Q&A: Mulherin Paints Tender Pictures of Love and Heartbreak on ‘Paper and Plastic 01’ EP
MAKING SENSITIVE AND LUSH R&B TO SOOTHE THE SOUL — twin brothers Marshall and Parker Mulherin explore emotional distance. The duo’s latest EP, Paper and Plastic 01, features four tracks that explore the ups and downs that come with opening your heart.
Currently based in Los Angeles, California, the duo’s music feels right at home under the city’s perpetually cerulean skies. It feels like a cool breeze or an afternoon drive with the windows down; the smell of jasmine lingering in the spring air. They want their songs to make you feel good, but their lyrics never lack emotional heft. Above all, they aim to make music that is sincere and authentic.
As artistic collaborators, Marshall and Parker support and deepen each other’s work. They started making music together as college students, inspired by the creativity of the people around them. They work together to bring their songs to fruition, playing with lyrics and arrangements as they push tracks to new places that they can only reach together. By combining their talents, they construct a rich sonic atmosphere that feels full of love and hope.
It’s easy to be cynical these days, but listening to Paper and Plastic 01, you just might feel your pessimism melting away. Mulherin shows us that even when it hurts, keeping your heart open is worthwhile.
Read below to learn more about the duo and the process of creating Paper and Plastic 01.
LUNA: First of all, congrats on the new EP — so exciting. This project is about love and the positive feelings involved with that, but also the pain. I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about what draws you to explore these themes in your music.
PARKER: It’s funny — going through our discography of the last few years, most of our songs are sad songs. When I want to write something that's true to me and emotionally striking and I sit down to do something, a lot of times I’m in a really pensive or sentimental mood. Situationally, it can be inspiring.
MARSHALL: When people talk about writing to figure out how you feel about a situation, you are trying to find the details in something that are making you feel a certain way. It takes drafts of writing. It’s easier to do that with situations that affect you in a more emotional way than “Oh I’m really happy — I’m going to write a song about being happy.” It can be harder to make something interesting and nuanced if you’re just like, “It was a good day.” That’s one way I want to push myself more as a writer. “Somebody I Know I’d Miss” has both sides: I like being with this person, and imagining not being with them is kind of crazy. That was [what we were] trying to explore a little bit more — not just being a song about love lost.
PARKER: If you’re making music and starting ideas alone at night in your room, you’re just not like, “Dude, let’s party.” It’s an introspective environment.
LUNA: I love that. I definitely did a lot of my creative homework for school in my room around 11 p.m. It’s a very generative space.
PARKER: Yeah, it's a specific tone that can be created if you’re just doing chords on guitar. A lot of times if I'm doing chords, I'm not like, “I’ve got to slap some drums on these.”
LUNA: This whole EP sounds lush and atmospheric. What inspires your sound?
PARKER: We used to not have a lot of synths and stuff like that. It was almost by necessity — Logic has a ton of stock synthesizers that sound good, but I just didn’t know how to use synths all that well. We either recorded all the sounds or it was more natural-sounding things. That just sort of became what our sound was.
MARSHALL: We’d create samplers of sounds that we’d record with our phones and drag those in and put them on a keyboard.
PARKER: Yeah. The more we kept doing it, we thought it was cool and refreshing to not have everything be full, loud synths that are really compressed.
MARSHALL: The more naturalistic sound became the thing. All the drums on “Last Time” were samples that you [Parker] had recorded. It’s a product of what we’re around. What’s laying around the house? Is it guitars? Whenever we’re home, we have a piano. We’re always trying to find a more natural palette of live instruments. We delved into doing live drums on this project a little bit, which was cool. A lot of times, it’s just sequencing out sounds that we’ve recorded or picking samples that feel textural. We want everything to feel textural.
LUNA: Would you say you're inspired by the space around you while you're making music? How does where you are when you're writing or recording impact you?
PARKER: Yeah, I would say so. It’s easy to make music that’s 100% in the box, meaning in the computer where it’s all software. It can almost be uninspiring sometimes. So it’s fun to think of ways where we can do stuff that feels more out of the box. Like, this is a thing that I’m recording in. It feels more tactile and real.
MARSHALL: In terms of what inspired this sound, there wasn’t a specific person. We’ll just kind of start with chords and think, “Cool, this feels like this tempo. Let’s try and play into this tempo.” But there’s never an artist or song that we’re really trying to emulate, really.
PARKER: I influence myself. (Laughs)
LUNA: That’s true originality.
PARKER: Yeah, who do I listen to? Myself.
MARSHALL: I am my biggest inspiration. No — I was listening to Arthur Russell and then we made “Somebody I Know I’d Miss.” It was [a] more up-tempo, drum machine feel. Usually, we just happen upon stuff. It can be a funny way to work where you’re constantly happening upon things. It can be great, because there’s no clear line sometimes on what you’re drawing from, but it can be funny when you’re in a rut and you just start at this random place. You’re like, “Dude, what the fuck is this?” You’re making something and you’re like, “This kind of sucks.” So it’s kind of good. I feel like I’m coming to a point now where I’m trying to find the balance between being in a rut and thinking, “I’m just going to make something that sounds like this because I like this song right now,” and building yourself that way and being a producer. I’m trying not to overly draw from direct references at any point.
LUNA: How do family and community in general impact your creative process and the way that you make music?
PARKER: Huge. We didn’t make music until we went to college and met people who did. I think it seems like an obscure idea at first. It seems like an impenetrable thing. When we went to school, our friend Zack Villere was one of the first real producers that I met. Also, there are all the people that we met out here [in LA] when we first moved here. It’s huge. Being around people who you think are good and who inspire you is huge. The community thing is super important.
MARSHALL: When you’re sending songs back and forth and you want to impress, you think, “What’s something cool I’ve made recently that I can send this person that I think they would like?” It’s fun to hear what they’re working on and you see them working on stuff. Here’s their setup, here’s how they can make this stuff. It got rid of that mystique that first kept us from making music. As you get further along and collaborate with people and see how other people work, it demystifies their music too. It’s like, I can maybe bring parts of that into my process: the way they write, the way they record their drums or background vocals. Even with us two, we’re a two-person community.
Our process is being refined constantly, but for a while we were just trying to establish ourselves. I didn’t want to be reliant on [Parker] to write a song, because I felt like when we first started making stuff I couldn’t really write a full song by myself. We were working separately and then would try to finish ideas together. But we’ve become more collaborative. Through doing that separately and finding our own voices and ways of doing things as producers, we’ve found ways that we complement each other and are okay with having slightly different things that we are better at. I feel like Parker is better at sitting down and banging out a song; being able to write something good quickly. I’m way more methodical — I’m like, “I’ve gotta rewrite this verse,” and I need to have five drafts. The methodical thing is also good for seeing songs through to the end and producing them out. We’ve both gotten better at doing that together.
LUNA: Given that it is this kind of collaborative process, do you guys ever have conflicts or disagreements about how you want something to be as a final product? If so, how do you work through that?
PARKER: Yeah, totally. There will be songs that one of us will have taken the lead on, and the other one’s like, “I don’t know.” Sometimes there are songs that don’t come out, that doesn’t get finished. There are songs where it starts like that and we’ll work through it.
MARSHALL: And the song is better because of that. Even “Dance With You” was that way for a second. Parker had written the first hook and verse — it was in that form for a while and it was just over two chords. I liked it, the writing was cool, and there was just something about it that I didn’t like, so we changed the chords on the verses and it felt like a new song. We both got excited about it and we both went in and finished it. So I try to have that mindset more. When I don’t love something and I don’t know why I try to work through it and give the song an honest chance.
LUNA: Yeah, and maybe through that process you can reach new points that you wouldn't have otherwise.
MARSHALL: Totally.
LUNA: Is there anything in particular you want your listeners to leave with after listening to this Paper and Plastic 01?
PARKER: I just hope it feels sincere. I don’t like writing, music, or art that’s trying to impress. You can tell when someone wants you to think they’re smart in the way they write. Especially in songwriting today, there are people who are naturally great writers, and then there are people who are like, “I want you to know that I read poetry.” And of course I think it’s important to read prose or poetry to feel inspired, but I don’t like when it feels like people are forcing it or something. I just want it to feel natural and sincere.
MARSHALL: I don’t want it to feel like, “Man, this is impressive music.” I don’t want it to be impressive — I just want it to feel good. “Sincere” is a good word. I recently had this conversation with a friend [about how] with a lot of music now there are all these tricks. It’s like, “I bet you didn’t expect this to happen.” I think that can be great, and it can be fun to do stuff that’s surprising. I’m constantly trying to surprise myself. But sometimes I wonder what the point of it is. What is the purpose? It’s just constantly flexing. It loses the honesty.
LUNA: What were your takeaways from making this EP? Did it change your perspectives at all?
MARSHALL: We were figuring out how we like to produce things together and figuring out our process. We realized [that] when we had a project we were like, “Cool, let’s sit and bang these out and try to be more pro about finishing them.” We were feeling more pro about song structure and arrangement and being more intentional. You’re always thinking about that when you’re making stuff, and usually, our projects just come together over time. We’ll have all these songs that fit together. With these, we realized earlier in the process that they were going to be on a project together. We were then able to approach finishing them more at the same time. We were getting better at finishing songs and being intentional with arrangements.
LUNA: I also wanted to ask you about the visuals accompanying this project. I've seen the “Dance with You” music video and I love the black and white split screen. What kind of role do visuals play in your music?
MARSHALL: With visual stuff, I’m not thinking, “I see colors; I see images” as we make music. But it’s definitely gotten to a point over the last few years where we’ve found a visual language that feels good for us. It’s way more intuitive now. We have a collaborator in Nik Arthur, who we did the video with. Nik and I directed the video. He has a similar thing where it’s very tactile and physically manipulated, and that was something we had been diving into before. The visuals are not created in tandem when we’re making music. But it’s funny how after the fact it is so in tandem and we’re super aware of that. When you listen to something, the way it’s presented really colors the way you think about it — for better or worse. If you’re listening to something on Spotify and the album art is wack to you, even if you like the song, you’ll think, “Man, I don’t know if I’m going to like this.” It colors your experience in a negative way. Having everything feel consistent and like a world can help take it over the line for people to where they think, “Oh cool, I’m inhabiting this world that the music is establishing first.” In short, it’s a vibe. (Laughs)
LUNA: You're creating this whole sense of atmosphere with all these different parts of the project, which is really cool. It seems like 2022 is off to an exciting start for you guys with the release of this EP. Is there anything that you hope the rest of this year holds for you?
MARSHALL: We’re doing another EP. It’s Paper and Plastic 02, so just finishing those songs. We might have one or two collabs on it, which we rarely do. Hopefully those will come through. I think we’ve only done one song as a collab; it was a song on our last EP from a couple years ago — we had a song with Dijon. We’re trying to do more of that because it’s fun. After we drop the EP, we will hopefully be doing some shows — nice little headline stuff. We would love to do a New York show. We’ve never really done a NY show.
PARKER: Get an opening slot for someone or something. Who knows.
MARSHALL: I want to travel more this year, collaborate more, and be more open as a creative person and just as a person in general. I’m trying to open myself a little more. When the pandemic started, everyone had to close off naturally. It’s been a steady process of trying to open ourselves back up to the world. That’s a big goal for me. Parker has been killing it on that front as well, just being an open guy.
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