Published on thebomberjacket.com.
Greg Mullen snubbed out the joint he’d been smoking just as the bus pulled up. He was wearing a cowboy hat with the sides curled in and big white, heart-shaped sunglasses. He was traveling with only a suitcase and a guitar. High and exhausted, he took his seat and the mystical voice of the bus driver came through the speakers. He said, “Let me be the first to welcome you to the future,” and then the image of everything around doubled, splitting apart horizontally into the cyans and magentas of a 3D image. The bus took off, bringing Mullen to a strange and wondrous place hidden somewhere under the surface of the everyday USA.
On Greg Mullen’s second record, There Are AMERICAS Beyond This America by Greg Mullen and the Cosmic American Band, he assumes the role of the “Cosmic American Bus Driver,” musically guiding you through a land you know well but have never seen before. A place where sculpture gardens grow in backyards and your pockets are full of shooting stars, a place where dogs can laugh, a place with devastating 15-foot waves of molasses, a place where Joan of Ark rides the subway with Mr. Clean and Commissioner Gordon, a place where devils hide in the mountains waiting to snatch your tongue, a place where the Seine, the Charles, and the Zambezi rivers converge into one steady trickle, a place where you can digitize the whole experience on social media websites to make your ex-girlfriend jealous…a place called “Cosmic America.”
