don't inherit that pain.
Meredith: I have heard astrologers say that millennials are cycle-breakers. Does that resonate with you? Do you feel like a cycle-breaker?
Madeline: I'd like to think I am. I also think being an artist is kind of a tough life. There's a lot of insecurity, especially in this country, but there are so many perks, and one of them is that you get to heal through what you make, and the result can be cycle-breaking. At the same time, I'm humbled by the way my parents' maladies could so easily be my own. Even if I work on them, as soon as I let my defenses down, they just come back up. I learned a lot about that while making The Brothel. I wanted to know my dad so badly because I knew there were pieces of me I wouldn't understand without understanding him. He can be overly logical and come off as rigid or cold, and I have that quality. My mom's mental health is all over the map and, honestly, I have that, too—that scares the shit out of me. She's bipolar, and it sounds like her mom was totally bipolar as well, but nobody mentioned it. And when nobody mentions it, and you're a mom, you're going to scare your kids, but our generation is able to have conversations that my parents' generation wasn't able to have, especially around mental illness, and maybe that is breaking cycles.
Meredith: Is there anything else that you want people to know about the album?
Madeline: The only thing that I would suggest is that if somebody wants to listen to The Brothel: A Musical Memoir, start from the top and listen your way through. It's a story. Don't skip around; that's all I ask. You can take breaks, but it has to go chronologically.
Meredith: The way that you pace the album is interesting in that you break it up a bit. You get into your parents' story, then you talk about "The Brothel" and your upbringing, and then you go back into your parents' story in a way that feels like it's foreshadowing future events. It's not super chronological, but the ordering feels emotionally important.
Madeline: Yes, it's supposed to build. And I tried to pace it in a way that's manageable and interesting. Normally, I'm not like, "Feel this when you listen to this," or "Make sure you do it like this," but you know what? It's a fucking concept album. It's supposed to be done a certain way. You've got to listen from the top.
Meredith: Do you think you'll ever want to stage it?
Madeline: I have fantasized about it. First I need to give birth to this child (oh my God, they have to get out of me—I'm so done), but then I really do want to think about that. There's a dream venue in New York City called 54 Below that I would love to stage it at. It does theatrical concert things, and I could see myself playing there in a band with two other singers playing the mom and dad. It's a dream for sure. I don't think I'm done with this. I grew up in the Broadway theater world in New York, and I would love to see this album make an appearance in it.
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