What is the Mother soundtrack album?

The game Mother reached the Famicom in 1989 with a score by Keiichi Suzuki, a rock musician Shigesato Itoi brought in from outside the game industry, and Nintendo composer Hirokazu Tanaka. Suzuki has noted that the hardware fought him the whole way: the NES could play only three notes at a time, which limited the sounds he wanted to make. On August 21, 1989, CBS Sony released the album simply titled Mother, and on it those three note melodies finally got their full arrangements.

The album holds eleven tracks, seven of them English vocal arrangements of music from the game, arranged by Suzuki with David Bedford, Takeshi Saitoh, and Michael Nyman, with lyrics by Linda Hennrick and every song produced by Suzuki. The voices were British. Catherine Warwick, fourteen years old at the recording, sings the leads on Pollyanna (I Believe in You), Bein' Friends, and Wisdom of the World. The St Paul's Cathedral Choir sings Eight Melodies, the game's central tune, and Louis Philippe and Jeb Million take a song each. The liner notes written for the album's vinyl reissue call the emphasis on English vocal songs a little weird even by the standards of its day, which is part of the charm: a Japanese game about an imagined America, sung back in English.

The melodies refused to stay on one album. Pollyanna, Snowman, and Humoresque of a Little Dog return in all three Mother games. The album itself was reissued in remastered and expanded form on February 18, 2004, and in 2015 the American label Ship to Shore Phono Co. gave it a licensed vinyl pressing, liner notes and all, with a Mother 2 vinyl following. Few Famicom scores got a record like this. Mother's whole identity is in it.