Mulligrub - Sound In The Signals Interview

First off thanks for the interview
Kelly: No problem!

Your new album Soft Grudge just came out. Can you tell me a little about the recording process and writing process of the album?
The songs on this album were written by me over the course of about six years and arranged by the band during the past three. We recorded instruments at Private ear in Winnipeg with Riley Hill (our drummer, we are super lucky to have a very talented recording engineer/producer in our band!) about a year ago and vocals/instrument overdubs over the five months before it came out.
 So this album has been a pretty long time coming!
I will usually write a song because I have some feelings and I don't know how to or don't have any opportunity to talk about them. I can write a song and be like, alright, I have used these feelings for good and now I don't have to worry about them as much.

"Mountains & Houses" is one of my favorite tracks off the new album. Can you tell me specifically about the writing process of that song both musically and lyrically?
It will sound like I made this up, but I wrote the riff to that song while living on a raft on Long Lake, Nova Scotia in 2011. My friends and I were really into the movie Waterworld (Kevin Costner anyone?) so we decided to build a raft house and live on an atoll for a month (or a moon cycle if you are a diehard). It was pretty silly and weird, as per drifter's law we would trade with all the people canoeing on the lake, mostly they would try to give us weed but we didn't smoke. We had tomoato plants next to the tent initially but they were destroyed by the wind. We had a little tent and a camp stove on the raft and there wasn't much to do besides read and swim and play music so I played a lot of music. It was nice, like having a free cabin with the best lakeside access ever.
The words I wrote a few months later while on my first tour with my old band The Rumble Strips. It was the first time I had ever been to BC and driving through the mountains really weirded me out -  you would come to this stunning valley and there would be all these suburban development houses with perfect lawns and right behind the fence would be huge trees and the sublime/terrifying beauty of the mountains. It seemed like the houses, or whoever built them, were extremely determined to ignore their context, and it was very ridiculous and surreal to me. Like western colonial development wants the natural beauty of the mountains as a commodity to use to sell houses, so the landscape is transformed on a market whim to this weirdo isolated suburb town where your backyard is a wild nature postcard but you also have a two car garage and TMZ.
And thematically I think that led me to think about/ make connections to mental health, and ignoring bad relationships or habits out of complacency, as I've always been a basket case and that is a common theme in my writing. I suppose that song was a way for me to think through the difference between being unaware and intentionally evasive or ignorant of capitalist/relationship/personal destruction, and how taking the 'neutral' position or doing nothing is de facto support of shitty patterns.


You're putting the album on cassette as well as CD. With vinyl and cassette listening and collecting culture so big now how important was it for you to have it available on cassette? Any chance you will do a vinyl release as well?
It was very important to me! I have a sh*t iPod and no CD player so cassettes are the primary way I listen to music. Cassettes are just a very nice object to hold in your hand, and as a designer (I did all the design and artwork for the album) it is the most fun thing to design. CDs are kind of all the same, but cassettes you can get in all different bright colors – our cassette are this very saturated (to the point of being dark pink) cool red color called Rubine Red and I am salivating right now thinking about how much I love that color. I am an artist as well and color is very important to me. A friend recently described tapes as a kind of artist multiple and I would agree with that. They have this tactile and physical quality you can only get with analog media that I love so much.
I don't have as much of a boner for vinyl – I just never got into it because of the cost – but I like how you also have cool colour and design options for the media itself. As for a vinyl release – it's a bit beyond our price range, but if any record labels are reading this right now, we would be right into talking about that with you – mulligrubmusic@gmail.com ;-)

You are going to be touring for this new album. What can people expect from these shows in terms of your set list and live show?
Our set list will mostly be songs from the album, although we do have a few new ones that aren't on there that we'll be playing. We had to learn a mandatory cover (Eternal Flame by the Bangles) to play Rockin 4 Dollars in Edmonton so maybe we will bust that out at some other shows as well.

If you had to pick one new song off the album for people who are not familiar with your band to check out what song would it be and why?
I didn't know how to answer this so I asked Riley and Mirella. Mirella said “Anyways However because it's a universal heartbreak story that people can relate to.” Riley said “Canadian Classic cause it's grungy and it's rockin and no one talks about it anymore but it's good. It's like Mulligrub's Smells Like Teen Spirit. But more Neil Youngy.”

I guess that about wraps it up. Thanks for taking the time to answer the questions. Do you have anything else you would like to add?
Thanks for asking us! Thanks for reading! Come to our shows if you're in these towns (!) – here are the dates:
May 6, 2016: Saskatoon @ Amigos
May 7, 2016: Regina @ German Club
May 8, 2016: Calgary @ Broken City
May 9, 2016: Edmonton @ The Buck (R4$)
May 11, 2016: Vancouver @ The Orchard
May 13, 2016: Victoria @ Vinyl Envy
May 14, 2016: Vancouver @ Franklin Studios
May 15, 2016: Kamloops @ The Office
May 18, 2016: Lethbridge @ Attainable Records
May 19, 2016: Edmonton @ 9910
May 20, 2016: Regina @ Dr. Coffee

Mulligrub bio:
Much like a burnt marshmallow, Mulligrub is angry on the outside and tender on the inside. The Winnipeg trio plays melody-driven songs with tweeish tendencies informed by the scrappy spirit of DIY punk; bittersweet but mostly bitter, they can be found singing songs about the last day of summer or friends you'll never see again. Kelly Campbell sings and plays guitar, J Riley Hill sings and plays drums, Mirella Villa plays bass, and they all have too many feelings.