Peter Mulvey - There Is Another World (2019)

With a career spanning nearly three decades, eighteen albums, and countless live performances worldwide, Mulvey has built his life’s work on collaboration and on an instinct for the eclectic and the vital. On February 15th, he’ll release his most vivid album yet titled There Is Another World via Righteous Babe Records produced by Todd Sickafoose.

Early in 2017, a series of upheavals found Mulvey living through the winter in a friend’s empty house in the small midwestern town of Fort Atkinson. Unmoored and lost in the middle of his life, he spent hours each day walking along the frozen marsh of the Bark river and through the wintry oak savannah nearby. The songs came in fast and strange and vivid, which Mulvey transcribed during the night at a table in the vacant house. These songs became his new album, a powerful dreamscape of imagistic, haiku-like auditory sketches, within which are plenty of wrenching, haunting, and even sweet songs.

The thirteen track effort amounts to a remarkable, brief, potent stab. Alienation, loss, and heartbreak; all are rendered lucid, even beautiful, in the bright-dark sideways light of deep winter. It is also a story of renewal, through close attention and a determined stillness, a piercing gaze toward detail and an opening toward simple acceptance of what is.