The Mumlers
A Friendly Hell Where Love Doesn't Happen
Oct 1, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Shawn Biggs
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Red River Hustle
original version appears on Thickets & Stitches
I used to be a motion picture projectionists & I had a guitar stashed in the projection booth. I wrote most of this song in between threading up projectors. It's sort of a collage of events that occurred outside of the window of the apartment I was living in at the time. Transvestite prostitutes, meth dealers on BMX bikes, stolen TVs in shopping carts rattling down the street at four in the morning were on my mind when I wrote it. I think the first time we recorded this song was the event that tied us together as a band. It was the first time all six of us worked on anything together. I played piano instead of the guitar I always play on this one. I have no idea how that's going to sound.
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Raise The Blinds
original version appears on Don't Throw Me Away
This song's always fun to play because it's got the galloping rhythm & the sudden changes. This song is kind of a reaction to watching my old roommates gamble all the time. I always lose when I gamble. I'm like the cooler... except the most recent time I was in a little casino in the middle of nowhere in Nevada because my cousin was getting married & I won 200 bucks playing Black Jack with a bunch of Basque sheep farmers. In our mind, the music is vaguely middle eastern.
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Tangled Up With You
original version appears on Don't Throw Me Away
It's a pretty straight-forward love song as far as the lyrics. It's about being too weak to pull yourself out of an unhealthy situation. Musically it's sort of a soul music/mariachi mutant that emerged from the nebulous heritage of our band. I always play this on guitar live. On the record version, I play guitar & piano. For this recording, I just played piano. I never heard the playback so am curious to hear how it came out. That goes for all these songs.
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Whale Song
original version appears on Thickets & Stitches
This one is a little finger-picking number that wrote itself pretty much. We never play this live. On the record I play it by myself. On this version, Müller sings harmony. I don't remember who played what... It's been over six months since we recorded these songs but one of us plays guitar and one of us plays autoharp. I'll probably be able to tell who's playing what when I hear it.
Will Sprott, the lead singer and songwriter for San Jose, Calif., band The Mumlers, takes us into the sordid lives of characters trying to live beneath the din, under the cover of shadows and behind versions of parapets that will absorb all of the justified or unjustified bullets. We're introduced to these people, who seem to be down on their luck or living with their heads spinning and spilling, cracked open at the hinges and exposed to all of the soggy elements. They're halfway gone, dragging their legs behind them, stricken with misfortune and paralyzing sadness brought to them through their welcomed vices. There's the gamblers, whittling their savings away via the black jack table and there are the street walkers owning their territories, all in this form of a hellacious setting, which could be anywhere else, but for them and for Sprott, it was home. Most of the characters, in their signature throes of seediness or degenerate station (though in the hands of the Mumlers, these terms are so romantic it hurts), are working it the best that they can. Sprott sounds like a southern soul singer and the Mumlers as a collective, sound like a loveable firmament, a single flickering light bulb swinging in a dirty basement, where the mildew's set in, but it's pleasant and cool, warm and inviting in a non-exclusive arrangement. They rumble through passionate takes on the desirous flares and flings of people who, for the most part, just want love and little drama. Sometimes things just go awry and that's when there are accidents, scabs and scars and messy, messy pieces to pick up or desert. That's when people get confused and the night sets in on them, throwing an arm over a shoulder and saying all of the sweet-talkin' right things, like a vulture smelling blood. Sprott is a writer's writer, turning glorious phrases and crafting storylines that employ classic sentiments and themes but tackle them with a unique touch that feels ancient and natural, as if he's got a playbook full of secret audibles that can just be claimed for his own. He sings, "My woman puckers her lips/They are the horses and she's the apocalypse/My woman moves her hips/She is the shoreline and I'm a ship" on "Red River Hustle" and it's a haunting waltz through a hell that's not just lurking on the horizon, but has bubbled over and is now moving into the neighborhood, getting its mail there and raising a family. We're there in a situation where it's all "blood under the bridge" and there's not all that much repentance going on or forgiveness being sought. It's just bygones and they'll be bygones if they're allowed to be, even one's that are so dastardly. Folks are left to act as they will in Mumlers songs and Sprott, along with his six-person band of players with countless instruments to their names, chronicles their mishaps and small triumphs with such gorgeous ease. These are tiring lives and questionable decisions that are framed with such elegance and bath water that feel as if they were and have been acceptable all along, that perhaps we're all a little bit off and this is nothing different. We are the same people stuck in the mud, in those ruts and we're all just spinning those wheels forgetting about all of the mud that's being shot out behind us. Sometimes sad things happen and love doesn't and that's just what has to be dealt with no matter what.
The Mumlers Official Site
