About Us

Without music life would be a mistake.  --  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

When, exactly, did music magazines stop taking music seriously?

Mule Variations is a different breed of online music magazine.  We’re bringing back the long form and providing a public forum for serious - and hilarious - discussions of music and ideas.  We feature demanding long form articles, recurring, occasionally strange, columns, and lengthy, often untimely, reviews.  Mule Variations is a place to explore the depth of ideas inherent in the music we love.

At Mule Variations we hope our content is a jumping off point for discussion.  We’re not the final word.  We want your ideas, your input, your opinions.  And as readers post responses and critiques, our authors will respond with clarifications and the occasional riposte.  Let’s create a community of music fans—writers and readers—who mutually elevate the contemporary discourse on music, culture and ideas.

We here at Mule Variations think the discourse surrounding music has been compromised by the powerful music publications on the market today.  Mule Variations tries to avoid the ills of large, corporate lifestyle magazines on the one hand, and obscurantist, hipper-than-thou sites on the other.  Mule Variations is not an insiders club.  You don’t have to know each and every obscure band in order to understand and enjoy a feature or review.  We believe that an article can be engaging on the level of ideas, and delve to the core of a work of art, without leaving in the dark the uninitiated.

We feature articles on the newest groundbreaking artists, but we also try to keep our feet firmly planted in the Rock’n’Roll tradition.  We feature throwback reviews of albums released throughout the Rock era and attempt to maintain a big-picture perspective on the larger cultural movements, trends, and fads expressed and informed by music.  We hope this synergy yields fresh perspectives on historical albums and historical perspectives on new albums, creating inter-generational dialogue and keeping Mule Variations from either idealizing the past or over-valuing the new.

The internet abounds with sound-bites and over-simplifications, but we believe content on the internet need not be limited to Twitter posts.  We can do more.  We can do better.  We can do something different.

Get behind the Mule.

Founders

	Adam Caress Adam met Co-editor-in-chief Philip Francis in college. It was the middle of the night. Philip had just awakened to find Adam (with help from Philip's roommate Tom) scouring Philip's record collection for a rumored copy of Bob Dylan's Biograph box set. Adam and Philip have been discussing music ever since. Adam was the longtime singer and songwriter of the popular Boston-based rock band The Troubadours. In addition to his Mule-related activities, Adam books bands. He lives outside Asheville, NC with his wife Annie and son James.
	Philip Francis Philip is co-editor-in-chief of Mule Variations.  He is also the inventor of Lefty’s Silver Cart and a teaching fellow at Harvard University.  Philip writes about Bob Dylan, Turkish mystics, and Byzantine Iconography.  He grew up listening to The Ventures, Dick Dale, and The Cramps--against his will (older brother) and with no waves in sight.  His first rock show was a double bill of The Strangemen (older brother) and The Upper Crust at the Ratskeller (RIP) in Boston.  His hair doesn't look like that anymore.
	Ned Silverman Ned has enjoyed music for most of his life, unfortunately he’s never been much of a musician. He is also one of the former proprietors of Smell the Funk.  There was much enjoyment.
	Lisa Kos Lisa was a prolific song writer from the ages of 6-10 until her brother's Swedish Chef impersonation (from the muppets) kept ruining her choruses.  He continued her musical training by harassing her with "name that song" tests that ranged from Zepplin, the Beatles, Cream, Blue Oyster Cult, to Queen.  Lisa grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana where it is flat, but thinks it is super lame when people think she grew up in a cornfield.  Lisa, Kathleen, and Ned worked side-by-side to bring you the Mule Variations design in all its glory.
	Kathleen Fulton At the ripe age of two, Kathleen wanted to make her mark. A lack of paper was not a barrier. She picked up a permanent marker and skillfully wrote her name, spelled “KAET” on her parent’s bedroom wallpaper. KAET remained on the wall for 31 years, as the first evidence of Kathleen’s core skills: creative solutions and illustration.  In 2006 Kathleen made her permanent mark by co-founding an organic bean to bar chocolate company called Taza Chocolate. Using those same skills Kathleen is contributing to the variations of mule as a member of the design team and the resident illustrator.
	Annie Caress Annie’s introduction to the world of music was via choreographed performances of John Denver ballads in her family room (which eventually evolved into epic lip-synching performance of Guns ‘N Roses songs in the basement).  Her musical horizons have expanded in the years since, especially since meeting her music-snob husband in 2007.  Annie studied marketing at Emerson College and currently lives in Boston, MA with her husband Adam and her sweet baby James.
	Marsha Dunn Marsha’s music credentials: listens to ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ every Thanksgiving, grew up singing ‘The Gambler’ in the back seat of family vehicles, started listening to Stan (not Kenny) Rogers after her uncle survived the plane crash in which Rogers died, invented a new kind of chanting at her bat mitzvah--3,000 years of beautiful tradition, suddenly transformed.  Marsha has studied art semiotics, done the theatre thing in NYC, made films, sculptures, installations and illustrations.  She’s the brains behind Lefty’s.  She is a creative and strategic consultant for the Mule.