Love Is the Only Thing CD

Love Is the Only Thing

All songs written by Peter Mulvey (September Dawn Music - ASCAP) except:

Oh My Dear (the Demagogue) — Paul Cebar and Peter Mulvey

Five Hundred Days — J. Green and Peter Mulvey

Old Men Drinking Seagram’s — John Statz and Peter Mulvey

You and (Everybody Else) — John Sieger/Peter Mulvey

Shenandoah — Traditional, arranged by Peter Mulvey, SistaStrings, and Nathan Kilen

Love Is the Only Thing — Chuck Prophet/klipschutz

Management: Steven Foxbury, Yellow Couch Studio | Management

Booking: Susie Giang, Ground Control Touring

Cover art: Bob Green and Bill Coil

Acoustic Guitar and Lead Vocals: Peter Mulvey

Cello and background vocals: Monique Ross

Violin and background vocals: Chauntee Ross

Drums, percussion, and background vocals: Nathan Kilen

Produced by Peter Mulvey

Engineered and mixed by Steven Foxbury

“Early Summer of ‘21”, “See You on the Other Side” & “On the Eve of the Inaugural”

Engineered by Graham and Greg Majors

Nobody wrote this song, and nobody has ever recorded it. It’s hardly even a song- it’s a region, an

ecosystem, a frequency. It’s deeply rooted in the American soul: wild and weird, rustic and deceptively

complex, and of course also it is a fever dream of the colonizer, and yet and yet and yet… it’s a sequoia,

a thunderstorm… it’s the wide Missouri. We offer our humble tributary, which took our whole lives to learn.

Soft Animal

I fell in love. That is all.

(Well… that’s not all. Chauntee and Monique made this feel exactly like falling in love.)

Oh My Dear (the Demagogue)

I think it was Robin Williams who apologized to Canada- such a kind, funny, lovely country. Like a nice

apartment located over a meth lab. America, we’ve been worried about you for a while. Paul Cebar and I

sat down to write this together. The narrator is wondering whether he and America belong in couples

therapy or divorce court. Nathan kills this tune on the drums, and I cannot help but notice that the ladies’

string parts are descending minor harmonies.

Old Men Drinking Seagrams

John Statz and I parked on the dyke in the West of the Netherlands that separates the North Sea from the

Zuiderzee. We sketched this portrait of a few American towns we’ve had the dubious pleasure of

knowing. Some of the meanest things I’ve ever said get said in this town. Often, our daily life is a search

for the optimal balance between honesty and kindness. In art, sometimes the gloves come off. All the

noise in the background is Chauntee and Nathan.

You and (Everybody Else)

John Sieger and I sat down to bust this one out quickly. The song announced itself as lean and loping:

very few words, all energy, a two-beat measure. We were pleased to get both a Tibetan Buddhism

reference (hungry ghosts) AND a Black Sabbath-style rhyme (where you rhyme a word with… itself!) into

the third verse. The ladies wrote that descending line, and it makes the whole song.

Early Summer of ’21

I wrote this in February of ’21, looking forward to the Hot Vaxxed Summer we were all gonna have once

the vaccines vanquished the virus. We’ll always have June. McSorley’s Tavern, which is mentioned in this

song, didn’t allow women to drink there until 1970. I mentioned that on Facebook, adding “the Irish are

the worst!” and Facebook banned me for a couple weeks for hate speech. Glad to know they’re on top of

things.

Five Hundred Days

My partner and I wrote this song about the possibility of parenthood in this cacophonous, reeling world.

We were, and are, just feeling our way forward. SistaStrings stayed up late one night at the Carpe and

created the parts that make this so very beautiful.

On the Eve of the Inaugural

With any luck, there’s a system that will allow our species to live on this planet sustainably for a few more

centuries. If we are even luckier, that system is called democracy. Anyhow, good luck, everyone.

Pray for Rain

In the writing of James Baldwin, from whom I stole the title of this song, we find both the aching, abiding

love and the searing intelligence that are necessary if we are to come to terms with the United States of America. If you have ever walked into a big box store and seen fifty televisions all tuned to the same

channel, you have seen a fairy tale written large enough to kill what’s left of you. Turn around. Walk out.

Get to a bookshop.

See You on the Other Side

Another co-write with my wife. I had touched the nerve of living a thousand miles from my elderly parents

during a global pandemic that was especially deadly for the elderly. She grounded me and we finished

this song together. I have since seen my parents alive, several times.

February Too

I am still in love. That is all.

(Well, no: I love the way “Tuscon, Arizona” rolls off the tongue. Thanks, Paul Simon.)

Song for Michael Brown

It will of course take so much more than compassion to heal this country, but without that compassion,

nothing we do can suffice.

Love Is the Only Thing

Chuck Prophet, the legendary rock’n’roller, the last captain of the Ford Econoline, a man of the cloth if

ever there was one, has had a long collaboration with the San Francisco poet Kurt Lipschutz, who goes by klipschutz. I love their work. I love this song. They’re right: love is the only thing.