Peter Mulvey (Pesky J. Nixon opens)

Peter Mulvey is a walking secret handshake. He has been the street-singing kid in Dublin, the man fronting the
storming electric band, the conspiratorial spoken-word craftsman, the Tin Pan Alley delver, an instigator in the
occasional Redbird collective, and all through it he has remained the traveler out on the road, bringing his music
to audiences from Fairbanks to Bilbao, Santa Monica to Montreal, in clubs, theaters, coffeeshops, the Kennedy
Center, and old barns.
Mulvey continues to travel, ears… Show more open and wide awake, through the unlimited territory of music. Honing his musicianship, his phrasing, his ability to inhabit a song, he has come into his own, with a sound full of grit and warmth, at the same time startling and familiar.
His latest record, The Good Stuff (Signature Sounds 2012) is a dazzling tour de force through American song: a
standards record -- if the definition of "standard" was left in Mulvey's hands. In his universe, Duke Ellington and
Thelonious Monk are presumed colleagues of Tom Waits and Jolie Holland. Bill Frisell and Willie Nelson are obviously in the same wheelhouse. Bobby Charles is still alive and having coffee with a bemused Leonard Cohen
somewhere in the Ninth Ward.
Playing solo, duo (with longtime collaborator David Goodrich) or with his most recent band, the Crumbling Beauties, he continues his restless search for the elusive moment when a song comes alive through the alchemical
combining of an audience, a performer, and the song itself.

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