Événement

Peter Mulvey at Stone Church

Peter Mulvey has been a songwriter, road-dog, raconteur and almost-poet since before he can remember. One of four brothers, he was raised working-class Catholic on the Northwest side of Milwaukee by parents who met as teaching volunteers in Central America. Inner-city life fell hard on him but harder on his classmates, leaving him with a restless view of the long journey America still needs to make, if it wants to live up to its promise.

Coming up through public schools and then a Jesuit university, he took a semester in Ireland, and immediately began cutting classes to busk on Grafton Street in Dublin and hitchhike through the country, finding whatever gigs he could. Back stateside, he spent a couple years gigging in the Midwest before lighting out for Boston, where he returned to busking (this time in the subway) and coffeehouses. Small shows led to larger shows, which eventually led to regional and then national and international touring. The wheels have not stopped since.

Eighteen records, one illustrated book, thousands of live performances, a TEDx talk, a decades-long association with the National Youth Science Camp, opening for luminaries such as Ani DiFranco, Emmylou Harris, and Chuck Prophet, appearances on NPR, an annual autumn tour by bicycle, emceeing festivals, hosting his own boutique festival (the Lamplighter Sessions, in Boston and Wisconsin) Mulvey never stops. He has built his lifes work on collaboration and on an instinct for the eclectic and the vital. He folds everything he encounters into his work: poetry, social justice, scientific literacy, and a deeply abiding humanism are all on plain display in his art.

Mulvey was scheduled to record an album with Todd Sickafoose bassist with Ani DiFranco and badass composer and producer in early 2017, however significant upheaval in both of their lives and the world at large scuttled their plans. Mulvey left his home and marriage and found himself living through a Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin winter in a friends empty house.

Days were spent walking for hours, sometimes with friends but most often alone, sometimes along the frozen marsh of the Bark river but most often through the wintry oak savannah nearby. The songs came in fast and strange and vivid. At night he wrote them down at a table in the spare house, just a mile from the Cafe Carpe (which Mulvey describes as his spiritual home). The songs became his new record, There Is Another World.