Motor Sister emerged from the vision of Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian as an all-star hard rock collective assembled expressly to honor and perform material by the Los Angeles groove/blues-rock band Mother Superior. That group had dissolved in the early 2000s following eight studio albums and a stint as Henry Rollins’s backing band. The collective first appeared in 2015 with Ride, a set devoted to Mother Superior songs, before issuing its own original material on the 2022 follow-up Get Off.
A longtime admirer, Ian sought both a reunion of the disbanded act and his own participation for his 50th birthday. His wife, vocalist Pearl Aday, who had already collaborated musically with Mother Superior frontman Jim Wilson over several years, helped realize the plan. Wilson, Aday, and fellow musicians Joey Vera (Fates Warning, Armored Saint) and John Tempesta (White Zombie) soon joined Ian at his rehearsal space to rehearse numbers. Taking its name from the Mother Superior song “Little Motor Sister,” the newly formed Motor Sister premiered at Ian’s 50th-birthday celebration; the chemistry proved strong enough that the members resolved to record together. The resulting Ride, containing twelve fresh versions of Mother Superior staples such as “Devil Wind,” “Beg Borrow Steal,” and “A Hole,” appeared on Metal Blade in March 2015. For several subsequent years the project functioned primarily as a live act whose appearances depended on the members’ individual schedules. Those schedules eventually aligned once more, yielding 2022’s Get Off. Captured live in the studio, the album comprised eleven original compositions plus a reading of Mother Superior’s “Rolling Boy Blues.”
