Support for the Alaska Live series of live music and conversation on KUAC is made possible by a grant from Design Alaska.

Design Alaska.

Strengthening community through support of the arts.

Live Studio.

Peter Mulvey, thanks for joining me.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

I appreciate it.

And you're on tour and, so you've got your songs and your guitar.

And all warmed up ready to go?

Yes I do.

I got one for you now you.

That'd be great.

This is new- ish.

It's called Hey, there, little one.

[PETE MULVEY, "HEY, THERE LITTLE ONE"] (SINGING) Hey there, little one.

Hey there, little one.

Your mama stole fire for you.

Just like her Papa Stole it for her it's this thing that the grown ups do.

And the funny thing is after all that, you still got to steal it for yourself as well.

And then God finds out and he chains you to a mountain and boy, don't it hurt like hell.

And hey there, little one.

If you see God coming, better run.

Ain't that the way that it always was.

I remember I was nine years old at a campsite by the water.

Somehow I ended up running through the woods with the neighbor's teenage daughter.

And her hand was warm and her legs were long and they were pale by the light of the moon.

And I guess I had what you might call a premonition of a big wave coming up and hit me real soon.

Hey there, little one.

If you see God coming take her hand and run, ain't not the way that it always was.

When I talk about it.

I can't talk about it when you talk about it.

I guess you can't talk about it.

So let's not talk about it.

OK. Let's talk about it.

The empire's rise as the meteor falls.

Lawnmower blows a gasket.

True love runs its crooked course and this all ends up in a casket.

And you never quite knew what it was that you wanted, but you knew that you wanted it really, really bad.

Never really knew if you ever really had it til you lost what you never really knew you never had.

And hey there, little one.

Ain't nothing new under the sun.

Ain't that the way that it always was bunny bun.

Ain't that the way that it always was bunny-bun-bun bunny-bun-bun-bun bunny-bun-bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun.

Who is a bunny who's up on bun bun bun bun.

You are bunny you're a bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun go to sleep got it.

Bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun bun go to sleep just go to sleep just would you just go to sleep would you just go to.

Oh, that was.

Sorry I amusing myself.

Starting off Alaska Live with Peter Mulvey with what sounded like the human condition and a lullaby.

Yeah.

All of it.

I became a parent with a certain degree of suddenness and velocity a couple of years ago.

And in some ways obviously it overthrew me and and remade me and ground me down to a nub-- all the things that happened to people.

But over the years, I've learned to distill and condense.

That's the only thing I've learned to do.

Well it's so good to have you back here on Alaska Live.

We're in the studio where we can have a live audience, which is super fun and it's great to have folks here.

And last time you were here I think it was really the coldest of cold of winter.

I remember that.

Yeah.

That was the only time-- because I've lived all my life down in the lower 48.

It was the only time I'd ever seen-- I think it was only 38 below, so I couldn't quite see the magic meeting of Fahrenheit and Celsius, but it was cold.

Turns out that's cold.

It was cold and I even think it made it into a song of yours talking about the ice and the fog rolling down the steps into the marlin.

I think it was-- that's what I was going to play next for that exact reason.

Oh, yeah, man.

Yeah that struck me as you have a way of capturing life, wherever it takes you and that's amazing in your songs.

And that first one was about parenting, but not all.

It was about the human condition.

Right.

You can-- the bridge on that song I just played nails it.

The things that I've wanted to talk about can only be spoken about obliquely.

The tune I'll play next, which is called Windshield.

What I'm trying to talk about is my sense from meeting people in Fairbanks over the years of must be like to commit.

One doesn't commit to live in Pittsburgh but one commits to live in Fairbanks.

And so there must be a sense of what drives that and the nuances of that.

But you can't talk about it directly, so you have to obliquely talk about just details.

And in fact, I played this tune in Palmer maybe eight, 10 years ago.

And two people in the third row-- one of them turned to the other one, I got to that one verse and just mouthed, the marlin.

He's talking and I was like I did it, I did it.

It's like a game of-- what's that game when you're not allowed to say the word?

Oh, it's not Pictionary.

Is it now, it's-- charades.

Oh, charades.

Thank goodness it's not just and I here because we would be still searching for that.

Seconds are rolling by.

Oh yeah.

It's something Fairbanks and Alaska in general, I think a lot of people thought, Oh, I'll just go visit or I will maybe go try it out for a little bit, or-- and that was maybe back in the '60s '70s, 80s, or recently and now they call it home for their forever home type of thing.

And it, is it's very interesting.

So man, I really want to hear the song again because it's one of my favorites.

Oh.

Thank you.

Well, here it is.

It's called Windshield.

[pete mulvey, "windshield"] There's a raven on the roof in the sideways light.

Emptiness black against monochrome bright filling up my dreams with his monologue.

He's never going to let me go.

He is tromping around up there in the snow.

He sounds like the wind like a ghost, like a child, like a dog.

I'm trying to hear what does he say.

Trying to hear what does that Raven say.

Every windshield in this town has seen better days.

The door opens up at the top of the stairs and all of that brutal arctic air slides down into this basement bar and lies down on the floor.

The sun just rose and now it's setting.

Some people here begin forgetting what it is they came here looking for.

Maybe they came to get away.

Maybe they came just to get away.

Every windshield in this town seen better days.

For 70 wet and she ate them seeds now she got the drive need to skip town every time the nights get long.

And she charms all the boys in their Carhartt jeans until they are twisting in their summer dreams trying to get within earshot of her song.

And she's going to go no matter who says stay.

She's going to go no matter who says stay.

Every windshield in this town has seen better days.

Sometimes out on the edge of town Timmy shuts the motor down.

He pulls over to the side of the road and kills the lights.

And a million stars and a million trees and the blazing moon the bitter breeze.

All the vast and the empty in the silent night.

You can feel your whole life falling away, feel your whole life just falling away.

Every windshield in this town, every windshield in this town, every windshield in this town seen better days.

Yeah.

Nice.

I bet you'd be hard pressed to go out to any parking lot here in Fairbanks and find a pristine windshield.

Maybe at a car lot but that's about it.

Yep.

God is in the details.

This is the other having traveled so much like, I run into someone like, where are you going?

They're like Oh, we're going out to do some sightseeing in Alaska.

I'm like, listen at the rental car counter they're going to ask you if you want the windshield insurance.

This is the one time when you're in a sense that that's a scam.

Don't trust it.

Get the windshield insurance.

Trust me.

You want it.

Yeah.

I mean, they spend a lot of time picking up the rocks after the season's over.

Oh, yeah I was just landing at Chicago Midway and I did for maybe the 20th or 40th time I just turned to my seatmate and said, have you landed at Chicago Midway before?

And then once in a while they say no.

And I'm like, listen, this is a very, very short runway.

And so shortly after we're on the ground they're going to hit the brakes harder than you have ever experienced.

It's fine.

We're all going to live.

That's me.

America's middle child.

Oh.

Recently we had municipal elections here in the borough and in Alaska, at some places in Alaska.

And a lot of letters to the editor were talking about, I've moved here, I want to stay here, I want to make this place a better place to live.

I want to keep making it a better place to live.

And I thought that was such a good sentiment like well, we could find another place to live or we've made our home here, let's make it a better place.

And I think that music does that too.

I hope so.

You know?

I do, yeah.

Especially like a week like this.

It's been a tough week on Earth here and a lot of us experience so much of the human interchange now through social media.

And I'm still not convinced whether it's a net positive social media.

It's either 51 49 for or 51 49 against us.

I mean, we're going to-- the only way forward on this Earth is that we collide our ideas of ourselves off of each other.

And so in that regard, social media is just the latest expansion of that.

And every expansion of that has seen has been correlated with a downturn in human violence.

So that's cool and yet on a week like this you just shake your head.

And I guess the there's just a couple things that I would say.

And one is a quote by James Baldwin that I've been clinging to through the past 10 days as a a piece of driftwood.

He said, all the children are ours, every one of them all over the globe.

And I'm beginning to suspect that who cannot recognize that cannot comprehend morality.

So that one is pretty deft.

But the other thing is, I've traveled in Northern Ireland a lot since I was 19.

And I watched it become impossible that peace would ever take hold there, and then all of a sudden peace took hold there.

And the two things that I would most-- the two things I noticed the most is one of the biggest drivers of it was straight up mediocre bland consumerism.

Like, I've had rocks thrown at me on the Falls Road just for walking down a road, and when a kid can get a job at the Blockbuster Video in downtown Belfast to buy beer and pursue his social life, he will do that.

And the other thing I noticed was watching the sort of worst of the political class, both the Ulster unionists and the sort of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, who are fairly nihilistic and cynical and hypocritical people.

They were so chastened when suddenly their job was garbage collection.

And it renewed my faith in politics.

Wow.

I had coffee at the kiosk, and you guys, you say very special stuff for this.

But that is-- it is so important to see each other as people, and making our civic process work, and whether social media helps that or not, we're still, like you said, that's still up for debate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think-- here's the thing worth noticing is that the first people that sees the older radio were Father Coughlin and Hitler.

The first people that seized hold of television were Roger Ailes, frankly, and so on and so forth.

It generally is the case that the people seeking to-- the nihilists get to the technology first.

But here we are on public radio, which is doing a tremendous job of boring and anodizing us into being very, very nice to each other.

Agreed that I think public broadcasting has brought us through some tough times, and music is a big part of that as is bringing news and education and engaging the electorate and all that we do.

And I think you're doing that when you're going out as a troubadour as yourself too.

I hope so, yeah.

Yeah, I have more and more realized that I'm probably like I serve a purpose sort of as a neurotransmitter within the great body of-- that's all I am.

Like, I'm a little peptide floating around the great collective human brain, hopefully.

And so that's why I watch what I eat.

Yeah.

And the right caffeine intake will zap those right through the system.

Can go a long way.

What's the next song?

This is-- this is-- what is this?

What am I going to play.

Oh, here you go.

This is a song that I probably won't play at the show tonight kind of because I'm playing it on the radio right now.

Are any of you in the audience going to the show tonight?

A few hands are up.

OK. Good.

You can hold me to it.

This is just a little conversation I had with a public figure.

[PETE MULVEY, "JESUS WANTS TO TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY"] (SINGING) Jesus wants to take your guns away.

Jesus wants to take your guns away.

See I was talking to him just the other day, and Jesus wants to take your guns away.

Jesus looked tired.

He said, Pete, I just don't get it.

Love could be enough for them if they would only let it, but somehow they shoot people while they dance or while they pray, and it kind of makes me want to take their guns away.

Jesus said, all I ever talked about was kindness.

Well, no, and the poor, and bringing all the love that you could bring more love, more.

Tell me, how do people go from what I said to what they say.

I do.

I totally want to take their guns away.

What I notice is that Jesus calls me Pete, which is really weird because pretty much nobody calls me Pete.

I've been Peter my whole life.

Just a couple of old high school friends call me Pete.

And normally I'd say something but, you know, he's Jesus, like you just kind of can't.

Like we were having lunch in this fancy restaurant, like the one in Cleveland, in an old hotel.

You know how they have those really nice sort of old school restaurants in the lobby sometimes of those hotels, and he just lit up a cigarette in 2017 the middle of this restaurant.

And in his beige robes, and the staff looked at him, and he looked at them, and they just brought him an ashtray.

I mean, he's Jesus.

You just can't so he shook his head and tears welled in his eyes.

So I put my arm around him I said, Jesus, man, don't cry.

I said, I've got this one, man.

I'll tell the whole world on this blessed day Jesus wants to take their guns away.

So, world, Jesus wants to take your guns away.

Jesus wants to take your guns away.

I was talking to him just the other day, and Jesus wants to take your guns.

Oh, Lord he wants to take them and beat them into plowshares.

Jesus wants to take your guns.

Like everybody else, he had never heard of bump stocks.

Jesus wants to take your guns.

I mean, he owns a hunting rifle.

In his father's house, there are many squirrels.

Jesus wants to take your guns away.

Thank you.

So I hope I haven't destroyed your funding for the year.

Whenever I hear somebody saying, oh, you know, this song.

I'm like, well, it's art, and some people like that kind of art, some people don't.

And it's OK. Oh, yeah.

I put it up on the internet, and as you might imagine, it's created a little kerfuffle.

And my favorite-- my two-- I had two great exchanges.

This dude wrote to me, and was like, that's a good song, but the message is stupid.

And I wrote back to him, and I said, I'll let Jesus know, which is what it is.

And then another, a guy wrote to me and said, I really take offense.

I am a Christian, and you're using something very important to me in your satire.

And I wrote him this, hopefully edging into Vonnegut worthy response.

I was like, I hear you, and I'm not going to apologize, but I'm going to push back and say I'm trying to accomplish something, which is without being mean, I'm trying to steer people to think about the radical pacifism of that particular guy.

If there was a historical Jesus, and it seems fairly likely from the scholarship there was, he was a he was up there.

He was up there with Gandhi.

He was up there with anybody.

Buddha, you know.

Peace and justice, I think, were two things he was definitely for.

Yeah.

And the guy never wrote me back, and maybe I should have just said thank you.

I'll let Jesus know.

I don't know, but yeah.

Yeah.

Out here just dealing with symbols.

Totally.

And if people have just run across you, or just tuning in, Peter Mulvey has been writing songs like this for quite a while now, and he is my guest on Today's Alaska Live.

And it's so good to have you back.

And when I first came across you, it was because of Mason Trudy's acoustic adventures.

They brought you up years ago.

Yeah.

I opened for Patty Larkin, right?

I think so.

That's who I was trying to think of.

Yes.

And they say to tell you hi.

They both still have shows on KUAC listen with Mason and Banjo signal with Trudy.

So it's really great to still have this big family of acoustic music still going on.

Oh, yeah.

I remember talking at that show to a dude who had ridden his bike there, and it was like 25 below, which is cold.

As you know-- why am I telling you about cold?

But and I asked him how it was biking in weather that cold, and he was like, yeah, my bike is aluminum, but so many of the components are steel.

And, of course, they have different expansion coefficients.

So the thing gets weird.

And I was like, oh, God.

You guys are so committed.

Back then I would have thought, whoa, I would never ride my bike that cold.

Now the cold is-- I started riding my bike in the winter now, too.

And, you know, I walked in one day and saw my Buddy Morris Palter who was the percussion professor here, and he was riding his bike all the time too.

And he goes, did you ride today?

I said, no Morris, I think my cutoffs like 30 below or so.

And it was 38 below that day.

And he goes, I did.

I was like you still have all your fingers?

Like you're percussionist, and he was, like, yeah, totally you know how to dress.

It's OK. And so I was like, all right.

You're right.

I do.

I am capable of doing that for a couple of miles.

And it is like being on a different planet when you're riding at that low temperature.

I would buy it.

Yeah.

It's really weird.

It's like being on a different planet just being here.

As luck would have it, I have some friends that live sort of Northwest of town up toward Murphy Dome, and I ran into them because they were going to the balloon festival in Albuquerque, which is where I was playing just last week.

Oh, nice.

And so they just gave me the keys to their Subaru, which was parked in the lot at the airport.

And I went up there, and I was standing on their deck, and I heard some sounds, and I realized what I was hearing was the wings of a bird.

That's how quiet it is here.

That's amazing.

And the quietness, it changes when it gets really cold too, the crunching and the snow.

You remember that too, right?

Yeah.

Oh, man, it's so great.

It's so cool.

Also, just being in a house where no one is making because I have a son, and I have a wife, and I have a dog, and I have a cat, and I have so many neighbors.

And up there I was like, oh, my God, why did I have any of these things.

What am I thinking.

This is so nice.

It's just a retreat, Peter.

It's just to reset for your life back home.

That's right.

It's OK. Yeah.

Note to self.

Get my wife an Airbnb in Northeastern main, and just send her there, and be like, this is for you.

It's a little retreat, yes.

I know that you are a biker also.

Are you still doing tours?

Some falls?

Yeah.

It's not like a fully supported tour.

It's not like you're faking it.

You've got all your stuff on your bike, and you go from town to town.

Yes.

That is true.

I've done a whole bunch of them.

I did a couple that went from Wisconsin, where I grew up, out to Boston.

The Boston area where I live now.

And in the beginning, I carried a lot of stuff.

And now, I'm kind of a minimalist, and I just carry a guitar and a bag of clothes.

And I mean, I do it-- I kind of just do it more for, I don't feel like I'm solving any problems here you know like the other 49 weeks of the year I'm taking airplanes and rental cars, but it's just a big reminder-- I think I did it because I'm a naturally curious person.

What I found, the most significant thing that I found was yet another community.

There are among my friends, people who are into that sort of thing, and so now we tend to meet up, and every year when I'm doing a bicycle tour, and we'll have a little pod of five people traveling over the landscape under our own power, getting rained on, getting scared, hungry all the good human things that bond us.

It's a lot of fun, although I've been here, and people have said, oh, so you biked here.

And I'm like no.

No, I did not.

No, I did not bike to Alaska.

I'm not that hardcore.

I just like to do this.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I realized when my now husband, when we first started dating, he realized that I had not been to Europe yet.

And he said, oh, we've got to go.

And we stopped in Amsterdam, and we rented bicycles, and I had never known that was a thing.

It was so cool.

And I realized, oh, what?

OK.

Wait, these people just get on their bikes and they go to where they need to go because that's their transportation, then they go to work, and then they go home, or they go wherever they're going, and they've got their kids.

And this is what they do.

This is their mode of transportation.

And I took that to heart and realized that I can be dressed just like I am now, the shoes to everything, and just get on my bike and go ride to work, or wherever.

It's so-- it's a shift in mindset, and I'm so glad I had that experience.

Yeah.

It's-- yeah, it's really a liberating thing to realize I can leave my city, and I don't even need internal combustion.

Long time ago, a friend of mine was at a party with a friend his, and his friend was a Bedouin.

And someone at the party sort of said something that upset him, and so he walked out the door, and everyone was like, where are you going?

Where's-- you don't have a ride, and he's like-- he turned around, and he smiled, and he said.

I am a Bedouin person.

He was going to walk to where he needed to go, 15 or 20 miles.

And I thought that's such a gutsy self-contained, you know, frankly, a lot of people who sort of flatter themselves as American individualists.

You want individualism, that's individualism.

That's right there.

Wow.

I'm going there on a bike, yeah.

When you're biking, do you write songs in your head?

I have.

Yeah.

I have on occasion, yes.

Unfortunately, one of the things that happens is I have this-- I have this sort of pedaling cadence, and it's-- and unfortunately, and this is deeply unfortunate.

Like I'm the-- (SINGING) She's frequently kind, and she's suddenly cruel.

You know, she's always a woman to me by Billy Joel, somehow spiritually matches my pedaling cadence.

And so like-- Can't rewrite that song.

I've been on a long pharmacological search to find the right drugs to stop me from thinking of that song.

I'm sorry.

Well, don't do that song next.

But, hey, I will have another one though.

Yeah.

Just because it's on my mind.

This is a John Prine song that I just learned, and it kind of still with me.

It did quite a lot of-- it made quite an entrance into my heart, and there's still some-- there's still some reconstruction work being done on the entry path.

It kind of burned in there like a meteor.

This is called an unwed fathers [pete mulvey, "unwed fathers"] In Appalachian, gray house station, she sits there waiting in a family way.

Goodbye brother.

Tell mama I love her.

Tell all the others that I'll write someday.

From a teenage lover, to an unwed mother, left undercover, like some bad dream.

But unwed fathers, can't be bothered.

They flow like water, through a mountain stream.

In a cold and gray town, a nurse says lay down.

This ain't no playground.

This ain't home.

Somebody's children, our heaven children, in a gray stone building, alone.

From a teenage lover to an unwed mother kept under cover, like some bad dream.

But unwed fathers, can't be bothered.

They flow like water, through a mountain stream.

On a somewhere else bound, smoky mountain greyhound.

She bows her head down singing lullabies.

Your daddy never meant to hurt you ever.

He just don't live here, but you got his eyes.

Still stitching up my heart.

I know.

From learning that tune.

Did you learn that since the pandemic or because John Prine-- There was a John Prine-- yeah, he died of COVID, right?

At the beginning of all this.

Very early on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There have been a number of tributes, and I got called up to do one down at the Academy of Music in my town, and it was just-- I mean, I know who John Prine is.

I love John Prine's work.

I even-- I opened for John Prine in 1997 in Galway, Ireland.

Wow.

And I was young enough-- most of being a performer, like lightning will hit you and you will become inspired and play transcendent shows, whatever sometimes.

Most of performing is bringing up your bad shows, bringing the level of them up, you know.

So that you're at least not terrible, and this was early in my career.

So I just had one of those nights where I couldn't sing.

I couldn't play.

I sucked.

I sucked so bad that I went out into the Hall afterwards to not sell any merch and genuine Irish concertgoers were coming up to me and being like, oh, that was really very good.

And I was like, oh, my God.

Was it that bad?

You know, like, wow.

But I hadn't sat down and just sort of immersed myself.

And so I learned a bunch of tunes to see which ones would fit.

And, man, oh, my God.

He was such-- he was a minor.

He was an angel, and we were lucky to have him, and, I guess, it's up to us now.

It seems a little hopeless, but you know, luckily, I mean, Anais Mitchell is younger than me, and she's an angel.

She's a Titan, you know.

And we, and like you said, we are lucky to be on this Earth when people like John Prine and Naz Mitchell are living.

Oh, yeah.

At the same time we have.

This is the only planet we know of that has coffee.

I know.

And I can't imagine going to another one if they don't.

Right.

Yeah, like if we terraform Mars, or heaven help us, Venus.

We're bringing coffee.

We're bringing songwriters, even me.

Well, they're not bringing me.

I'll be dead by then, mercifully.

If there are alternate realities, Peter Mulvey, I think in the alternate reality you might be a scientist, an astrophysicist, or-- I might have been.

I never-- I have had a 22 year association with the National Youth Science Foundation.

Yeah.

I've played at their summer camp.

In fact, I just put it to bed this year because I kept that gig too long.

I really did.

I started that gig when I was 30, and somewhere in my 40s, I was like, why the hell is this diverse group of American science students, who are 2/3 women, and well over half young people of color, why is the middle aged white dude, much as I like myself, why am I the one who's up here entertaining them.

And so I found my replacement.

Oh, good.

Who was your replacement?

She is a young songwriter from Madison, Wisconsin named Carissacat.

Apparently, you can name yourself one long word these days.

You can name yourself a symbol.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So I brought her to the gig and split the gig with her, and then she's going to take it over next year.

But I love science.

I do not have the mind for the grind-- for the grind forward.

I think I have the playfulness and the curiosity, but just never had the mind for the sort of-- I apprenticed to a guitar repairman once, and I was his apprentice for 2 and 1/2 weeks, during which time, I never got to the point that I saved him more time than I cost him.

Yeah.

And then I said to him, should I be doing this?

And he was like, I'm so glad you asked.

The answer to that question is no.

There are ways that people are sort of built on this Earth, and you are not built to be a woodworker.

But you are built to create poetry, to write songs, and to even bring other people into the world of writing songs because I know that that's one of your missions, to help others.

Oh, yeah.

Be creative.

I run sort of song writing groups, not really lessons, but just groups.

I just get whoever wants to, and I supply a prompt once a week.

We went for a whole year once, and most of the time now that I'm a dad, I just do like eight weeks.

We just write a song a week, and give to-- What's your weirdest prompt?

Oh, man.

Or are they all kind of weird?

My weirdest prompt.

That's pretty good.

Let's see.

I once gave a prompt that your song had to begin in the key of C, and it had to begin, well, here.

I noticed a thing in popular music.

What I noticed was this.

(SINGING) Something in the way she moves or looks my way-- that and then this.

Something in the way that she moves.

And so both of those songs hit on a downbeat in the key of C with the C chord, and begin with the words, something in the way she moves.

And then, I was like, that's our assignment.

All 40 of us are going to start with a C chord, the key of C, and we're going to start with the word something in the way she moves.

Good luck, everybody.

Good luck having a valid original thought that doesn't get steamrollered by not one, but two spectacular compositions.

And that was the cruelest thing I think I've ever done.

I'm still paying for it.

I mean, you have to get outside of people's comfort zones, and everybody knows those songs, but nobody ever thought that they were probably going to have a writing assignment after this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's great.

I can play you the song that I did.

I mean, I'm going to have to-- I'm going to personally bleep some of the content.

Great.

OK.

Here was my response to it, and I was wracked with guilt now for the next seven days.

Normally, I'd just procrastinate and let my unconscious you know burp something up.

But in this case, like I had nothing coming.

I had nothing coming, and then I got rescued by a news item on the Tuesday afternoon, and this is called "Mhm In Space."

[PETE MULVEY, " IN SPACE"] Something in the way she moves.

I could lose myself in the grace of it, but sadly I turned on the news.

And the news is Jeff Bezos went to space today.

That mhm could have paid everyone who ever worked for him a living wage and still been rich enough to buy a rocket ship, but no.

So he's on ha ha ha ha in space.

Some days I thank my lucky stars that I never made enough to buy a rocket ship because people, people are what they are, which means I probably would have bought myself that rocket ship.

And there'd probably be some folksinger, and his name would be Jeff Bezos, writing songs about how badly I treated my employees, and he'd be right, and I'd be the ha ha ha ha in space.

You should have moved the world before he came back down.

We should have moved the world before he came back down.

We should have moved the world before he came back down, but we were too busy ordering a tripod with Prime Delivery.

Somewhere there's a better world than this one.

A world where the folk singers are all just twiddling their thumbs.

In fact, they're sitting down with the friendly tech 1,000 heirs, who live in trailers and drink Diet Coke and rum.

He could have treated every human being who ever worked for him with dignity and still been rich enough to buy a rocket ship, but he didn't.

He didn't.

He just didn't.

Ha ha in space.

Thank you.

Peter Mulvey, I had no idea you were going to do that song, but I wore my NASA socks.

It says, I need space.

That's great.

You know, and, man, I pulled the trigger far too soon on that.

I can think of another space going billionaire that I have larger issues with, who knew.

Oh, what a time.

What a time to be alive.

Oh, are you still tweeting?

I don't know what it's called, X-ing?

You've Xed out of that.

In fact, you have laid your finger on a thing that is been-- I've been thinking about this real hard, social media has been objectively bad for me.

And, you know, I already went through the exact same thing.

I was an impatient driver, and because no one could hear me, although I am a very pleasant person, person-to-person, alone in my car, and feeling self righteous about how I needed to get somewhere, I became a worse person, and an unhealthy person, and I finally let that go, or it let me go.

I don't know what quite happened.

Hopefully just middle age or something.

But I feel like social media is worse.

Social media is as though we had a microphone in our car, and we could randomly talk to someone who was in a car far away and make them a proxy for a person we were frustrated with in our own traffic jam.

It brings out the worst in us.

And yet it is how I tell a lot of people that I'm going to be coming to their town and playing.

I have my email list, and it's a conundrum.

So I swore off Twitter like before it really even got vile.

And I don't know-- I don't know how to solve this.

And I will say that I miss some of the best parts of even Twitter.

It was on Twitter that a woman tweeted, I like my antidepressants like I like my men, cut in half as I am trying to wean myself off of them.

I was like, that's genius.

That's so good.

And you wouldn't hear that anywhere but in a place where people are forced to keep their thing to 244 characters.

I don't know.

I don't know what to do.

You did pick up, I don't know if it was during the pandemic or before the pandemic, Patreon site.

I did, yeah.

And I think those are probably the best of type of social media for musicians such as yourself.

I think so.

It's been great for me.

The pandemic happened-- And for those folks out here who don't know what Patreon is, you can sign up for it, and you pay a certain level.

And you kind of pay to be a friend.

I don't-- or, Yeah.

I don't know how that-- I don't know how to describe.

It's kind of the NPR model.

I have discovered-- I mean this.

Most people who experience me, they go to see me once every two and a half years when I come through their town, and then I'm just up there putting songs on videos of songs on YouTube, on Facebook, I sort of just I put them out there for free, and then in Patreon, at first I was posting sort of more of that content.

And I noticed almost nobody.

I have 400 people supporting me there, and no one's checking it out.

Like they're already just checking it out elsewhere and going to see me, and I think-- so it is really kind of-- I just give away what I do anyway.

Yeah, and it's been really great.

I mean, I keep getting my opinions upended.

I guess, what I would say about the 21st century is that now I have learned that the Medicis are way nicer and way more-- there's way more of them.

We have reached a beautiful place where anyone can spare $3 a month for quite a number of things or $5 a month.

Yeah.

And you put enough people together that believe in your mission.

Like NPR, like Peter Mulvey out there doing his songs and doing what he does.

I mean, you can support it.

And for those times when you can't support everything, there's other people who are supporting that.

Precisely.

And that's-- Right.

But Jeff Bezos isn't supporting you yet?

Well, he may have heard the song and taken some offense.

And I get it, why kick a man when he's down, you know.

Man, you can-- I'm probably not going to put that on a record, but you can stream it on Apple Music and Spotify, and most importantly on Amazon Music.

And I hope everyone does it right now.

And I like him.

I like Jeff Bezos.

He seems like a decent dude.

He's the one who went to space in a rocket ship shaped like I could be anatomical, and we would not have an FCC problem, would we?

I know.

OK. Oh.

It was-- the pandemic was different for everyone, and I can imagine that it probably rocked your world quite a bit when you're-- Oh, my God, yeah.

I mean, you were doing a lot of touring.

You had just picked up this amazing band, the-- Sister Strings.

Sister Strings.

I know.

And they are-- you put out an album, and it's so amazing.

If people haven't checked it out yet, it's called Shenandoah, and it's achingly beautiful.

And you had just done that in 2019, and then early 2020, our world got turned upside down.

Yeah, 100%.

And, you know, I mean, I got through it by live streaming and through Patreon.

And one of the things I noticed immediately is that I at least had an audience, but none of the venues have audiences.

So I'd partner with a venue so they could keep their shuttered doors somewhat open through to the other side, if there was going to be another side, or the obvious thing, to partner with a food bank.

But also, if you do what I do, you need a bass player and a drummer to make your records if your records are going to have these things, or if you travel in a band, you're the writer, and your stuff-- your intellectual property can get out there, but the sidemen, like the sidemen and side women, they can't.

So like, the pandemic was an immensely tough time for everyone.

It was fascinating and horrifying to watch how it drove income inequality, like I was certainly on the lucky side of that fence.

And, yeah, I don't know what else to say except that I wrote a lot about the experiences we were all going through, and I wrote a tune called "Summer of '21," and I wrote it in the winter before the summer of '21 because I could see on the horizon that there was a vaccine coming, and I just could not wait for the commonsensical thing to happen, which is that this incredible life saving vaccine had been rushed through its stages by the Trump administration, and by some miracle, we had a life saving vaccine.

Warp speed.

Yeah, warp speed.

And like, obviously, people were going to all take it, and a sort of a unified swell of-- and then we were all going to be liberated from this deadly-- how much of your funding can I destroy?

I'm trying to think how many people-- For those of you listening years later from this-- yeah, that's a different history that Peter Mulvey just told.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So-- do we have time or where are we at?

We do have time.

This is my ode to at least the early summer of '21, that little window when we all got back out there before, you know, variants and blah, blah, blah.

This is called "Early Summer of '21."

[PETE MULVEY, "EARLY SUMMER OF '21"] Early summer of '21 when we felt like it was all clear, guess we went a little crazy, hugging everyone, rode our bikes to the riverbank, put our bodies in the water, watched the little ones splashing drunk on the warmth of the sun.

I took a train to the city, like we hadn't done in two years, and we packed into McSorley's, just to sit and have a beer.

And we waited in a long line, just to eat a taco.

And we were licking our fingers, eyes full of tears.

Nobody can tell you until you see it with your eyes.

No matter how full up with sorrow behind the clouds.

There was always the sky.

There was a singer on the sidewalk.

She had a little crowd there.

She was young, and she was soulful, and she was raking it in.

And we stopped into a thrift store, and you tried on a sweater, and I said that you looked pretty, and you gave me a grin.

And so we walked around the village, just to look at all the people.

And the day was so perfect.

Even though, we knew it had to end.

And on the last train home, we could still hear that street song.

And we were just so happy to have been in the world again.

Nobody can tell you until you see it with your eyes.

No matter how full up with sorrow behind the clouds.

There was always the sky.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I think about the people that are in this audience today here in the live studio audience, and I think of Amanda, who we were at the place where they did 2000 shots that day, and we were handing out information, telling people which arm to pick.

Oh, yeah.

It gives me chills to think about that.

And I think about Alice, who was bringing us groceries because she was doing that gig, and I think about my husband, who's here.

And we were sitting on the couch and wondering what the future holds.

And, yeah, and I was listening to your music, and I just think about how-- it's just.

We all went through this.

It was crazy, man.

I was listening to a radio interview with a woman from Hungary who had emigrated to Philadelphia in the '80s, and like her thing was mRNA research, and then she wound up working for one of the companies in Ann Arbor, like Moderna, I believe, is the company.

And they were just working on a flu vaccine.

That's all they were working on.

And then when the pandemic hit, they kind of raised their hands they're like, we think we have a fast track thing that might work here.

And they asked her if she felt moved at having saved lives, and she said, I still remember this, she was like, I love the goobers, the movie Candy, the chewy stuff, and but, of course, I do not eat whole box.

But that night, that night when they gave the first shots, I say to my husband tonight I eat whole box.

So it's like-- I wonder, after she won the Nobel Prize.

She just got the Nobel Prize.

She did, if she ate two boxes.

Right, you know, like, right.

Maybe, yeah.

Nobel prizes are not edible.

No.

But goobers are.

Exactly.

Oh, man.

Oh, man.

Peter Mulvey, do you have one song to take us out.

I do, yeah.

Right on.

I sure do.

Thank you so much.

This has been so much fun.

This has been.

This is a song that has a little bit of biology in it, and biologists have come up and confirmed that, in fact, my guess that sea borne mammals can have head colds is true.

[music playing] Thank you all for being in here too.

I appreciate you.

[PETE MULVEY, "YOU DON'T HAVE TO TELL ME"] (SINGING) In the middle of the humdrum, there's a sound like a riddle, waiting and waiting and waiting for your soul to solve it.

And in the medicine cabinet, they got a pill to take the edge off.

It's waiting, and it's waiting, and it's waiting for your tongue to dissolve it.

But you don't have to tell me.

You don't have to tell me.

You don't have to tell me because I already know.

In the middle of a lifetime.

The road gets a little squirrelly.

You might lose your sense of humor for a year or two.

And in the middle of the ocean, there is a dolphin with a head cold.

And you probably think about him as often as he thinks of you.

Yeah, you don't have to tell me.

You don't have to tell me.

You don't have to tell me, sadly I already know.

Now in the middle of the motion, you can wonder if you mean it, but you could just put your hand out, and you could lay it on me.

And I can second that emotion.

We could make this moment stand out.

We could lock it all down, but we could set it all free.

You don't have to tell me.

You don't have to tell me.

You don't have to tell me.

I already know.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

You don't have to tell me.

You don't have to tell me.

You don't have to tell me.

I already know.

You don't have to tell me.

I already know.

Thank you.

You can find links to more episodes of Alaska TV and download audio podcasts of the Alaska Live radio show online at KUAC.org.

Support for the Alaska Live series of live music and conversation on KUAC is made possible by a grant from Design Alaska.

Design Alaska, strengthening community through support of the arts.