Boston Beats:  Could everybody please state your name, age, and current occupation for the record?

Peter Mulvey:  My name is Peter Mulvey. I’m thirty-seven years old and I’m a singer.


HISTORY

BB: How did you get into music? When did you first learn how to play?
Peter: It’s just about thirty years ago I was at summer camp, and one of the counselors played guitar and I thought this is what I want to do. I asked my parents for a guitar and I got one and I started taking lessons. I used to walk up to North Avenue in my neighborhood in Milwaukee, and this guy named Norb Kaminski would teach me the chords to all kinds of things. Beatles tunes, and that old tune “There’s a Kind of Hush” by Herman’s Hermits. I would play the chords and he would play the melodies. So that took seven years. Then I studied finger style guitar at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music with a guy named Peter Roller. Learned a lot of the old blues tunes and ragtime tunes. From there I discovered Leo Kottke and Michael Hedges, got seriously into the guitar and then I moved out to Boston in 1992, to Somerville. I met David [Goodie] Goodrich, in a guitar shop, The Music Emporium, which used to be on Mass Ave in Cambridge. He got me into all kinds of music. So I really feel like I’ve begun to study more as I go on.

BB: How did you come to write your first song?
Peter: [Laughs.] A childhood friend of my brother’s, we were sitting around and I was playing Pink Floyd tunes from The Wall in the basement, and Simon and Garfunkel tunes. And I remember, he was like, “You know, you should write your own songs, Peter.” Having said that, the first tune that I wrote that I kept is probably “Black Rabbit” or “On the Way Up,” which I still play at shows. But those must have been the fifteenth or twentieth tunes I wrote. Actually, this is not true; I played with a band in college when I was maybe nineteen or twenty years old, and those songs stuck around for a while. Some of those wound up on my first record, on Rapture. “I don’t know.” That’s maybe the shortest answer. I’ve written a lot of songs.

BB: Where have your songs ended up?
Peter: They used that song “On the Way Up” in that television show Felicity and then they used a song called “Take This” in the DVD for Felicity and that was kind of cool to see that they would want to do that, and it paid good. And then there was an independent film called “The Origin of Species.” That didn’t make me any money but the filmmaker wanted to use the song, and that was very touching. And there’s this weird Japanimation video that someone set to “The Trouble with Poets.” I have no idea why, or who they are. All I know is that if you add my name into the search engine in YouTube, this is one of the videos that comes up which is pretty amusing if nothing else.


SONGWRITING AND MUSICAL INFLUENCES

BB: How does a new song usually come about for you?
Peter: For me, it comes as a piece of music. It usually comes as some sort of guitar idea. Either it’s a chord structure that then I sing a melody to, and then the melody gives rise to words, or it’s a finger style structure that has a melody in it, and then I just put words to that melody, and learn to play it.

BB: What are some of your musical influences?
Peter: Lately it’s been my friends. Kris Delmhorst and Jeffrey Foucault, and Goodie and Chris Smither. But as a kid, I was way into the Police. I had all five of those Police records when I was younger. And obviously I went through the phase of digging Led Zeppelin, and I was into the whole prog-rock thing. Rush and Yes. It was certainly very interesting, there was a lot of creative stuff there, although not very groovy when one looks back on it. You can’t really dance to Rush. And obviously ignoring Dylan would be like ignoring the King James Bible. And Tom Waits. Lately it’s been a lot of more old-timey stuff. Louis Armstrong and old old country tunes. Old Hank Williams tunes. Old Willie Nelson, like early Willie Nelson, the suits-and-short-haircuts Willie Nelson.

BB: What are some of your favorite albums?
Peter: One of my favorites is Kiko by Los Lobos, that’s a perennial favorite. I think that was one of their high water marks. I’m really fond of that Greg Brown record that wasn’t an official Greg Brown record. It’s called “One Night,” and it’s just a concert that he did. And the reason I’m so fond of it is that it reminds me of his concerts. They’re full of songs that you’ve never heard before. I love that about Greg Brown. He’s always writing songs, and when you go see him play he just plays you a bunch of songs that he has lying around right now. It’s not like he feels like since he’s touring some new record that he’s got to play the songs from the new record. He’ll just play you what he’s got.

BB: How would you describe your guitar style?
Peter: It’s a hybrid of two things. I use very low and very broad guitar tunings to create a fuller sound, a sound with more low-end in it and a sound with more space in it, wider intervals, because I think the space defines that sound. That’s about half of what I do with the guitar. The other half is a more traditional approach using standard or alternate tunings and finger styles to try to be melodic. To try to build chords over time instead of throwing them out there all at once. So most of what I do is to try to introduce space into things, and play just a few notes to imply movement and to imply chords.

BB: What’s your singing style?
Peter: My singing style, if I have one, has to do with playing to my strengths and downplaying my weaknesses. I’ve never had a lot of pure tone, but I have a decent grasp of phrasing. I don’t have a particularly wide register, but I have a lot of strength right in the bottom third of my register so I play to that.


RECORDING

BB: What has been your experience recording music? What’s your process?
Peter: I’ve only done one record with a lot of overdubbing. It was my first record, Brother Rabbit Speaks, and it took me a lot of time. It took me weeks of going in for a day or going in for two days. It took me weeks and weeks across a summer. And it was fun, but ever since then I’ve tended to work very quickly. My next record was a live record, obviously recorded in a couple of hours. The record after that, Rapture, was recorded in two days and that’s about generally the pace I like to work at. Just find some musicians that you know, learn to play the tunes, go in, everybody set up, turn on the tape machine and play. I think, for me, that at least leads to a certain vitality in the performances. It doesn’t sound like a constructed juggernaut, it sounds like something that happened. And what I’m after there, though I have never gotten it to the extent that he gets it, is what Tom Waits does so successfully. When you hear a Tom Waits recording you get the feeling that he and the boys were just playing the songs, and some anthropologist happened along and just happened to tape that event. Does that make sense? Like it was a real event that was happening, and we’re just lucky enough that somebody had a tape recorder there. He sounds like those old third world recordings that guys used to bring back to the Smithsonian after they traveled the world with a tape recorder. And I’m after something like that, maybe a milder version of that, where what you’re hearing on the recording is sort of an “overhearing” of a conversation between the musicians.

BB: Of all the albums you’ve done so far, which ones are the most personal to you?
Peter: Either Kitchen Radio or Deep Blue. Deep Blue, I was just going through a sad time, and it’s a fairly dark and sad record. And Kitchen Radio is drawn, I think, most directly and closely on a personal experience.

BB: Which ones do you think are your best albums?
Peter: As far as the best written songs, I think that’s the last two. Kitchen Radio and The Knuckleball Suite. I feel like I’m finally hitting some kind of a stride, and it’s a stride that I really hope to continue and kick into an even higher gear. And that’s because I think it has sunk in, all of the study that I’ve done. I read a lot of poetry. Two of my favorites are Billy Collins and James Tate. I think Billy Collins has everybody beat in terms of simplicity, and the colloquial, the every day. James Tate is just spectacular and narrative, although he’s a little surreal. I’d like to get into that surrealism but I think it would take a lot of study. So, I feel like my albums are constantly getting better. The hope—well, not just the hope, the goal—is to keep some kind of youthful spark of creativity as you get more skilled, so that your more skilled stuff still has that resonance. It’s a shame that it’s once you learn to write you also don’t have that much to say. So the goal is to always try to keep that youthful spark alive as you get more and more mature as a writer.