Once I was eleven, and once I was just atoms, and once I was a hilltop in Rome
So zabira and sdwolfpup and I went to see Peter Mulvey last night. A local woman named Pepper Proud opened for him, and she charmed us all immediately: she's got a huge, effortless voice and a kind of sweet fierceness and intensity to the way she sings that was incredibly compelling, along with a lovely rambling, open-hearted narrative style to her lyrics. Actually, she reminded me a lot of Gerard Way, if he were a tiny ringlet-haired girl from West Virginia, and talking to SDW afterward, she said she had the exact same thought. So that was an excellent way to start, and I really hope we get to see more of her as her career grows-she certainly made fans of everyone there last night, me included.
And then Peter Mulvey played. Before last night, I actually only owned one of his albums, which is strange because that one album-Letters From a Flying Machine-is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard; I picked it up last year on Jeffrey Foucault's recommendation after he and Peter Mulvey had played a magical co-bill at the Tractor Tavern, and I fell immediately in love with it and foisted it on pretty much everyone I knew and listened to it over and over again throughout the winter. But this was the first time I've ever seen Peter Mulvey by himself, and he has a gorgeous, raspy, rich, Irish-coffee voice, and I'm not sure if it was due to picking or pedals or both, but there were times when it seemed like he must have had at least one other guitar hidden away somewhere, the sound was so intricate. His style is a rolling fusion of American folk and Irish folk and old jazz standards, and there's such incredible warmth and humor and depth to his songs; you can hear him smiling while he's singing, even in the studio. And he is funny as HELL, gregarious and clever and easygoing and wickedly cheerful and extremely, extremely smart. He seems to have an agile and voracious mind that devours facts ("I'm a Wikipedia kind of guy," he told us at one point) and observations and lets them all ping off each other until they shake out as a song or a story or both. Topics between songs included astrophysics, squirrels accidentally ingesting marijuana-infused butter, the likelihood of Houdini escaping from a book, and rhapsodizing over "The Nearness of You" (which he opened with) and how it's both timeless and perfectly calculated to pitch very effective woo. Z said afterward that she would have happily paid just to hear him talk, much less play, and I felt exactly the same way.
The cumulative effect was that-after a weird few weeks that had left me feeling burned out and drained-by about halfway through his set, I felt like someone had filled me up to overflowing with liquid light, and I went from laughing so hard I cried at the squirrel story (seriously, it was hilarious) to crying at the next song, the kind of crying that happens when something is so beautiful it actually kind of hurts. Afterward we went to buy some albums and I ended up talking to him about baseball and Yeats-which is about as perfect a conversation as I could ask for with anyone, honestly-and he was so interesting and interested and friendly and outgoing, it was lovely. And at one point SDW and I were talking about the structure and scope of Letters and how amazing it is and he was like, "Wow, you listened, thank you," and I love that, having the opportunity to reflect back even a tiny bit of the gift that an artist has given me. It was just a fantastic experience from beginning to end, and if you ever get the chance to go see him, I can't recommend it highly enough-at worst you'll end up laughing a lot, and at most maybe you'll end up feeling like I do now: like the universe is vast and weird and wonderful, and I'm not alone in it.
Z and SDW and I were talking afterwards about adulthood-it was that kind of night, that makes you introspective and invigorated at the same time-and I was saying that as I actually go through it, I feel like being an adult isn't so much having everything figured out as just being able to deal with things. And (without disregarding the many awesome things and people in my life) I have had some challenges to deal with this year, and sometimes I get so frustrated coming up against the same issues and obstacles over and over again-I just want to FIX things and be DONE with them. But at the end of the day, I look at it like a spring, rather than a flat track, and each time I come back to the same sticking point, I have a little more perspective, a little more experience, and that's all I can ask for, really, just making progress, even if it feels frustratingly incremental at times. So that's my current self-definition of adulthood; that and the ability to eat as much Halloween candy as I want. :)
And then Peter Mulvey played. Before last night, I actually only owned one of his albums, which is strange because that one album-Letters From a Flying Machine-is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard; I picked it up last year on Jeffrey Foucault's recommendation after he and Peter Mulvey had played a magical co-bill at the Tractor Tavern, and I fell immediately in love with it and foisted it on pretty much everyone I knew and listened to it over and over again throughout the winter. But this was the first time I've ever seen Peter Mulvey by himself, and he has a gorgeous, raspy, rich, Irish-coffee voice, and I'm not sure if it was due to picking or pedals or both, but there were times when it seemed like he must have had at least one other guitar hidden away somewhere, the sound was so intricate. His style is a rolling fusion of American folk and Irish folk and old jazz standards, and there's such incredible warmth and humor and depth to his songs; you can hear him smiling while he's singing, even in the studio. And he is funny as HELL, gregarious and clever and easygoing and wickedly cheerful and extremely, extremely smart. He seems to have an agile and voracious mind that devours facts ("I'm a Wikipedia kind of guy," he told us at one point) and observations and lets them all ping off each other until they shake out as a song or a story or both. Topics between songs included astrophysics, squirrels accidentally ingesting marijuana-infused butter, the likelihood of Houdini escaping from a book, and rhapsodizing over "The Nearness of You" (which he opened with) and how it's both timeless and perfectly calculated to pitch very effective woo. Z said afterward that she would have happily paid just to hear him talk, much less play, and I felt exactly the same way.
The cumulative effect was that-after a weird few weeks that had left me feeling burned out and drained-by about halfway through his set, I felt like someone had filled me up to overflowing with liquid light, and I went from laughing so hard I cried at the squirrel story (seriously, it was hilarious) to crying at the next song, the kind of crying that happens when something is so beautiful it actually kind of hurts. Afterward we went to buy some albums and I ended up talking to him about baseball and Yeats-which is about as perfect a conversation as I could ask for with anyone, honestly-and he was so interesting and interested and friendly and outgoing, it was lovely. And at one point SDW and I were talking about the structure and scope of Letters and how amazing it is and he was like, "Wow, you listened, thank you," and I love that, having the opportunity to reflect back even a tiny bit of the gift that an artist has given me. It was just a fantastic experience from beginning to end, and if you ever get the chance to go see him, I can't recommend it highly enough-at worst you'll end up laughing a lot, and at most maybe you'll end up feeling like I do now: like the universe is vast and weird and wonderful, and I'm not alone in it.
Z and SDW and I were talking afterwards about adulthood-it was that kind of night, that makes you introspective and invigorated at the same time-and I was saying that as I actually go through it, I feel like being an adult isn't so much having everything figured out as just being able to deal with things. And (without disregarding the many awesome things and people in my life) I have had some challenges to deal with this year, and sometimes I get so frustrated coming up against the same issues and obstacles over and over again-I just want to FIX things and be DONE with them. But at the end of the day, I look at it like a spring, rather than a flat track, and each time I come back to the same sticking point, I have a little more perspective, a little more experience, and that's all I can ask for, really, just making progress, even if it feels frustratingly incremental at times. So that's my current self-definition of adulthood; that and the ability to eat as much Halloween candy as I want. :)