What is Pollyanna, the Mother song?

Pollyanna (I Believe in You) is the signature song of the Mother series. Keiichi Suzuki composed the melody for the first game's soundtrack; for the 1989 Mother vocal album, lyricist Linda Hennrick gave it English words and Catherine Warwick, then a teenage singer, performed it as a full pop recording, the album's opening track.

The title names the stance the whole series takes. A Pollyanna is a person who believes in people past the point of evidence, and the song's narrator believes in a traveling companion the same way; in the games, the tune itself plays in the first game's opening town and returns, rearranged, in both sequels, alongside other durable Suzuki and Tanaka themes like Snowman.

Its afterlife is unusually documented for a game theme. Suzuki re-recorded it, singing himself, for Mother Music Revisited in 2021, thirty-two years after the original. And when Hobonichi needed a title for its official tribute comic in 2020, it chose Pollyanna, the song standing in for the series' entire emotional position.

The Library's page on the 1989 album covers the record as a whole; this page is for the song, the one piece of Mother music a person can hum having never played a minute of the games.