Long Mama: Songs for the Broken and the Brave

Photo by Lily Shea

Long Mama doesn’t ask for your attention — the songs demand it. Stark and searching, cinematic and punk at heart, the music rides the tension between beauty and blunt force like it’s born from both. If you’ve ever had your heart cracked open by a stranger’s voice on the radio, there’s a good chance you already know what Long Mama sounds like. Or at least how it feels.

Behind the name — both the band and the moniker — is Kat Wodtke (pronounced “Wood-key”), a Riverwest-based songwriter, vocalist, and storyteller whose music glows with both candlelight and wildfire. Wodtke (they/them/she/her) is Long Mama — and Long Mama is a vessel for the kind of truth-telling that doesn’t blink.

“It was always just me and whichever group of friends I could cobble together to play with me,” Wodtke says of the early days, playing solo in Milwaukee and Alaska bars and cafés. “Our name was always changing.”

But something shifted when the current band began to take shape with collaborators Nick Lang and Andrew Koenig.

“We started to feel like something special was going on in the room when we played together,” Wodtke remembers. “They are such good listeners and patient, open collaborators.”

So came the name — unearthed, fittingly, from a night spent researching cactus varieties.

“I spent a whole night looking at common names for different cacti and learned that a ‘long mama’ cactus prefers shade to sun and can survive cold weather. It felt right for an alt-country band from snow country,” they say. “The cactus itself also looks like a very prickly/angry piece of human anatomy, which resonated with me in particular. I am not a songwriter who is afraid to provoke or ruffle feathers. It is a musician’s job to make people think and stir the pot.”

That blend of toughness, dark humor, and survival threads through everything Wodtke writes. On Poor Pretender, Long Mama’s debut full-length album, songs crackle with stories that are as lived-in as they are literary. No wonder. Wodtke’s roots are steeped in books and storytelling as much as in music.

“I am such a nerd and proud of it!” they say, laughing. “I can’t thank my cool parents enough for instilling a love of reading in me and also a deep appreciation for the arts and the outdoors. They gave me a lot of freedom to run around in the woods as a kid and cultivate my imagination and curiosity.”

While Wodtke studied Theatre Arts in Minneapolis and grew up in a home spun with Carole King, Aretha Franklin, and Bach, they found a love for the unvarnished poetry of punk and country in high school.

“A bunch of my friends played in punk bands that would perform in basements or garages,” they say. “No one I knew played in a country band, but we started listening to the old (good) stuff and also discovered newer artists like Caitlin Rose, Rachel Ries, Bright Eyes, Mountain Man, and Jolie Holland.”

What drew them in wasn’t just the sound — it was the shared ethos.

“I think I was excited to find folk and country music that sounded great and had the subversive ethos of punk,” Wodtke says.

Long Mama’s genre-bending songs — gritty and graceful, punk-rock and twang-tinted — come together not by planning, but by following instinct.

“It’s very organic. We experiment, play, and arrange until it feels right,” they say. “We try not to think about genre and let the song lead the way. My musical collaborators do an incredible job of underlining certain lyrics or capturing a setting or feeling with the way they play.”

The way Poor Pretender was recorded reflects that approach — live, in the same room, in the middle of a snowy weekend, with just enough warmth and grit to feel like an attic session shared with friends.

“Our co-producer and engineer Erik Koskinen has a great studio for live recording,” Wodtke explains. “It also feels like a cozy, northwoods cabin inside, so we felt right at home there… I think the album captures what we sound like live, which is really cool and an increasingly rare way to record. It doesn’t sound overproduced. It sounds like us.”

You hear it in the breath between notes. The banjo that sneaks in late. The laugh that nearly breaks mid-verse. These are not pristine, polished songs; they’re lived-in — wrinkled, bruised, tender — exactly how Wodtke intends them to be.

“I find tenderness to be gritty and brokenness to be really beautiful,” they say. “Life is messy, and hard things can be equal parts excruciating and hilarious. So it’s not tension for me. I think these things co-exist in the human experience.”

Much of Poor Pretender was shaped in the wake of loss — a dear friend’s passing that shifted Wodtke’s songwriting from cautious to candid.

“I think I became more willing to be open and vulnerable about mental health in my writing,” they share. “My friend who died was battling depression, and I found myself struggling with that a lot in the wake of losing her… I think a commitment to music became more deeply rooted in me. Not necessarily as a career path but as something I will always need to experience and make.”

Grief and joy don’t exist separately in Wodtke’s writing — they collide. And in that mess, Long Mama finds its voice.

“Grief and joy are so interconnected. Each deepens the other,” they say. “I just try to be honest and plain-spoken about it in my songwriting. No human is just one thing, and no song needs to be just one thing. We can be many beautiful, broken, tender, gritty things at once.”

That philosophy pulses through every Long Mama track, whether it’s the ballad of a busted romance or the imagined voice of a ghost wandering a prairie. Wodtke builds characters and sketches scenes like a playwright with a steel-string guitar, unafraid to drift from the autobiographical to the fantastical if it means hitting something true.

“With my songs, I like to experiment with inhabiting characters in the first person (see ‘The Narrows’) or making a semi-true story larger than life (see ‘Badlands Honeymoon’),” they say. “I also like taking something really mundane and mining it for beauty or meaning.”

In the hands of a lesser songwriter, it might all fall apart. But Wodtke makes it stick — not by smoothing the edges, but by sharpening them.

“I just love taking in any kind of art — it cracks open my brain in the best way possible, and I feel like I can’t not riff in my own work on whatever it made me feel or think about.”

In Riverwest, not far from the Milwaukee River where they grew up, Wodtke writes in the drafty attic they’ve made their creative home. They rake through notebooks, seeking not perfection but presence — songs that feel like showing up, again and again, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

Long Mama’s music isn’t background. It’s the kind of sound that sits with you — when the fire goes out, the friends leave, the whiskey hits, the silence closes in. It knows what you’ve lost, and what you still have to give.

And maybe that’s why it sticks.