Ute Lemper Turns One Song Into a 17-Language Appeal for Peace With MOTHERS
Ute Lemper has spent much of her career exploring what music can carry that ordinary political language sometimes cannot. Her latest project, MOTHERS, takes that question into unusually ambitious territory, presenting one original song across 17 languages and cultures as an international appeal for peace, equality and human dignity.
Released September 21 in recognition of the International Day of Peace, MOTHERS begins with a universal idea: parents wanting their children to be safe. From there, the song broadens its scope to war, humanitarian crises, freedom, tolerance and the conditions children will inherit. The English version is available to stream here, with versions also recorded in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, Farsi, French and Kurdish.
The scale of the undertaking gives the release its particular identity. Rather than translating the same recording and leaving its musical framework untouched, Lemper explored arrangements connected to different musical traditions while preserving her original composition, melodies, structure and instrumental elements. The project moves through influences ranging from American soul and R&B to Brazilian rhythms and musical languages associated with the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe.
That international framework mirrors the central argument of MOTHERS. The song moves from images of refuge and care toward increasingly explicit calls for dignity, equality, rights and democratic participation, eventually narrowing its focus again to children. Its final section centers on the declaration that all children are equal, giving the project a simple point of convergence after its journey through multiple languages.
The accompanying “MOTHERS” video similarly works on both personal and global scales. Hopeful imagery appears alongside real footage from protests and demonstrations around the world, connecting the song's emphasis on care with public expressions of resistance and demands for change.
The project grew out of an earlier chapter in Lemper's career. She originally wrote “MOTHERS” while hosting a European television series centered on conversations with women from professions including medicine, sports and politics. The song was ultimately left out of the program when its producers opted for instrumental music, but Lemper retained the composition and returned to it years later.
That return came this spring, amid wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and a broader period of geopolitical division. Lemper revised the lyrics and expanded the piece into the multilingual project now being released. Women's emancipation and liberation from restrictive doctrines became part of its widening focus, connecting maternal concern with questions of agency and human rights.
Photo caption: Ute Lemper with her children
Technology also played a role in building the different versions. Lemper used AI-assisted production as a creative tool while maintaining authorship of the composition and musical structure. That distinction matters within a project whose purpose depends so heavily on a single human-created work being adapted across cultures rather than generated independently by software.
The concept also fits naturally into the longer arc of Lemper's career. Her early encounter with Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill eventually led to decades of engagement with Weimar-era music, political conscience and historical memory. Projects including Songs for Eternity, built from music written by Jewish prisoners in ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust, have repeatedly placed questions of history and responsibility inside her musical work.
MOTHERS now extends that thread into a project designed to keep growing. A platform called Just Mothers is in development to collect videos from women around the world, while Lemper also envisions the song being sung in different languages at gatherings, marches and eventually a live event bringing its many cultural versions together. For now, the 17 recordings give that idea its first concrete form, with one composition carrying the same appeal through markedly different linguistic and musical settings.
