So Many Stories, So Little Time: Peter Mulvey's Letters from a Flying Machine

"He helped me remember who I am." This was my friend's answer when, during intermission at a Mulvey concert, I asked what she thought. The response is not atypical: after she said it, I recognized faces in the audience from his performance six months prior in another hole-in-the-wall venue eighty miles away. When Peter Mulvey's in town, art-folk fans come out of the woodwork. They do this because of the intimacy, honesty, and engagement of his solo performances: Mulvey takes the stage with nothing but a kind baritone voice, a beat-up guitar, and the conviction that songs change lives.

The first thought of most people hearing him is, "This guy is good." He's developed an incomparable approach to the guitar involving extended techniques, unusual altered tunings (frequently lowering the bottom string by more than an octave for percussive thump), and intricate fingerpicking patterns. He's learned to use the expressive range of his deep voice to maximum effect, often switching into half-spoken intonation and speech-pattern rhythms to phrase the lyrics just right. He's honed his writing skills over a twenty-year music career, with twelve albums and near a million tour miles to his name. His breadth of experience staggers: among other things, he earned a degree in method acting from a Jesuit university in his native Milwaukee; moved to Dublin, Ireland to perform on street corners; spent a year playing in Boston subways to make rent; narrated documentaries; and recently completed a thousand mile tour by bicycle. He reads and references Christian mystics, existential philosophers, T. S. Eliot, Billy Collins. Beyond sheer talent, Peter has wit, wisdom, personality. Now, in his early forties, he's hitting stride, writing the best songs of his career.

Mulvey's latest album Letters from a Flying Machine (2009) explores what has always been Peter's driving question: What lasts? In the face of inexorable change and loss, why—how—ought we to live? Throughout the album, Mulvey includes narrations of letters written to his nieces and nephews during airline flights, explicitly addressing the role of future generations in his search for meaning. In the first letter, "Letter from a Flying Machine", Peter reminds us that, in all our apparent progress and technological development ("They are baking cookies in the sky, Edgar!"), nature and spirit precede us; marvels such as modern flight pale in comparison, "because the sky is and was full of birds." The second, "...Plus the Many Inevitable Fragments", followed and elaborated by the song "Dynamite Bill", finds that past generations have likewise struggled with impermanence (sometimes self-induced, in situations where "you gotta make something go boom") while acknowledging their role in transmitting to us the things that do still last. Peter's third letter, "Bears", relays his niece's first encounter with the idea of human mortality: future generations, too, will face the Question. And yet, for Peter, they are its answer: "Vlad the Astrophysicist" juxtaposes the isolating indifference of the universe—Mulvey calls Vlad's anecdote "the single most startling thing anyone has ever told me"—with the miraculous possibility and grace found within human beings. Like the Teacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes, Mulvey investigates the structures of life that might offer lasting meaning, concluding in "On a Wing and a Prayer" that love, however fragile and apparently fleeting, is the sole answer. Mulvey describes the pattern arising from his inquiry in the letters as "time-time-time-love": if the passage of time overturns our achievements, our stability, and our very existence, what matters is not for what we live but for whom. The sole worthwhile human pursuit is trying (and failing, and trying) to love: "On a wing and a prayer, I don't know how we'll get there; we were just crossing the street, still finding our feet. But you're the song that I know, the only one, and so I'll carry it there on a wing and a prayer."

Although the album has a start-to-finish arc, "Some People" and "Mailman" stand out as songs to hear and rehear, to sing along to, to tell people about. "Some People" includes fiddle, electric jazz guitar, and brushed drums for a thorough Dixieland vibe—"I was born in the wrong era," Mulvey says—and offers a whimsical list of human endeavors and preferences, juxtaposed humorously: "Some people go to the synagogue, some people go to the woods, some people go to a shrink (and they think everybody should)". The song's refrain is a series of the kind of grunts one emits while shaking one's head and sighing, "Some people," as if to say, "This too is meaningless." Mulvey frequently opens concerts with this song to break the ice: he understands that making us laugh at life makes us listen, and while his songs are not sentimental, they ask to affect us. Hence Mulvey cultivates openness and empathy in the listener throughout the album to prepare her for the deeply personal content in its final section: not personal in a biographical sense, but personal to him and to us—things we aren't willing to talk about or be told about unless we know someone. In "Mailman", a sparse, melodic piece with an inventive lyrical structure, Mulvey notes the beauty found in nature, then contrasts it with the ugliness of self-serving politics and religion, in the guise of "the man on the radio telling us how it's all gonna be . . . especially the part about what God wants". He points out that it's enticing to accept these distortions as beauty itself, or perhaps that they do have a measured beauty by seeking good things (however wrongly) or by ushering from good intentions (however mangled). With both of these possible conceptions of beauty in mind—pristine nature, and defiling but gratifying nurture—Mulvey considers a third way: the complicated beauty of experiencing and accepting both piercing grief and profound joy, confusion and clarity, hatred and kindness. The vast powers of evil and entropy do not diminish the grace we experience in life, "the part that we can't quite name". Despite everything, it's "still beautiful".

Letters from a Flying Machine became possible for one reason only: Peter Mulvey loves music. Before he became a performer, he was a listener, and the passionate playing of others inspired him to pick up the guitar himself. Likewise, Mulvey's love for music saturates his own work, which enables listeners to love more fully whatever and whomever they love. This is what happened to my friend at the concert: when someone else shows you who they are, when they sing honestly, it reminds you who you are. One Internet commenter similarly memorialized the late J. D. Salinger by noting that, after she read Franny and Zooey, "I knew then how much I love my brother." Among arts, we often look to music in particular for mere entertainment, for mood-setting, or simply for a stay against boredom. Musicians sometimes treat it as "something to get better at"; social cliques and trendsetters see it as "something to set ourselves apart", making it a boundary against others. Art at its best is anything but a diversion, turning one aside from one's path. Peter Mulvey's music enacts conversion, turning us around: he guides us back toward our true selves, toward each other, toward what lasts.