Preview

In the early 1900s, a group of musicians and performers travelling across America called themselves The Circuit Chautauqua tour. Their goal was to bring entertainment, inspiration, and cultural enlightenment to small-town America and, at its peak, the Circuit Chautauqua appeared in more than 10,000 communities across the United States. Three young American songwriters, Peter Mulvey, Kris Delmhorst, and Jeffrey Foucault, currently celebrating the release of their albums on Acoustic Roots Records in the UK, have respectfully adopted the name for their UK tour. The concerts will feature solo sets by each artist followed by song-swapping, campfire-style, at the end of the night.

Think sharp, think intelligent, think 21st-Century Americana.

Peter Mulvey

To Peter Mulvey, there is no such thing as a straight and narrow path. At least, not one that he has any interest in taking.

A live-wire on any stage, Peter Mulvey is an acoustic singer/songwriter/guitarist who, in fact, defies this categorization. His ferocious guitar playing whisks him through more tunings than he has fingers in the course of an evening, as he winds his way from full-throated rockers to deceptively plain-spoken musings. Whether solo or with longtime musical collaborator David "Goody" Goodrich at his side (coaxing unearthly sounds out of electric guitars and mandolins), Mulvey is someone who just naturally commands a stage:

Peter Mulvey is one of the most accomplished guitarists you're ever likely to hear ... utterly original ... it is nigh on impossible to explain him to the uninitiated ... his intelligent and sometimes complex songs engage both hemispheres of the listener's brain ... one of the finest, most complete entertainers ... stunning." - The Irish Examiner

Peter Mulvey's story is pretty simple. College graduate from Milwaukee moves to Ireland in the early nineties, with guitar, and busks on the streets of Dublin. Hears that acoustic music is booming in Boston, comes back the U.S., and, in between the occasional paying gig, plays in the subway to make rent. Wins the prestigious Acoustic Underground Competition and awes both the audience and the press:

He simply blew away the competition ... A year of subway performance has turned him into a magician. In twelve minutes, he blended wit, passion, a clear voice, and a sensational guitar style that was both technically complex and emotionally hot ... Mulvey was nearly incendiary, the clearest star-in-making." - The Boston Herald

Then what? Guy gets record deal, manager, booking agent, and starts to tour, building an audience and a discography that is both steadfast and impressive.

In between building his career as a singer/songwriter, though, Mulvey has also written and performed music for theatre and modern dance (Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, Amiri Baraka's Primitive World, and for The Wild Space Dance Company), penned articles for national magazines (Acoustic Guitar, Performing Songwriter, The Writer), done voice-over work for various documentaries, and has had his songs placed in both film and television (the WB drama Felicity, independent films Origin of the Species and The Fisherman, the PBS documentary Wisconsin: An American Portrait).

As if these credits and his own songwriting weren't enough, Peter Mulvey has, over the course of his career, also been noted as a fine interpreter of other artists' songs. Known for subverting the mere idea of a "cover song", Mulvey consistently injects his live shows with innovative interpretations of songs by other artists - everyone from Radiohead to Tom Waits, Fats Waller to the Waterboys:

Peter Mulvey is not only an extraordinary fellow but a walking repository of other people's songs, delivered at live shows as whim demands an invariably in some altered tuning so far out that nobody else will know it yet." - Mojo (UK)

Although past albums have always included at least one or two cover tunes, Mulvey has selected a dozen songs by some of his favorite songwriters and recorded them on his new album, TEN THOUSAND MORNINGS. And Mulvey brings it all full-circle; to record this album, he returned to his old stomping ground - the subway stations of Boston, Massachusetts.

A major label would have laughed in the face of any musician wanting to record an album in a subway station - it's not slick, it's not polished, it's not how things are done. It is, however, what Mulvey calls "hands-dirty art" and it's exactly how he likes it. With five albums under his belt (see DISCOGRAPHY below), Peter Mulvey's road is pretty well worn. He's clocked over 300,000 miles on his car, averaging about 200 shows per year in North America as well as Ireland and the UK. All the while, the music just keeps getting stronger, the critics continue to rave, and the audiences continue to grow. It's an organic process, to be sure, but it's one that has worked well for Mulvey. Flirtations with mainstream success continue to come his way but Peter Mulvey keeps his head down, his hands on his guitar, and continues to do what he wants to do. And being on indie label Signature Sounds gave Mulvey the freedom to do just that - to record TEN THOUSAND MORNINGS his way. Said label president Jim Olsen: "Peter's music is best heard live and in the moment. We thought it was a great idea for him to return to where it all began and record an album of music written by his songwriting heroes. The subterranean vibe adds a gritty reality to Peter's inspired performances."

Mulvey's Ten Thousand Mornings -- with some very special guests including Chris Smither, Jennifer Kimball, and Erin McKeown -- features songs by Randy Newman, Gillian Welch, Elvis Costello, Dar Williams, Paul Simon, Marvin Gaye, and others. The CD also makes use of an innovative new technology called HyperCD. The web-based, enhanced-CD element embeds a five-minute video trailer on the album that listeners can play on their computer. The video, which features footage of Mulvey playing and recording in the subway, is, in fact, a preview of a full-length DVD that will be released in 2003. Unlike prior enhanced-CD technology, HyperCD makes use of a web-based interface that allows users to interact online with other fans while viewing the video footage.

Clearly, there is no such thing as a simple path for Peter Mulvey. Year after year, he keeps his hands and mind occupied with his own songwriting and performing, as well as innovative side-projects, and continues to build a steady following that succeeds in flying just under the radar of mainstream media. But as long as that following continues to buy records, turn up at shows, and fervently support his unique brand of intelligent acoustic-rock, he'll simply keep doing these things that he loves to do. His way.

Peter Mulvey is all substance, which is his style. - The Boston Globe

Peter Mulvey is consistently the most original and dynamic of the US singer-songwriters to tour these shores ... A phenomenal performer with huge energy, a quickfire, quirky take on life, and an extraordinary guitar style ... a joy to see. - The Irish Times

Kris Delmhorst

Although she grew up with "harmony in the bloodstream" in a musical household, and studied cello through high school, Kris laid down all thoughts of a musical future when she realized the constraints of the classical world weren't suited to her exploratory style. Years later, housebound with a sprained ankle in a Maine log cabin in midwinter, she turned back to music to keep her sanity. She found a fiddle and a guitar gathering dust in the attic, tuned them up, and hasn't looked back since.

Kris is a musician's musician who makes a point of contributing to colleagues' careers as well as the world beyond the stage. When not on the road she finds time to sit in and record with the likes of Catie Curtis, Mary Gauthier, Jennifer Kimball, Jess Klein, Lori McKenna, and Peter Mulvey. She played fiddle in the local cult-favorite Vinal Avenue String Band and was an associate producer of the Respond compilation to support survivors of domestic abuse, which has earned over $100,000 for the cause and was named Album of the Year 1999 by Billboard Magazine.

Equipped with enormous creative reach, transcendent lyrics, and a great ability to connect with an audience, Kris Delmhorst has everything she needs for a long and illustrious musical journey. With the release of her second studio album, Five Stories (Big Bean), she leaves the category of up-and-comer behind and hits the highroad, asserting herself as a mature national artist. Featuring twelve songs ranging from junkyard rockers to two-kleenex ballads, back-porch hootenannies to midnight lullabies, this record allows Kris to flex her varied musical skills and enlist the talents of the Boston music community that she calls home.

Kris Delmhorst: ''Five Stories'' (Catalyst). Combining alluring, rootsy melodies with the intimacy of the urban songwriter, Delmhorst is a significant new folk-pop voice." - The Boston Globe

Jeffrey Foucault

Jeffrey Foucault was born and raised in Southeastern Wisconsin, in a small college town in the middle of farm country. After finishing high school he settled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison where, after two years, he realized that he didn't know how to do anything useful. He quit school, moved home, got work as a farmhand and house carpenter, and began writing songs. Eventually he returned to school and took his degree in History, dividing his time between the local tavern and whatever book he could lay his hands on, fishing and writing and driving a snowplow for the University. After college and a brief stint spent living in the San Bernardino Mountains of California, he returned to Wisconsin and began to assemble the resources to record his first album.

Foucault started out at seventeen playing John Prine tunes on his father's beat up mail order guitar, and spinning old records on a hand-me-down turntable in his bedroom. When he was eighteen he stole a copy of Townes Van Zandt: Live and Obscure from a friend, and immersed himself in the Texas folk of writers like Van Zandt and Guy Clark. With the Dylan-inspired singer songwriter movement as a foundation, he waded through old country, alt country, bluegrass, and blues, and began to identify closely with the midwestern regionalism of  Greg Brown . He discovered the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth, and by nineteen Foucault had begun to try his hand at writing songs. By the time he finished school he was performing regularly at the  Cafe Carpe in Fort Atkinson Wisconsin.

"When I got back from out West I moved into a little lake cottage for a few months. At that point I had finished school and figured I had learned most of what I was going to learn, and enough to return home to the landscape of my own county- to the church steeple skylines, and the county trunk roads- to find an authentic idiom, a way of telling."

Miles From The Lightning is a collection of dark narrative ballads, starkly rendered love songs, allegories and elegies told in plain verse. Equal parts folk, old country, and roots Americana, Miles ranges from hellfire to homespun, every song edged with the desperation of the blues and tempered with a brooding sweetness. The writing is spare and intoxicating, and the compositions have a lyrical style that is both literate and rough.

The performances on Miles From The Lightning are stripped down, barebones acoustic arrangements of fifteen original compositions, featuring contributions from fellow Wisconsin songwriter Peter Mulvey on lap-steel and high-strung guitars, and Mark Olson on Classical guitar, with light percussion on two tracks by drummer Joe Wong. At the forefront of each recording is Foucault's burnished voice, smoky and sharp.

The title track, subtitled A Song For Townes Van Zandt, which laments the late Texas songwriter, resides at the end of the album and provides a natural context for the record as a whole:
"What I found compelling in Townes Van Zandt's writing is the essentially American element of the blues that runs through everything he wrote. No matter what he was playing, Townes sang the blues and he did it with such a hurtful purity. It was honest and haunting. Hearing Townes when I was eighteen had the power of revelation."

Review

The buoyant and fiercely competitive American acoustic songwriter scene consistently spawns a plethora of rising stars, all of them with absorbing and intelligent CDs to display their wares: and the trio of artists who make up the Chautauqua Tour (eagerly anticipated by us all at HQ) lived up to, and exceeded, our expectations, and gave a healthy-sized and appreciative audience an evening of truly memorable quality. Three nights into their UK tour, they were well fired up, and it showed ... happily, this was our first night of recording for the upcoming 'Live at the Talbot' CD, and Martin and Toby Levan from Red Kite Records were able to commit to tape (or whatever they use these days!) a night of outstanding performances from all three of our visitors.

If Jeffrey Foucault were a painter, his pictures might well be bleak landscapes of his home state of Wisconsin; his songs have an equivalent quality, suggestive of survival in a challenging environment, love in a cold climate. Great songs like 'Secretariat', I'm Alright', and CD title track 'Miles From the Lightning' were delivered in his trademark weathered voice - unexpected from someone so young - with Peter Mulvey visiting the stage to provide occasional second guitar.

Boston's Kris Delmhorst was next up, and quickly beguiled us all with her warm and informal presence and truly lovely voice, underpinned by guitar work that's both deft and functional. Both Mulvey and Foucault jumped on stage from time to time to add their contributions to songs like 'Broken White Line', 'Little Wings', 'Gave It Away' and others from her repertoire of material, by turns rootsy and haunting.

Peter Mulvey's solo set opened the evening's second half, and demonstrated convincingly why he's lauded as a uniquely compelling and inventive performer and writer. If he's ever possessed a guitar tutor book, it's long since been consigned to the bin - his approach combines a range of totally audacious open tunings with a playing technique, ranging from percussive funkiness to ornate picking and hammering-on, that had every guitarist in the room, be they occasional or regular, open-mouthed in awe. As if that wasn't enough, he peppered a selection of his own articulate material with innovative covers of Paul Simon, Dylan, and others, and rounded off the night by bringing his colleagues on board for ensemble versions of Lennon/McCartney, Greg Brown, Gillian Welch, and Townes Van Zandt classics, many topped with perfect 3-part harmonies. What a feast!

Post-gig CD sales were spectacular - not far short of half the audience went away clutching one or more mementos of what was, by any standards, an uplifting evening.