Letters from the Road: Peter Mulvey

Guest post this week from an astounding singer-songwriter, Peter Mulvey, whose new record Letters from a Flying Machine streets this August: "Eight songs, interspersed with four prose pieces over music, framed as letters to my various nieces and nephews written on airplanes. The first one sets the place and the theme and they go from there." Brilliant.

Hear Peter reading the below letter here. Hear the song that goes with it here.

17th of June 2009
Over the Great Lakes

Dear Edgar-

Last week your father and I hooked up trailers behind our bicycles, and trundled you and your sister into them over your initial strident protests. Then we all rode twelve miles along the Hank Aaron trail, down by the ballpark and through the Menominee River valley. As we rode along, I marveled, as I often do, at these extraordinary machines, which allowed us to cover the distance at a brisk but relaxed clip in a little over an hour.

But that is nothing: courtesy of a very different machine, I am at this moment hurtling Eastward, eight miles over Ontario -- over land, and water, and little herds of cumulus clouds far below.

Further, I am writing this letter with yet another machine; a mechanical pencil that would have flipped DaVinci’s wig. And who knows what he would have made of the pocket-sized computer that is currently playing a Bach sonata through tiny speakers hidden in my ears...

Oh, the gadgetry! To make this recording, these amazing sounds must have leapt from an Italian violin, into a German microphone, to be rendered as ones and zeros somewhere in the dark of a Japanese hard drive.

And I wonder, did Bach write these notes down with a goose quill? With ink made from [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.