Band Interview: Hercules Mulligan

Games, Brrraaains & A Head-Banging Life are pleased to bring you an interview with indie rock band, Hercules Mulligan!

1. How did you get started as a band?

We (Trent & Ben) started playing music together when we were 15 years old to collaborate on a Jack Johnson cover (a very sad attempt at Flake) for a school assembly to try and impress the girls in our class. Since then, we’ve played in a couple different bands together that actually recorded and released music (Bare Bear, Father Teresa), but we didn’t start writing the songs for Hercules Mulligan until mid-2019.

2. How would you describe your sound?

We’re definitely some sort of indie rock band, but we don’t really know where we sit within that. Maybe neo-disco-synth-pop? I think that’s one of the things that makes us unique – we don’t really fit neatly within a genre nor do we try to. We usually start jamming with a beat, build around it until something feels good and we get in a groove, pick out some melodies, develop a coherent thought and write around that idea. Every song is a bit different.

3. What bands/artists would you say have influenced your style of music?

We’re both big music junkies so we pull from a lot of different places. Ben’s favorite band of all time is Led Zeppelin. My favorite singers of all time are James Brown, Otis Redding, and Bob Marley, but unfortunately, I sound nothing like any of them. We both were super into 2000s/2010s indie (The Shins, Delta Spirit, The Postal Service, MGMT, STRFKR, Edward Sharpe, Bon Iver, Vampire Weekend, LCD Soundsystem, Phoenix, etc…we could go on and on…). Recently, with how insane it feels like every single day is, we’ve found a lot of joy in music with fun, upbeat beats from all over the place: 70s Disco (Chic, Sister Sledge), 80s pop music (Tears For Fears, Hall & Oates) and 90s Hip Hop (Jurassic 5, A Tribe Called Quest) – there’s a whole lots of good music out there and we try to learn from all of it.

4. Has the rise of YouTube & music streaming helped or hindered you as a band?

Since this project is so recent, we haven’t really experienced a world without YouTube & Spotify. We’ve challenged ourselves to figure out how to make our own music videos, and we’re pretty happy with how they’ve turned out so far, particularly our video for Hermosa Henry. We’re both huge fans of Spotify as consumers and we feel like it’s allowed us to reach people with our music we never would have had a chance to reach before the existence of streaming. In the past month, we’ve seen streams come in from 86 different countries, which is pretty crazy to see. Hopefully the guy in Kazakhstan who streamed our song this week is digging it.

5. What do you enjoy doing when you’re not making music?

Playing pickup basketball, golfing, volunteering on political campaigns. Walking the dog. Cooking dinner with our significant others. Wow – in writing that, I just realized we’re basically 80 year old men.

6. What are your future plans musically? Tours?

We’ll be releasing our debut album by the end of 2020. Since it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to play live anytime soon, we’ll probably just keep on working on new material and try to put out another album by the end of 2021. Gotta just keep rocking.

Links

Website | Spotify | Instagram | YouTube