Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Peter Mulvey: Ten Thousand Mornings, Redux
(covers of Los Lobos, U2, The Beatles, and more!)

As always, I’m offline at our annual Falcon Ridge Folk Festival pilgrimage for the last weeks of July; feel free to stop by the Teen Crew tent some morning and say hi if you’re at the fest. But arriving early to help set up the festival site means making hard choices, and there’s none harder than missing this year’s Green River Festival, which featured an incredible Friday night line-up of fifteen Signature Sounds artists in honor of the label’s fifteenth anniversary year.

Signature Sounds is at the top of my favorite folk labels list, both for their incredible stable of artists and their tendency towards rich contemporary production values; it helps that they’re local, too, and that I’ve spent years as an adult audiophile listening to founder Jim Olsen spin the tunes on local radio. In the earliest days of Cover Lay Down, we featured numerous artists from their ranks, and serendipitously, two of these artists — Peter Mulvey and Chris Smither — have new CDs hitting the pavement at summer’s end. This week, we feature those artists, with bonus tracks from their upcoming releases, both of which come very highly recommended.





I first encountered Peter Mulvey at the 2003 Green River Festival, where he appeared as part of lo-fi folk covergroup Redbird along with folk blues artist Jeffrey Foucault and his recent bride, the full-voiced Kris Delmhorst. Though at the time I was more impressed with the others, it is Mulvey’s interpretations I keep coming back to — Delmhort’s work is sweet simplicity, and Foucault can play the blues like nobody’s business, but Mulvey has the versatility of the true cover artist, and the knack of bringing new meaning to a wide breadth of song.

Peter Mulvey fans speak mostly of his songwriting and guitarplay, which play off the similar strings but equally defined style of his constant sideman and collaborator David “Goody” Goodrich to create a rich slackstring sound; Mulvey’s voice falls more into the Tom Waits and Dylan camps, full of feeling but hardly melodic. As a member of Redbird, this lends a rough edge to harmonies. As a solo cover artist, though, the spare voice recasts lyrics powerfully.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Ten Thousand Mornings, a 2002 album of covers — the up-and-coming folksinger’s bread and butter — recorded live in Mulvey’s old stomping grounds: the Davis Square subway station just outside of Boston. It’s a neat concept, designed to call to his roots as a struggling busker, and it works exceptionally well: the echoes of the brick and tile underground lend an air of realism, and the trains and passersby screech and shuss, becoming part of the music, making the experience — and the songs — truly live.

It’s hard to pick just two cuts from this album, both because there’s so many gems and because there’s a surprising diversity among them, given that most are just a guy and his guitar (and his guy, and his guitar). In the end, I decided to save his best covers of folk artists for other posts, so you’ll have to wait for his amazing interpretation of Dar Williams’ The Ocean, and his Elvis Costello, Gillian Welch, and Dylan covers. Two of my remaining favorites from the subway series, the second with backup from Anita Suhanin:


Ten Thousand Mornings is one of many fine Peter Mulvey records from folk label Signature Sounds; Mulvey sells them directly through his website, so you know where he prefers that you buy them. And now you know why you should, too.


Today’s bonus coversongs:



Special REPOST BONUS: an exclusive track from the upcoming Peter Mulvey album Letters From a Flying Machine, due this fall from Signature Sounds:

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2 Responses to “Peter Mulvey: Ten Thousand Mornings, Redux
(covers of Los Lobos, U2, The Beatles, and more!)”

  1. Will
    July 23rd, 2009 at 1:03 pm

    Thanks a lot for these mp3s. I’ve been listening a fair bit to Redbird’s covers of Running To Stand Still and You Are The Everything so it’s good to find some background about them and some more listening.
  2. Peter Mulvey Covers “The Beatles, U2, and Los Lobos” « Rock God Cred
    July 24th, 2009 at 7:26 am

    [...] Click here to go to CLD to check Peter Mulvey The Beatles “Fo No One”, U2 “The Fly”, and Los Lobos “Two Janes” [...]

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