So much of what is going on with both this band and this track is guesswork. Although hailing from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, did 81 Mulberry name themselves after the Mulberry Island Plantation in Stoneville, NC? Has this track been called Ephedrine because its properties as a remedy for hay fever allow the band to link it to the track’s themes of urban suffocation? Or is it an allusion to its possible use as an amphetamine, which ties it to the line about killing at 2:10. They give so little away about themselves.
All of it is guesswork because the vocals have been mixed in such a way that even when the singer is screaming his head off, it’s a struggle to fully catch what’s being sung. Even when the band re-recorded Ephedrine in a less lo-fi manner for their 1995 album, Drive Shaft to Culdesac, it’s clear that getting a clean vocal wasn’t on anyone’s list of priorities. As a result, Ephedrine ends up being one of those most frustrating of things to blog about: a track I really like, but would struggle to explain why because of the lack of clarity in what the lyrics are telling us.
This post should have gone up earlier in the week, but I held off on putting it up after I saw that someone claiming to be 81 Mulberry’s drummer had popped up in the YouTube comments of C Geoffrey Taylor’s upload, albeit from 6 years ago. I asked them them whether the song touched on any of the following perspectives:
- Disenchantment with school. (missing class line at 0.22, and I think that the opening line complains about struggling with maths.)
- Someone feeling suffocated by their domestic environment. (The same streetlights on/First I’ve got to run between 0:31 and 0:38.)
- Whether the second half of the song was told from the point of view of a school shooter. (See first paragraph.)
I gave them until today to get back to me. I knew it was a long shot and indeed I found out that not everyone is Col from Mr. Ray’s Wig World, so it looks as though - until I hear differently - we can say that Ephedrine is about all the things I mentioned above.
Video courtesy of C Geoffrey Taylor
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