Publication : V13 Media
By : Aaron Willschick
Date : September 22, 2026
Ute Lemper has released “MOTHERS,” an international peace project built around one original song presented across 17 languages and cultures.
Photo of Ute Lemper by Jim Rakete
Internationally acclaimed singer, actress, composer and recording artist Ute Lemper today releases “MOTHERS,” a new international peace project built around one original song presented across 17 languages and cultures.
Arriving on the International Day of Peace, “MOTHERS” begins with something immediate and universal: the instinct to protect children, worry about their future and create the conditions in which they can grow. Across its many versions, the song carries the same central message while moving through different languages and musical traditions, calling for peace, freedom, equality and dignity across borders, religions and political systems.
The release is accompanied by a new video that moves between hopeful imagery and real footage of protests and demonstrations around the world, reflecting both the song’s urgency and Lemper’s belief in people’s power to speak up for change.
“What unites us is a lot more important than what separates us. No mother wants to lose her child in a war, as a soldier, as a victim of war, as a victim of a humanitarian crisis that is created by war.”
Lemper first wrote “MOTHERS” while hosting a European television series of the same name. Across three seasons, she spoke with women from different professions, including athletes, doctors and politicians, about motherhood. She wrote and recorded a song for the program, but the producers ultimately chose instrumental music instead.
Lemper kept the song.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute, the time will come.’ I will find another way to recreate it, to bring it out into the world.”
That time arrived this spring. Lemper returned to the recording amid wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, a renewed sense of geopolitical division and her own growing anxiety about the world her four children will inherit. She revisited the lyrics as well, sharpening the song’s call for peace, freedom and equality.
What began as one song gradually expanded into a multilingual project spanning English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, Farsi, French and Kurdish. Within that international framework, Lemper also wove in themes of women’s emancipation and liberation from restrictive doctrines, giving the project a broader call for dignity, agency and human rights.
The lyrics begin with refuge and care, then become increasingly direct. Mothers are described as an “army of love,” asking for dignity, tolerance, equality, rights and the ability to elect their leaders. By the song’s final section, the focus turns entirely toward children: “All children are equal in our world.”
The project also continues a thread that has run through Lemper’s work for more than four decades.
Growing up in Münster, Germany, Lemper discovered the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weillas a teenager in the late 1970s. She found in Brecht a writer who understood art as a means of confronting injustice, political failure and human weakness, and went on to become one of the leading international interpreters of Weill, Brecht and the music of Weimar Germany.
Over the decades that followed, Lemper moved through Broadway and the West End, won Olivier and Molière Awards, earned GRAMMY nominations, and interpreted artists ranging from Marlene Dietrich and Édith Piaf to Jacques Brel and Astor Piazzolla. Her own projects increasingly explored political conscience, memory and the responsibility of artists to engage with the world around them.
Click here to read the original article online.