
The Live Room is the brainchild of Ron Dukelow and Hilary Booth, both experienced music promoters, who, for ten years were the driving force behind the highly successful Live at the Talbot series at the Talbot Hotel in West Wales. It's their intention to bring the same ethos to their new venue at the Caroline Social Club to make it the best folk and [...]

Peter Mulvey - Airbag [Radiohead] | bx . watch the original
Folk veteran Peter Mulvey provides another batch of bluesy tunes with his latest release, The Good Stuff . Peter Mulvey knows how to make good bluesy-folk music. The Milwaukee, Wisconsin, singer and songwriter has been doing it for two decades, and just when you think there's no ground left to cover, Mulvey brings another fresh take to the folk genre. With a discography as long as Mulvey's, you're sure to find some hit and miss releases, but the man has enough talent that even when an album falters as a whole, there are...

I've written about my father several times here on Cover Lay Down, citing him as a friend and fellow folkfan whose companionship I cherish, especially now that I have children of my own. I've written about my wife, too, and my children, when the occasion warranted it. But other than a 2008 feature on Mothers of the Folkworld , we've skipped over Mother's Day for four years running - leaving my own mother conspicuously absent from these virtual pages. If I've avoided taking the time to parse the particulars of our often volatile [...]

It's finally Spring, though the warm winter shuffled our sense of season a bit this year. And just as the turning of the calendar has brought an early bloom of daffodils and crocuses to the garden, so has it revealed a growing set of cover collections and tribute albums, each featuring a beautiful bouquet of songs of and from artists we love. Today, we gather in these new and newly-found releases, providing news of the good stuff, a coverlovers delight. Enjoy! Boston-based folk foursome Pesky [...]

Peter Mulvey has a new album and a companion EP out at the end of March. These are a slight departure as they are both cover records. The lp has songs written by Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Jolie Holland, Chris Smither and Duke Ellington. The companion EP called Chaser . Here's "It's Lonely At The Top" by Randy Newman from Chaser . Peter Mulvey's record release show is this Thursday at Schubas in Chicago - he'll have both records for sale at the show. It's Lonely At The [...]

I had other plans last night - dance class chaperonage and an early fast food supper out with the kids; a long school committee meeting; a late-night blog entry that bowed to a particularly delicious crop of video-driven mailbox coverage. But Mother Nature had a different idea, and here, in a town ravaged by October blizzards and June tornadoes, we've learned to listen to her insistent ways. And so, after months of startling sun and warmth, and what was surely the driest season on record, winter came at last to our little pocket of [...]
Originally posted, with slight modifications, in August 2009. Because it's one of my favorite sets...and because bloggers need vacations, too. We're in Truro for a short weekend, just like in 2009, in the same rented beachhouse high on the dunes above the Cape Cod sound. Wakeless trawlers and shore fishermen, beach wanderers and bathers are few and far between, mere specks on an otherwise natural landscape that fills the sense with color: green grasses, faded yellow sand, the variable [...]

One of the biggest challenges of coming of age in the late eighties is that some of the best pop performers of the post-punk/new wave era were already past their musical prime when I discovered them, invariably through radio hits that echoed their earlier work while somehow managing to sound derivative and old-school amidst the rising tide of majestic yet ultimately ephemeral heartland rock, bouncy pop, early grunge and smooth R&B which characterized the era. Case in point: I went through a brief Elvis Costello phase when I was in high school, [...]

Peter Mulvey : Abilene (The Eisenhower Waltz) [ purchase ] Abilene (The Eisenhower Waltz) doesn’t sound like a political song. It was recorded in 2005, when the Iraq war was much more in the news and the public’s awareness than it is now. Peter Mulvey evokes a period 50 years prior to that, even taking the phrase “Iron cross” from an Eisenhower speech in 1953. He presents Eisenhower as a man who had gotten the country into a tight spot, and took responsibility for it. Mulvey says not a word about [...]

I was one of those arty middle-class music-and-theater kids - you know, the ones who spend their free periods in the band room, stay after school to paint sets, seem utterly disconnected from the mass media-driven marks of popular consumer culture, and demonstrate a complete and utter lack of coordinated ability in running shorts. But it wasn't just desire or common interest that kept me there. Natural talent, a strong ear, and an ADHD sufferer's tendency to misplace my instrument had led to formal voice lessons and private choruses as a child (lose [...]

As I was searching my collection for the songs I would post this week, a strange thing happened: I came across two songs, released sixteen years apart, with oddly similar titles. The only other thing they have in common is that I really like them. So I couldn’t resist posting them together. Indigo Girls : You and Me of the 10,000 Wars [ purchase ] First, 1990 saw the release of the Indigo Girls album Nomads Indians Saints. My first selection is not one of [...]

I don't know as much about Townes Van Zandt as I'd like to. Despite the great similarities in sound and sensibility between his work and that of Guthrie, Dylan, and other core members of the folkworld, somehow he never cropped up in a childhood balanced between a mother's love of the Seeger classics and a father's fandom for the singer-songwriters of his own generation. Of course, some of that is due to Van Zandt's relative obscurity during the bulk of his life - as my father notes, until his resurgence in [...]

Here's another song from the excellent new Peter Mulvey record on Signature Sounds. If you'd like an invite to the Oct. 11 Chicago area house concert email me at cbonnell@gmail.com. Buy Letters From A flying Machine here or here . Kids In The Square
This is from The Trouble With Poets released in 2000. MP3 File yousendit
We're in Truro for a short week, in a rented beachhouse high on the dunes above the Cape Cod sound. Wakeless trawlers and shore fishermen, beach wanderers and bathers are few and far between, mere specks on an otherwise natural landscape that fills the sense with color: green grasses, faded yellow sand, the variable blues of sky and water. At night the lights of Provincetown shine brightly just on the edge of the vista, a line of stars marking the difference between pitch-black sea and an invisible sky. Last [...]

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 [...]
"Through the songs and stories of this album, I'm trying to figure out what actually lasts a long time," explains New England singer/songwriter Peter Mulvey . On his wry and spry new album Letters From A Flying Machine, due August 11, Mulvey takes the listener on a "voyage" of music and spoken word "essays" meant, he says, to be listened to from start to finish: "I want the listener to hear the end of the album differently that they heard the beginning." Nimble and jazzy at times (particularly on the delightfully verbose "Some People"), wistful and observational [...]

As I sit here listening to Allen Toussaint's excellent new record The Bright Mississippi I realize I've selected the only jazzy song from the new Peter Mulvey record to share with you. Perhaps I was influenced by the New Orleans vibe of Toussaint. Or perhaps I needed a pick me up. Either way "some People" has got a jauntiness that sets it apart from the other fine (yet typical singer-songwriter fare) found on his new record Letters From A Flying Machine . Peter is another of the amazing artists being represented in the [...]

Peter Mulvey : The Fly [ purchase ] Kris Delmhorst : Galuppi Baldessare [ purchase ] Eilen Jewell : Heartache Boulevard [ purchase ] Signature Sounds has only been around since 1995. But in fourteen years, they have managed to corner the market on the New England acoustic music scene. A Signature Sounds artist or band usually features literate lyrics and interesting instrumental arrangements. The [...]