best of 2025 • The Beths • "Mother, Pray For Me"

“Mother, Pray For Me” is stripped-down and intensely personal. Over plaintive finger-picked guitar, Stokes’ voice is childlike in its wistful plea for connection. Here, Stokes grapples with the lives her parents have led, their mortality, and how to see them as people who did their best, even when it might not have felt like enough. “I cried the whole time writing it,” Stokes reflects. “It's not really about my mother, it's about me —what I hope our relationship is, what I think it is, what it maybe actually is, and what I can or can't expect out of it.” anti