If you were walking or driving through downtown Concord at some point and heard a bicyclist yell “Mother Fungus,” know that he didn’t stub his toe and try to keep his language safe for kids.
He was trying to catch Kane Two Feathers’s attention.
Two Feathers, frontman for Mother Fungus, a local psychedelic rock band, said that when this happened, he knew the band had started to get some attention.
“One of my favorite moments — I was just, like, walking through the town, and some dude rode by me on a bike and just yelled ‘Mother Fungus,” he said. “Whenever stuff like that happens, it blows my mind. Even though it’s just a small thing — how do you know who we are? We’re just some guys.”
Two Feathers and his bandmate, Isaac Richmond, spoke to The Concord Bridge about their music, their album, and how Mother Fungus came to be.
“I got into music at a very young age,” Two Feathers said. “My parents are both musicians.” Two Feathers’s parents, Morwen and Jimi, founded the Earth Drum Council, an organization that works to create “opportunities for people to drum and dance in community.”
Two Feathers said he he grew up playing the cello and saxophone in school and started playing the drums around age 10 or 11. For most of his life, music was “kind of a hobby,” but five years ago, he said he wanted to take music seriously.
Right before the COVID-19 pandemic, Two Feathers said he picked up the guitar.
“I took the opportunity to just sit there and just teach myself guitar, with the goal of creating a band and fronting a band,” he said. “I got to a performance level in, like, a year and a half, two years.”
He practiced six hours a day, he said. And then he went out looking for bandmates.
Luckily, he already knew Richmond.
“[Richmond] was dating my roommate during COVID, and he would come over to the house, and just ‘cause we were kind of in the same bubble, [we] would end up hanging out,” he said, adding that they’ve “gone through lineup shifts” but that he and Richmond have been there since the beginning.
Richmond said he’d also been looking to join a band, calling it a “New Year’s resolution.” And “then COVID happened,” he said.
But then Two Feathers asked him to join.
“It was pretty perfect,” Richmond said, noting that the two of them have similar histories musically and enjoy sharing music with each other.
But what about the name?
“I came up with the name,” Two Feathers said. He said he’d been talking to his friend, and he envisioned this “big, organic temple,” which he described as a “fungus, a mother fungus.”
“The real meaning is mushrooms — fungus — is a thing that has been central to my identity,” he said, adding that they relate to his feeling of “otherness.”
“I’m really fascinated by them,” he said.
He said the name is also, in a way, a nod to his mother, who died in 2018.
Richmond said that the name, for him, relates to environmentalism, and Two Feathers said caring for the environment is central to their mission as a band.
“When people think of [the name], it’s going to tie back to naturalism,” he said.
Regarding Concord, Two Feathers said people have been “really cool.”
“It’s been only positive,” Two Feathers said, adding that since he grew up in Concord, it feels full circle. “It’s been better than I ever could have imagined.”
“It’s funny how we fit in in Concord,” Richmond added. “Everybody does kind of dig us.”
Mother Fungus’s album, Living Oblivion, is out now.
For more information about Mother Fungus, visit motherfungus.band.
