The Mulligan Brothers give hometown fans a first listen to their new album Via Portland at a pre-release show Wednesday, December 10, at the Joe Jefferson Playhouse in Mobile.
Tickets are $10 through Brown Paper Tickets, with Oh Jeremiah opening the 7:30 p.m. show.
The venue is part of the story. The Joe Jefferson Playhouse has been a Mobile institution for generations, a community theater that usually stages plays rather than concerts, and booking a hometown band’s album premiere onto its stage gives the night a feel somewhere between a show and a hometown celebration. The room’s acoustics and intimacy suit a band built on storytelling, and the $10 ticket price keeps the evening within reach of the local audience that has followed the group from bar gigs to bigger rooms.
Opening act Oh Jeremiah adds its own local flavor. The pair’s stripped-down, harmony-driven songs have made them a fixture of the Gulf Coast’s independent music scene, and the pairing gives the bill a cohesive, acoustic-leaning shape from the first note.
The band and the name
The Mobile-and-Baton Rouge band — Ross Newell on lead vocals, guitar and songwriting; Gram Rea on fiddle, mandolin, viola, harmonica and vocals; Ben Leininger on bass and vocals; Greg DeLuca on drums and vocals — met playing bars around Mobile before taking a name that means second chances.
The mulligan of the band’s name, golf slang for a do-over, captures both the group’s origins and its sound. Four players who found each other in Mobile’s bar circuit, with backgrounds split between Alabama and Louisiana, built a band on songs about mistakes, redemption and second acts, delivered with the instrumental vocabulary of folk and roots music. Newell writes the songs; Rea’s fiddle, mandolin and viola give them their texture; and the rhythm section of Leininger and DeLuca carries the groove that has made the group a draw across the Gulf Coast and beyond.
That bar-band apprenticeship shaped the album’s material. Songs that went over well at closing time on Dauphin Street became the foundation of the new record, tested and revised in front of live audiences before they were ever committed to tape.
Recording in Portland
They cut the new album in September at Portland’s Ice Cream Studio, hence the title, with Grammy-winning producer Steve Berlin of Los Lobos and engineer Jeff Saltzman.
Berlin brings credentials few producers can match. A longtime member of Los Lobos, the Los Angeles band whose career spans roots rock, Mexican-American folk and a famous catalog of Grammy-winning records, he has spent decades as a saxophonist, keyboardist and producer for artists across the American music map. For a young band from Mobile, landing him behind the board for a follow-up album is the kind of break most unsigned groups never get.
“A friend gave me the Mulligan Brothers’ first CD and I told them to call me if they wanted my help with the next one,” Berlin said. “It was a slam dunk. The songs are great and the band is great. Ross’ voice is a unique, magical instrument.”
The producer’s praise zeroes in on what separates the band from the pack. Newell’s voice, a reedy, expressive instrument that carries the emotional weight of his songs, is the sound the group is built around, and Berlin’s endorsement gave the project credibility with listeners far beyond Alabama. Working in Portland, a city with a deep indie and Americana recording culture, put the band in front of engineers and session players outside their home scene, and the studio’s name — borrowed for the album title — turned a practical choice into a piece of the record’s identity.
From debut to national release
Via Portland arrives nationally January 20, 2015, as the follow-up to the band’s 2013 debut, which built a national following and landed in the top ten of CD sales at the 2014 New Orleans Jazz Fest.
That Jazz Fest statistic says a lot about the band’s trajectory. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival draws hundreds of thousands of fans each spring and sells music from artists around the world, and a young band from Mobile cracking its top ten in CD sales means the songs were finding strangers, not just hometown friends. Touring had done the rest: the band plays most nights each week, and the new songs took shape in front of audiences on tours reaching Pittsburgh, New York, Oklahoma and Texas.
The road-worn approach to songwriting shows in the record’s arrangement choices. A group that performs four or five nights a week learns which verses hold a quiet room and which choruses lift a loud one, and Via Portland was assembled by players who already knew their material the way veterans do, from repetition in front of paying crowds.
What comes after the Playhouse
Local dates continue after the Playhouse show: The Frog Pond at Blue Moon Farm in Silverhill, and a New Year’s Eve appearance with Kristy Lee at The Hangout in Gulf Shores.
Both follow-up dates are landmarks in their own right for Gulf Coast music fans. The Frog Pond at Blue Moon Farm is a beloved listening room on a farm property in Baldwin County, the kind of intimate, bring-your-own-chair venue where songwriters get a respectful, attentive audience, and its stage has hosted national acts alongside the region’s best. The Hangout, the beachfront entertainment complex at the heart of Gulf Shores, brings a far bigger crowd for the New Year’s Eve show with Kristy Lee, capping the band’s year on one of the coast’s most visible stages.
The routing reflects a band that has never stopped playing home. Even as the national release approaches and touring pulls them farther from Alabama, the Mulligan Brothers keep anchoring their calendar with the rooms that built them, from Mobile’s bar circuit to Baldwin County’s farm stages to the beach in Gulf Shores. The December 10 premiere sits in the middle of that pattern: a hometown audience, a hometown venue and a first listen to the record that will carry their name nationally in January.
Why the homecoming matters
Every touring act eventually faces the question of what to do with the audience that was there first, and the Mulligan Brothers’ answer has been to keep them in the loop. The pre-release show puts Via Portland in front of Mobile fans six weeks before the record hits stores, a courtesy that doubles as a celebration of the local scene that made the band possible.
The night at the Joe Jefferson Playhouse will gather all the threads at once: the songwriting Newell built in bars, the band Berlin praised, the audience the debut album assembled and the hometown pride that follows a Gulf Coast group onto a national stage. When Oh Jeremiah opens at 7:30 p.m., the evening becomes a showcase of the region’s music scene with a national release on the horizon, and when the Mulligan Brothers take the stage of a theater better known for community theater productions, the material on their setlists will already belong, in a sense, to everyone in the room.
Inside the album
The recording sessions in Portland gave Via Portland a different character from the band’s 2013 debut. Where a first record is often captured quickly with whatever resources a young band has, a sophomore album made with an established producer allows arrangement, performance and sound to be shaped deliberately, and Berlin’s track record with roots-rock and American songwriting made him a natural fit for the Mulligan Brothers’ material.
For the four players, the studio process capped months of touring with the very songs they were recording. The band’s habit of playing most nights each week meant the material was already broken in, and the studio sessions became less about inventing the songs than about capturing them at full strength. Engineer Jeff Saltzman’s role in that capture, translating the band’s live chemistry into a record, rounded out the Portland team that gave the album its name.
The release plan followed the industry’s long-game logic. A December 10 hometown premiere, a January 20 national release and a continued touring schedule form a sequence designed to let word of mouth build from Mobile outward, exactly the path the debut took. The band’s management and label hopes rest on the same formula that carried the first record into Jazz Fest’s top ten: relentless live performance, songs that connect and a home region that keeps showing up.
The scene that raised them
The Mulligan Brothers’ rise is also a story about the Gulf Coast’s music infrastructure. Mobile’s bar scene gave the band its first stages, Baldwin County’s listening rooms gave it attentive audiences, and the region’s festivals gave it exposure to traveling crowds. Bands rarely emerge from nowhere, and this one came up through the same circuit of venues, bookers and fans that has sustained Gulf Coast songwriters for decades.
Oh Jeremiah’s slot on the bill reflects that ecosystem as well. Two local acts on one stage, sharing an audience and a billing, is how the region’s scene reproduces itself, and a sold-out Playhouse show benefits both. The same logic carries into the Frog Pond date in Silverhill and the Hangout’s New Year’s Eve party with Kristy Lee, where the band shares the stage with another Gulf Coast favorite in front of a holiday crowd.
For Mobile music fans, the December 10 show is a chance to say they heard Via Portland first, weeks before the rest of the country could buy it. For the band, it is a homecoming that doubles as a launch, played in a room they grew up around, for the people who were listening before anyone else was.