Melbourne folk rock duo Green Mules have recently dropped their new EP Play Labradorable. Born from a solo effort by Rob Webb who was producing music under the name Labradorable the Green Mules because Green Mules when Rob recruited mate Chris McNeilage to join the fold on drums.
As Rob explains the evolution of the band “since Chris came onboard, it’s developed from a dude with a looping pedal into something that sounds like a band. Chris and I played together in a band called Disgracelands that had two lives, one at the end of the 90s/start of the 2000s, and it reawakened for a couple of years around 2008.
He’s a great drummer because he listens; most drummers I know whip their bands along like stagecoach drivers. He’s played in a bunch of bands, but his main one was The Record Boys who kicked around from the end of the 90s till the end of the 00s.”
To celebrate the release of the duo’s local gem of an EP Rob has given us a track by track run down of this endearing release. If you like what you’re hearing pop by the band’s Facebook page for more info on upcoming shows and releases.
Walk Away
The verse and chorus of Walk Away were written in an empty classroom where I teach during the last week of school when stuff-all kids are around. The lyrics were written much later.
They are about a tragic couple from my home town who left their partners and children to be together then holed up in a rundown house on the outskirts of town and drank themselves to death.
Our Anniversary
This one is about a night my wife and I spent in a hotel in Albert Park a week before she gave birth to our first child. My uncle is a sheep farmer and he won a night’s accommodation in the city when he bought some drench (sheep medicine). He didn’t want it – the hotel room, not the drench – so he gave it to us and we used it on a our first wedding anniversary.
I’d promised my wife I’d stop pissing around with band stuff a couple of months before she was due but I kept playing shows and rehearsing, so the song is partly about the guilt I felt for using up this time selfishly, but mostly the song is permeated with nostalgia for our last few moments together as a couple before our daughter’s arrival changed our lives.
Stubbsy
Last year I saw a dude who was a couple of years ahead of me in school in ‘the people you may know’ section of Facebook and he’d changed so much in the twenty years since that I barely recognised him.
Seeing him reminded me of a day down at the swimming hole when I was thirteen or fourteen. A local creep who was in his thirties had brought a couple of casks of Fruity Lexia down to the river and the older kids were already wasted – I reckon it wasn’t even eleven in the morning by this stage. The guy I mentioned seeing on Facebook fell off the end of the diving board and it looked like he was going to drown.
Later that day one of the other older kids pinned a girl from the year above me on the ground and ripped off her bikini top. I felt shitty and scared and cowardly that I’d just stood there terrified and I hadn’t helped her. In the last verse I imagine what the guy I saw on Facebook’s life is like now – he’s meeting his children in a McDonald’s in Morwell on an access weekend and driving a forklift three days a week at Bunnings.
Seven Stars
I wrote this when I was living in Kyoto in 2001. Some friends used to come around to my house on Saturday nights and we’d play and get drunk. We called ourselves the Golden Salaryman.
Our songs, including this one, were named after brands of cigarettes favoured by salarymen (Japanese business men). We played a couple of times in local bars and cafes before going our separate ways.
I’m Not Here
This one was written in Japan too, although the lyrics came a few years later when Chris (drums) and I salvaged it in a band we did together called Disgracelands. The first line of the song is pinched from Seven and Seven Is by Love. The rest of the lyrics are nonsensical.
