MuMu Releases New Soundtrack LP & Shares “The River” Single + Video
New York City-born and raised artist Madeline “MuMu” Rhodes grew up in a matriarchy on the Upper West Side, sharing a one-bathroom apartment with her mother and five sisters. That upbringing gave her a unique perspective on womanhood, identity, and family—subjects that continue to fuel her creative work today.
Today, MuMu unveils her most intimate and ambitious body of work yet, The Brothel: A Musical Memoir, an ambitious multimedia project that blends album, podcast, memoir, and musical into a deeply personal exploration of womanhood, generational trauma, and self-discovery.
Alongside the release and lead single “To The Love,” MuMu highlights the album’s focus track, “The River,” a raw, poignant reinterpretation of Bruce Springsteen’s beloved classic.
“My mother says she and my father were always in love,” she shares. “My father says they never were. She got pregnant and three weeks later they had what my father describes as “a shotgun wedding where we were both pointing shotguns at ourselves”. He told me to listen to The River, by Bruce Springsteen, to understand what it felt like for him at that time. Here is my version of The River, interwoven with my parents’ “love” story…or lack thereof.”
Built from a collage of voice memos, Zoom recordings, song demos, and fully realized studio sessions, The Brothel: A Musical Memoir serves as a gift to MuMu’s younger self. Throughout the project, she asks the questions she was once too confused, angry, and afraid to voice, ultimately arriving at a place of empathy, understanding, and forgiveness for both of her parents—and herself.
“Now, pregnant with my first, I wonder about the family I am going to build. I wonder how far the apple falls. Making this album was an effort to understand how things happened, what effect my parents’ relationship had on the relationship I have with myself. It was an effort to heal, to move forward, and to hopefully not make the same mistakes my parents made with me. I hope to listen when my child cries, and never run. I hope to hold them when they kick, and plant my feet firmly in the ground when they push. Inevitably, I will cause them harm. I know this. I hope they find peace from that one day, the way this album helped me find my own.”
“The River” and Brothel: A Musical Memoir are out July 31st. Brothel: A Musical Memoir Extended Edition are out August 28th, 2026.
FEATURE INTERVIEW:
Your version of “The River” transforms a classic song into something deeply autobiographical. What was the biggest emotional challenge in weaving your parents’ conflicting memories into a piece that has already meant so much to so many listeners?
The way this interpretation of The River came to be was organic. When my father referenced the song as an accurate description of his relationship with my mother, I had never heard it before. On my first listen, it moved me so much. I love when songs capture the feelings we may not fully understand, and tell our own stories right back to us. This seems to be what The River did for my father, and as a result, this version of The River was able to do that for me. Weaving conversations with my father and my mother into this cover, recorded with the incredible Jack Broza on guitar, felt natural. Their stories ran together and met at an intersection in The River. Thank you, Bruce.
You describe your parents telling completely different stories about the same relationship. How did living with those opposing narratives shape your own understanding of love, and did creating this song change your perspective on either of them?
I always found the discrepancies in my parents’ narratives of what happened fascinating. I couldn’t understand how two people living the same life together could experience it so entirely differently from one another. But when lining up both their stories in The River, I was reminded of that saying “the truth is always somewhere in the middle”. In this case it’s in the bridge. My father only remembers the difficult times. My mother only remembers the love. In the bridge of this song, Bruce describes a faint memory of a love he once cherished. Then, when thinking about the loss of that love, he says “All those memories come back to haunt me. They haunt me like a curse. Is a dream a lie, if it don’t come true? Or is it something worse?”
This lyric gave me chills every time, when thinking about my father. I wondered if it was easier for him to pretend the love was never there, rather than to grieve the loss of it. And I wondered if my mother chose to live in that bridge, because it was easier to forever exist in a dream than to acknowledge the nightmare it turned into.
Bruce Springsteen’s original “The River” captures the weight of dreams interrupted by circumstance. In your reinterpretation, what new meaning were you hoping to bring to the song, and what do you hope listeners take away from hearing it through your family’s story?
This song is one scene out of a musical memoir I hope you all listen to titled The Brothel. The River isn’t necessarily a standalone song, but more of a taste of what the musical memoir is about. The Brothel: A Musical Memoir is an ode to my parents. Their story was flawed, but it was theirs. And it was how my sisters and I came to be.
I am due to give birth to my own child in three weeks. I know my story as their parent will inevitably be flawed too. But in releasing this musical memoir, perhaps we will have a better chance at breaking the cycle, clearing away the wreckage of family secrets to forge a cleaner path forward.
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Photo Credit: Evan Murphy
