From the recording The Island - Part One
“Oh Mother” is a quiet, ambient piano ballad—one of the album’s moments where everything slows down and the words are allowed to hang in the air.
The lyric is written from a place of guilt and longing: looking back on what it means to leave, to grow older, and still need an answer from the person you walked away from. The refrain—will I even get a reply—is the core of it: part prayer, part voicemail, part question that can’t be settled.
In the “everybody knows” section I write sn* on purpose. It can be read as son or sun—because both meanings haunt the song: the son who left, and the sun that keeps rising anyway, as if the world is indifferent to what’s breaking underneath.
Stian
Lyrics
Quite a son
That I must have been
Left you in the dark
While hunting for a queen
Oh mother will I even get a reply
Now I’m older than you
When you gave
Me all that you could give
But I do need you still
Oh mother will I even get a reply
Oh father how could you just leave her to die
Everybody knows
Everybody knows
That the s*n is arising
Everybody knows
All this time
I have traveled the world
Believing I could do
A difference without you
Oh mother I need you to give me a sign
I need to know if my father’s still alive
Oh mother will I even get a reply
Oh father how could you just leave her to die
Cause everybody knows
Everybody knows
That the s*n is arising
Everybody knows