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 – what?—charcoal, linseed oil, and water?
And at this very moment, the smell of baking cookies has filled this flying machine. They are baking cookies in the sky, Edgar. Seriously, in the late Twenty-First Century, when you’re teleporting from here to there or traveling by personal jet-pack or however you get around, will there be cookies involved?
But all these wonders, all these machines, all that is nothing, too — or less than nothing if there is such a thing. Because there are people alive on Earth who could go twelve miles along the Hank Aaron trail in a little over an hour an hour on foot. Barefoot, no less. Because the sky is and was full of birds.
Because this music must have sparked to life somewhere in the wet dark of Bach’s brain.
Anyhow, when they come down the aisle, I believe I’ll have a cookie. You keep up the good work.
Love,
Uncle Peter
www.petermulvey.com
Tags: CUT THROUGH THE NOISE, KATE BRADLEY, LETTERS FROM THE ROAD, OUTLANDOS MUSIC, Peter Mulvey —
7/6/09
Categories: CUT THROUGH THE NOISE • KATE BRADLEY • LETTERS FROM THE ROAD • OUTLANDOS MUSIC
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[...] 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 [...] [...]