In 2018, Tiff Randol (USA) and Mary Leay (UK) were both navigating the early chaos of motherhood—nursing newborns, wrestling with postpartum recovery, and trying to hold on to their music careers in an industry that wasn’t built  a support them. What they didn’t have was community. And that absence was deafening.

Tiff had recently given birth when her management team stepped away. With her husband away on set and no roadmap for how to juggle a creative career alongside the demands of new motherhood, she felt the ground shift beneath her. Searching for connection, she sent an email to a women’s music group with a simple question: Is there any group out there specifically for mothers in music?
 

That email landed with Chloe Pullinger, an A&R at Reservoir Media and a mother herself, who forwarded it to her artist Mary Leay. Mary had just signed a publishing deal and was trying to balance studio sessions, expectations, and the intense mental load of new parenthood—all while feeling like she had to hide just how hard it really was.

“That email cracked something open,” Mary recalls.

“I didn’t want to seem like I couldn’t handle it, but I was struggling. I felt alone.”

From that moment, Tiff and Mary began exchanging honest, raw conversations about the invisible weight mothers in music carry—how opportunities dry up, how silence is expected, and how the myth of “doing it all” quietly crushes so many.

They didn’t set out to build an organization. They were just two exhausted mothers showing up for each other. But in that search for solidarity, they uncovered something much bigger: a global need for change.
 

In 2019, Mamas in Music was born—not in a boardroom, but in the margins of nap schedules, night feeds, and 3 a.m. voice notes. It became the first global nonprofit supporting mothers across every corner of the music industry—artists, songwriters, composers, executives, and more. What began as a grassroots collective has grown into a global movement, offering everything from song camps and sync opportunities to community support, education, and advocacy.
 

We didn’t build this because we had extra time.
We built it because we had to.

Because motherhood doesn’t mean pressing pause on your passion.
And in Mamas in Music, no mama has to do it alone.