“I see you have some challenging questions coming up,” Ute Lemper says in her first reply. She sounds pleased. Across the exchange, she pushes back, corrects me, widens the frame and occasionally throws an elbow. The composure of a veteran performer remains intact; the answers still have teeth.

The occasion is MOTHERS, released on September 21 for the International Day of Peace. One original composition appears across 17 languages, with Russian and Ukrainian in the same collection, alongside Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish and others. Lemper developed the arrangements through AI-assisted production, then brought the song into her live performances in several languages. Four decades of theatre, recording and politically engaged work have given Lemper a substantial history to draw upon, though she keeps the discussion fixed firmly on the present. Our interview moves through war, motherhood, nationalism, inherited hatred, artistic ownership and the uneasy freedoms offered by new technology.

Hi Ute, it is a privilege to speak with you. Your international peace project MOTHERS is built around one original song recorded in 17 languages. Which version challenged your original understanding of motherhood most profoundly?

Hello, nice to speak with you too. I see you have some challenging questions coming up, which I am eager to answer. Every single one of the 18 versions of my song MOTHERS has something that moved me in the way it captures motherhood and its mission. The voices of the mothers are authentic in their own languages and carry love to their countries. There is grit and guts, tenderness and intimacy in the interpretations, and the musical landscapes of the arrangements around them catapult the listener into an almost cinematic experience. The traditional instruments speak their own language of cultural heritage, sometimes with haunting cries coming from deep within.

I was really amazed and stunned once I started working on the individual versions. Some of them took weeks to finalize, after hundreds of attempts; others came together in a short time and seemed to hit the spot almost immediately.

I worked for many days on the Russian version, researching the choirs and musical lines of their original traditions. But they are often very male-oriented, and it was difficult to find the female choirs I wanted to support the MOTHERS choruses. When I finished the Russian version, I started to tackle the Ukrainian one and almost immediately found the right voice, filled with sorrow and strength, weathered but sensitive. It is a very deep voice, and the pulse in the music supports the heartbeat of the mother singing, walking and walking through the landscape with pride and courage, yet infinitely sad and traumatized.

I felt something similar with the Farsi and Kurdish versions. They authentically reflect the colors and longing of their traditional music and combine the past with the present, creating a contemporary groove within the world of the old music.

I am in love with the Spanish and Brazilian versions because I simply love this kind of music: the revoicings and harmonies, the groove that drives the song, and the joy that rises from singing MOTHERS in those languages and musical rhythms.

And then the English version is gutsy and inspired by R&B and soul, which is very much my cup of tea. I love singing this way.

And all of those mothers’ voices are a million times more human-sounding than many other contemporary pop singers’ recordings that are put through the mills of auto-tuning and processing and often sound like Mickey Mouse on speed.

Let’s stay with the phrase “army of love” for a moment. I flinch slightly at the word “army” because it still carries obedience, force and enemies. What do you hear in that word that I might be missing?

You are missing the full metaphor: “an army of LOVE,” followed by “in thousands of battles they fly on white doves.” For me, this is a deeply pacifistic image. I deliberately use the vocabulary of war and then turn its meaning upside down.

While actual armies fight with guns and weapons, this army carries something entirely different into the battlefield. The mothers’ weapons are their hearts, their love, their voices and their determination to protect life. And instead of arriving on tanks or warplanes, they fly on white doves, the universal symbol of peace.

So I don’t hear obedience or aggression in the phrase “army of love.” I hear collective strength. One mother may feel powerless against the machinery of war, politics and violence. But millions of mothers standing together are not powerless. There is strength in numbers, and there is strength in a common moral purpose.

That leads directly into the next part of the second verse: we ask for dignity, we want tolerance and respect, we want equality and rights, and we want to elect, in these loud times when voices of men fail with wars and crimes and costly games of shame.

These are strong lyrics, and they are meant to be strong. The song is tender, but it is not passive. Peace is not passivity. Sometimes standing for peace requires enormous courage.

I find the Russian and Ukrainian versions uneasy neighbors under one peace project, since a shared melody may imply a shared degree of responsibility. What did you want their proximity to communicate?

Here we go exactly into the heart of the project. I do not believe that the Russian mother wants this war, and neither does the Ukrainian mother. Neither wants to send her child to war, to see her child die, or to see the happiness and future of her children destroyed by the reality and devastation of war.

But placing the Russian and Ukrainian versions next to each other does not imply a shared degree of political responsibility. That is very important. The Russian mother is not the aggressor against the Ukrainian mother. Russia invaded Ukraine, and the responsibility for that cannot simply be dissolved into a general statement about peace. But the politics of autocrats and governments should not make us lose sight of the human beings who have to live, and die, with the consequences of their decisions.

For me, that is exactly why these two versions belong beside each other. MOTHERS tries to go underneath political systems and national identities to something simply human. Mothers on both sides know the fear of losing a child. They know that their children deserve a future. At the same time, of course, the Ukrainian mother carries the additional reality of having her country invaded, her home threatened or destroyed, and her children forced to live through a war that was brought to them.

The history between Russia and Ukraine is complicated and deeply intertwined, including their decades together within the Soviet Union. After the end of the communist dictatorship and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was the hope that these countries could determine their own futures and live beside one another with mutual respect. Instead, we are witnessing the return of imperial ambition, authoritarian politics and the hunger to dictate the destiny of another country.

But that is not the game of the mothers. That is the game of power.

The entire idea of MOTHERS is that beyond these political structures there is another possible language: humanity, community, collaboration, diplomacy, care and mutual respect. Every country deserves its sovereignty and dignity, and every child deserves not to inherit the wars and ambitions of those in power.

So the proximity of the Russian and Ukrainian versions is intentional. It does not say that responsibility is equal. It says that the longing of mothers for their children to live in peace is universal.

The AI-assisted production will divide listeners, especially where culturally specific instruments, rhythms and vocal styles enter the arrangements. Which criticism of your method would you accept as fair?

I could not have done this project without the assistance of this brilliant AI tool.

Listen, I am a Time Traveler. I have made more than 30 albums over 40 years, since 1985. In the beginning we recorded on analog tape, musicians and orchestras, singers all together in the same room. Later in the ’90s we recorded on 24-track analog tape machines, and if we wanted to make an edit, we literally cut the tape and glued it back together. Then we learned Pro Tools after 2000, which frightened everyone at first. People said it sounded digital, artificial and fake compared with the warmth of analog recordings. And now it is the good old traditional way of making music.

My last album, Time Traveler, actually combined recordings I had made around the year 2000 on 16-track analog tape with new versions created more than two decades later using Pro Tools. The technician burned the old tapes in order to digitize them, and then we brought the new and old versions into a dialogue of time. The juxtaposition became part of the charm of the project: the younger me versus the older me, the changes in the timbre of my voice, my personality and my understanding of the music, and the production of the warmer tape sound and imperfect recording intertwined with modern digitized and cleaned-up rerecordings.

I have always loved to experiment, to break rules and cross boundaries. This time with MOTHERS I traveled into the future, but with an important message to carry with me.

I have said before that much of contemporary pop music already sounds totally processed. Voices are tuned, rhythms quantized, performances manipulated and filtered until there is nothing human left. So the idea that there is a clean dividing line between “authentic” music and technologically created music has already been lost for decades.

With the sophistication of AI, I was able to create something different and honestly authentic. I was overwhelmed at every step. My song MOTHERS was carried to the UNITED NATIONS :). AI did not write my composition, it did not conceive the message, and it did not decide what I wanted to say. It became an extension of my imagination and my artistic vision.

To me, these arrangements are like elaborate paintings. They are complex, layered and more like movies, not a documentary, but a film that transports you into another world, using fantastic elements, cultural memories and the colors of a dream.

I uploaded the music into my Pro Tools and separated the tracks, started the puzzle, re-edited between versions and even used some of my original elements and voices to add to the picture. The guitar solo of my guitarist John Benthal was always copied in the versions. AI could not imagine anything better. The melodies and dynamics of my original vocals are kept and provide the foundation. The craftsmanship of AI was so good, but what surprised me most was the emotional transparency, the sense of soul, especially in the voice. As crazy as it sounds, sometimes it brought me closer to what I wanted to hear than I could have achieved through conventional production.

I am already singing the song MOTHERS in different languages on stage now in a variety of countries on tour. I enjoy my LIVE version as much as the original live version that inspired all the other versions. This project was an adventure, and I loved every bit of the way creating it and learned so much. It enriched my life.

So I accept the debate. But ultimately I judge a tool by what the artist does with it. Technology does not create the intention. The artist does.

Picture the teenage Ute in Münster, newly obsessed with Brecht and Weill and desperate to escape the values around her. What would she challenge you about today?

I think that young teenage Ute is still in me. I always felt that I was a rebel. I never liked authority and pursued complete freedom in making decisions about my own life. My father used to say, “Life grows in proportion to its courage.” I liked that. I never shied away from taking risks or worried too much about not being liked for following my own ideas and intuitions. I definitely was courageous, and my life indeed grew larger along with it, as a person, a mother and an artist, even though the balance between those hats often seemed impossible to manage.

So I would challenge that younger Ute instead. I would tell her to emancipate herself even sooner from traditional and conventional structures, to dare to fall freely and, within that dizziness, discover her own path.

When tears arrive during Songs for Eternity, the audience encounters your grief alongside words written by Jewish prisoners. Whose emotion should command the room?

The emotion of the story itself carries the room. The audience feels it and can touch it with their own hearts. I am only a medium, a vessel, and try to channel the person who wrote the song in those most unbearable circumstances, and I try to do it so real and direct that it opens the doorway to everyone in the audience with their very own individual reflection of sorrow.

So the tears are all our tears. It is the universal grief of human experience, the pain of loss, persecution, separation, the longing to live, to hope, to remember.

Admiring Marlene Dietrich today comes easily because history vindicated her resistance. Which contemporary conviction would justify a similar break between you and an audience that celebrates you?

I cannot step into such footsteps. On the other hand, I do try to make a difference through the choices I make in my own work. My projects are more daring and compassionate than the films and songs Marlene Dietrich was known for. She was a great entertainer. I am not an entertainer in that way. I create stories through music that take the audience into a context, a world or a human experience that I care about. A vision of the future by Brecht, the poetry of liberation and political rebellion by Pablo Neruda, the abyss of Bukowski, the tragedy of Dietrich, the remembrance of the Holocaust, a story of a survivor, etc.

I create homages to composers, Weill, Piazzolla, Nyman and many others, and I engage with the words of writers and poets such as Neruda, Paulo Coelho, Charles Bukowski and Paul Celan and compose music to them. I want to create a story that wants to be told.

I don’t want to be celebrated. I just want to be heard.

Some mothers raise soldiers, vote for war and pass nationalist ideas to their children. Where do those women fit inside MOTHERS?

Here comes my middle verse:

“All children are equal in our world, all children are soft. Tell them nothing else, don’t seduce them with hate and pride… ’cause they see through your eyes.”

Of course those mothers do not fit into the vision of MOTHERS. But they are mothers, and I am speaking to them too. I am telling them to stop the brainwashing.

Children are not born with nationalism, hatred or the idea that another child across a border is their enemy. These ideas are taught to them. And mothers, like fathers, have an enormous responsibility for what they pass on to their children.

That is exactly what these lyrics are saying: your children see the world through your eyes. So be careful what you teach them to see.

Imagine a submission to Just Mothers that transforms the song into a political statement you deeply oppose. How would you respond to it?

That cannot really happen, because the lyrics speak very clearly. But if it nevertheless did happen, I would prohibit the use of my song and speak out publicly about the distortion and misinterpretation of its message. I would distance myself very clearly from it and, if necessary, openly criticize the political action or ideology that was trying to appropriate the song.