Ronald Kessler | In the President’s Secret Service

October 25, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. It’s my pleasure to have the New York Times Bestselling author, Ronald Kessler, to talk to us on the show today about his newest release called, ‘In the President’s Secret Service.’ Ronald Kessler, of course, has written many books, and they all are very investigative and fascinating. This newest one intrigues me the most of all of them. Welcome to the show, Ronald Kessler.

Ronald Kessler: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Now this is an incredible topic. How did you get access to former agents to write a book like this, ‘In the President’s Secret Service’?

Ronald Kessler: Usually I would water board, that worked pretty well [laughs]. But I’ve written previous books on the FBI and the CIA, and I think I tell an honest story, and that helps. An FBI agent introduced me to a Secret Service agent sometime back, I started anecdotes, and then more recently, several current Secret Service agents came to tell me about corner cutting that has been going on at the Secret Service, basically since the Homeland Security Department took over in 2003 (they used to be part of Treasury) to the point where they’ll actually not do magnetometer, metal detection screening at some events, or they’ll shut it down early, which really risks an assassination, just like letting people into an airplane without putting them through metal detectors. So that got me into the current Secret Service, and the Secret Service itself cooperated as well.

Dr. Kent: It was really in the news recently, you know folks have started bringing small arms or larger arms to these presidential events. Of course, they’re blocks away, but Secret Service does have a lot on their plate.

Ronald Kessler: Yes, in fact threats against Barack Obama are up 400 percent since he took office as compared with President Bush. A lot of them were, unfortunately, racist based. They’re not necessarily the town-hall meeting type people because they’re not really that political, they’re more just racist. They go onto white supremacist websites, for example. The people who run around with weapons near Obama’s events as you say kept at a distance, and they are certainly watched, and if they did try to get closer, they generally would be arrested, or detained. They’re idiots in my opinion, but they’re not really a threat to the president.

Dr. Kent: I know, even from that first speech on November 4, when Obama won, I remember one of the networks showed the very, very thick bullet proof glass that lined his stage. And from that moment, of course, now he has the presidential car, which is very, very safe. What kind of dangers are there to the president of the United States?

Ronald Kessler: There are so many different threats out there: there’s Al Qaeda, which would love to wipe out the president; there are these right-wing militia types; there are just nuts, and they’re the type that did actually kill JFK: Lee Harvey Oswald, and Hinckley who tried to kill Ronald Reagan; people who just think that it would be really nifty to kill a president. They don’t really care who it is, they just think the number one authority figure in the country is the president, and that’s the way to really get your name in the paper. It’s really a wonder there hasn’t been a successful assassination, and the agents that I talk to say that because of this corner cutting, the risks are even higher. Not only are they not doing metal detection screening, but the Secret Service has been cutting back on the size of counter-attack teams. They’re not keeping up today with the latest firearms; they’re using the MP5 submachine gun, as opposed to the newer and more powerful M4, which both the FBI and the military use, and they’re not even allowing agents the time to do firearms requalification or regular physical training, and they’re covering that up by asking the agents to fill out their own test scores. So this is the last time you would want the Secret Service to be cutting corners, and that is one of the aspects of this book. The other aspect is what are the presidents really like. The vice president, the first family, even cabinet officers, what are they like behind the scenes, because agents are really like human surveillance cameras: they see everything that goes on in private. That’s quite a wild story. It ranges from Jimmy Carter, who’s known as the most phony and nasty president, because he, for one thing, didn’t even want Secret Service agents to say, ‘Hello’ to him in the morning. It was just apparently too much trouble to say, ‘Hello’ back. He would pretend to carry his own luggage, but it was actually empty, or he would just carry it in front of the cameras, and as soon as the cameras were gone, he would give it to aids. He would also come into the Oval Office at five or six in the morning sometimes and tell the press office to tell the press that he was in there working hard for the American people at five AM, but then he’d fall asleep on the sofa. On the other hand, Jenna and Barbara Bush were also very difficult with the Secret Service. Jenna would even go through red lights to try to evade her agents. She just thought that was a game, a nifty thing to do. She wouldn’t tell them when she was leaving, or where she was going, so they had to conduct surveillance of her car, to find out where she was going and when.

Dr. Kent: What is the Secret Service? You mentioned the CIA and the FBI, and I guess we know a little bit more about the CIA - they’re abroad, and the FBI, they’re within the country. But what does the Secret Service do? Is it anything attached to the president? What is the Secret Service?

Ronald Kessler: It’s main function is protection of the president, and the first family, and that includes even the grandkids. For example, Dick Cheney’s grandkids were guarded. Michelle Obama’s mother is guarded because she lives in the White House. But it also investigates financial crimes such as counterfeiting, ATM fraud, phishing, stuff like that. Actually about two-thirds of the budget goes for protection, the rest goes for those investigations. It was ironically signed into law by Abraham Lincoln, who of course was assassinated - he didn’t want any protection at all, even though the Civil War was going on. He finally agreed to it just before he was assassinated, but the one DC policeman who was guarding him on the night he was assassinated decided to go off and get a drink at the local tavern, so Lincoln was totally unguarded when John Wilkes Booth killed him. When the Secret Service was started, it was just to go after counterfeiters, because that was a big deal at the time. About a third of the nation’s currency was estimated to be counterfeit because state banks would issue the currency, and each one would have a different imprint, so nobody even knew what the currency was supposed to look like. It wasn’t until years later when the Secret Service in a very zigzag sort of way started to guard the president, because a gang of counterfeiters happened to also threaten the president, so the Secret Service assigned two agents to guard the president, and that’s how they first got into protecting the president.

Dr. Kent: You’ve got all these great stories. I’m sure you have many more than you detail in the book. How do you cull through them and choose what will stay on the pages?

Ronald Kessler: I think I have a good sense for what will grab people’s attention, and what’s newsy: I used to be on the ‘Washington Post’ and ‘Wall Street Journal’ - but also, what might give some insight into either presidents or how agents think. They really are very dedicated; they will take a bullet for the president; they’re courageous. But it’s been the management that’s been the problem with the corner cutting. Luckily I had wonderful material to work with, and the book really worked. It’s on the New York Times bestseller list, and it’s available everywhere.

Dr. Kent: You mentioned some sort of negative stories about presidents. Are there any sort of positive gems that you uncovered? Sort of secret stories of real honesty and integrity and kindness?

Ronald Kessler: Well, Ronald Reagan was known as the nicest president. He would spend a lot of time with the agents, schmoozing, joking. He and Nancy would give them food. He one time came out of his California home, and he was wearing a pistol, and one of the agents said, ‘What are you wearing that for?’ And he said, ‘Just in case you guys need some help.’ Another time, he was about to go into an elevator at the White House residence, and an aid came and told him about Gary Hart’s affair with Donna Rice, and the fact that that was about to come out in the paper the next day. Reagan said, ‘Well, boys will be boys.’ Then he went up in the elevator, and said to the Secret Service agent, ‘But boys will not be president.’ Laura Bush also was a real sweetheart. She was loved by the agents. Mary Cheney, on the other hand, Dick Cheney’s daughter, was very difficult with agents. She would ask agents to take her friends to restaurants, which of course was not their job. When the detail leader objected, she got him removed, which of course tells you something about Secret Service management, and how spineless they are. They should not be removing people for doing their job. Joe Biden does not like Secret Service protection. He wants them to only have two vehicles in the motorcade guarding him, as opposed to the usual eight. So that’s not very good, especially if you have a whole bunch of terrorists who could have gotten the Secret Service. When Biden revealed at the Grid Iron dinner that there was this secret bunker at the vice president’s residence, that tells you what he thought about security. He later claimed he didn’t really say that, but the Secret Service e-mailed agents and told them that he had in fact compromised the location of those bunkers. When Biden threw the first pitch at the Orioles game last April, the Secret Service did absolutely no magnetometer screening. Both the Baltimore field office and the detail were outraged, just stunned, that the Secret Service would take a chance like that. Otherwise, he’s known as a good guy, and so is Obama. Obama treats agents with respect and consideration, and both he and Michelle have invited them to dinner several times, including when he was campaigning; that’s pretty unusual. Although he is continuing to smoke on a regular basis despite his claim to have given it up 95 percent.

Dr. Kent: Right. Once an addict, always an addict, right?

Ronald Kessler: Afraid so.

Dr. Kent: But he does treat them with respect and I guess there’s been many folks in several ways that compare Ronald Reagan and Barrack Obama, sort of strange bedfellows, but indeed they have a lot in common. Tell us a little more about our current president, and his code name, and any other details you might know about his detail.

Ronald Kessler: His code name is Renegade, and Michelle’s is Renaissance. The Secret Service assigns the same letter to all the code names for each family, so Bill Clinton is Evergreen, Hillary is Energy. No - I got that reversed. These code names are assigned by computer basically, they’re just randomly spewed forth. Then if a protectee doesn’t like a particular code name, they can get it changed. So George W. Bush, for example, initially was code named Tumbler, but he didn’t like that maybe because it reminded him of his drinking days, so he got instead the code name of Trail Blazer, which he chose. Dick Cheney was Angler because he’s a fisherman. Lynne Cheney was Author because she is a prolific author. With Barack Obama, well there are a lot of other tidbits. One is that he did meet secretly with Reverend Wright about three weeks before Reverend Wright gave the big speech at the National Press Club. We don’t know what happened, but Barack Obama met for about an hour in Reverend Wright’s home. I would assume that he was trying to get him to shut up, but he obviously was not very successful. The fact that he does treat agents with respect is certainly a good sign.

Dr. Kent: What’s it like for the life of an agent? What do these guys go through every day? Do they just show up and escort them? When I see them on television or whatever, their eyes are all over the audience, and it seems like each guy has a different region of the audience or whatever. What’s their job like?

Ronald Kessler:What their looking for when they’re actually protecting is anything out of the ordinary: a person who, for example, is not smiling when everybody else is smiling, or is sweating when nobody else is, or is wearing an overcoat in the summer, or they will also watch their hands to see if they’re making a dive for a pistol, let’s say. George H.W. Bush, would typically just leave the Oval Office and go greet people at the White House fence without telling the Secret Service beforehand - they wanted him to warn them so they could screen these people - but no, he liked to go out spontaneously and greet people. Well, the ‘Washington Post’ ran a story about this, and a few days later, agents noticed in the crowd this guy who sure enough was wearing an overcoat, sweating, wasn’t smiling when everybody else was smiling. They patted him down and sure enough he had a pistol on him, and he probably would have used it. So a lot of plots that they uncover, ranging from something simple like that to more complex - again it was Hezbollah that had a plot to take out George H.W. Bush after he left the White House. The CIA got onto it, and the Secret Service changed his route so that he was not in harm’s way.

Dr. Kent: These presidents do get protection, of course, for the rest of their lives, right?

Ronald Kessler: They used to, and Bill Clinton is the last president who will receive it for the rest of his life, along with spouses. After him, a new law has dictated that presidents beginning with George H.W. Bush will only receive it for 10 years, and his spouse, although the current president can always extend protection, which he has done with Jenna and Barbara Bush, and Dick Cheney, and Lynne Cheney. They can extend it on a temporary basis. That’s the new twist, when it comes to protection.

Dr. Kent: What are you working on next? What’s your next book project? Did I lose you? Of course, I’ve been speaking to Ronald Kessler. I lost him there for a second. I was just going to ask him one last question of what his next book project is. I will talk to him again in one second, but in the meantime, I’ll talk a little bit about his book. It’s called, ‘In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire, and the Presidents They Protect.’ We’ve heard some fascinating inside information, and of course, Ronald Kessler is the author of eighteen nonfiction books, and he’s a New York Times bestselling author. He began his career back in 1964, and ever since then has been putting together these incredible thrilling nonfiction books. Again, this current book is called, ‘In the President’s Secret Service.’ It’s available everywhere. Some incredible details in here about the former president, about his daughters, about Dick Cheney, and then Barack Obama: his smoking habit. Really fascinating stuff all the way on back to Ronald Reagan and others. If you want to check the book out, go to Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, and you can also order it from Borders. You can check out his website at Ronald Kessler dot com. I’ve got him back for my final question here. I just wanted to ask you, what are you working on now?

Ronald Kessler: I’m not really sure. It’s going to be another book that reveals secrets, because people love to get the inside scoop, and that’s what I’m working on.

Dr. Kent: So you’ve done these eighteen books through the years, and you love to get the secrets yourself it seems like.

Ronald Kessler: Yes, it’s a challenge. Maybe I’m perverse, but I don’t like to do subjects that are just too easy. Of course, that makes the books unique, and I also like to tell about something that is important. Certainly protecting the president is one of the most important things that you can do in this country.

Dr. Kent: Well, it certainly is. Thank you so much for being on the show. I’ve been speaking to Ronald Kessler, author of ‘In the President’s Secret Service.’ Thank you so much.

Ronald Kessler: Thanks, I appreciate it.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Politics, Entertainment, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Ronald Kessler | In the President’s Secret Service

October 25, 2009 | Comments Off

 
icon for podpress  Interview with Ronald Kessler [19:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Ronald Kessler is the New York Times bestselling author of eighteen non-fiction books. Kessler began his career as a journalist in 1964 on the Worcester Telegram, followed by three years as an investigative reporter and editorial writer with the Boston Herald. In 1968, he joined the Wall Street Journal as a reporter in the New York bureau. He became an investigative reporter with the Washington Post in 1970 and continued as a staff writer until 1985.

Secret Service agents act as human surveillance cameras and observe everything that goes on behind the scenes in the president’s inner circle. Kessler’s latest book, ‘In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes With Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect,’ reveals what they have seen, providing startling inside stories about presidents from John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, as well as about their vice presidents, families, Cabinet officers, and White House aides.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under History, Politics, Entertainment, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Thomas Childers | Soldier from the War Returning

October 24, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Hello everyone. Welcome to Sound Authors. I’ve got four fantastic guests on the show today. We’re back to an older format of Sound Authors, just for this show, and then we’ll be back to the brand new format with a great show next week. I’ve got four guests on the show today. My first guest will be Thomas Childers, an award-winning professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. His newest book is called, ‘Soldier from the War Returning.’ After that, I’ll be talking to the New York Times bestselling author, Ronald Kessler, about his newest book called, ‘In the President’s Secret Service.’ After that will be the children’s author of ‘The Curious Garden,’ Peter Brown. At the end of the show will be Chris Smither, an incredible folk musician who just put out his eleventh studio album. He’s had a nearly forty year career. It’s my pleasure to welcome the author of an incredible book called, ‘Soldier from the War Returning.’ It’s about the troubled homecoming from World War II. Welcome to the show, Thomas Childers.

Thomas Childers: Thank you. My pleasure.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this book. It’s about a soldier from the war returning, just like the title says. Tell me about it.

Thomas Childers: Well, I think we’re all familiar with Tom’s Brokaw’s book ‘The Greatest Generation,’ and this is a greatest generation storyline of the generation of men who went off, fought the wraith of the great depression, went off, fought the Second World War, prevailed in it, and then came home healthy, happy, well-adjusted, worked hard, had families, and went on. Those stories have been told over and over again. They’re inspiring; they’ve been told in volume. But I wondered what happened to those veterans whose reentry was troubled: those long-ignored, and then their families, who found readjustment from the war a disruptive, enriching experience, much like those from Vietnam, and the current wars that we’re enduring. I was born just after the Second World War, in that first wave of baby boomers. I grew up in a small town outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. One of the most common things that one can hear about men in the late ’40s, early ’50s, my mother would say, ‘He was never the same after the war.’ So I wondered if the experiences that I’d had growing up and seeing my parents, who had a very difficult time, if the parents of friends of mine, was somehow peculiar to my experience, or whether it was something more broad based. So I set out to find out, and discovered that in fact, the happy greatest generation storyline - it’s not that it’s so wrong, but it certainly doesn’t cover what was really a very traumatic reentry for so many veterans.

Dr. Kent: How does this differ from the books you’ve done before?

Thomas Childers: Well, I’ve written two other books about the Second World War. It’s the third in a trilogy, really. One was called, ‘Wings of Morning’ - the last American bomber shot down over Germany in World War II was about my maternal uncle who was killed on what was the last American bomber that was shot down over Germany in the Second World War - where the family had gotten a killed-in-action telegram on VE Day, so that while others were celebrating the end of the war, this family was plunged into real tragedy. I wanted to write about that, about the loss suffered by this family, and what it was like for these young men in their very early 20s who were flying dangerous missions over Germany in the Second World War. What I’ve then done in this book and the other two, is I’ve tried to write things that are historically accurate, but I’ve written them in a novelistic way, so that what I really wanted to do was to the capture the feelings and the experiences of people rather than the kind of dry historical rendering.

Dr. Kent: It’s a fascinating tale. You go into things in this book that again aren’t what we think of. Of course we think of Vietnam: we see Vietnam vets on the street. We know the story that they came home and it wasn’t a happy homecoming. We know even now the Iraq war vets, a lot of them have nerve damage, there’s hundreds of thousands of folks that have been injured in some way. Marriages dissolved, and all of this. So that happened too after the Second World War. What kind of things did you uncover?

Thomas Childers: It certainly did. First of all, we think of PTSD, which is written about a great deal about Vietnam vets, and the current wars. At the end of the Second World War, over in 1947, two years after the war had ended, over half the beds in veteran administration hospitals were occupied by men suffering from what they called neuropsychiatric disorders, we would say some form of PTSD. Forty percent of the army discharges during the war had been for psychiatric reasons. There were almost a million and a half troops hospitalized at some point during the war for what they called neuropsychiatric disorders. This was written about and talked about a great deal during the end of the war: men coming back, suffering from nightmares, alcohol abuse, shattered personal relationships. For example, in 1946 and in 1947, the United States went through a post-war divorce boom: the highest divorce rates in American history were in 1946 and 1947. We’ve topped them now, but it took until 1973 to do it. If you read through any of the things: books, ‘Life’ magazine, ‘Colliers’ and so on, divorce is talked about over and over and over again. One judge in Newark, New Jersey wanted - it was so common, that he was so furious at wives of service men, who were getting divorces, adultery being the charge - that he wanted to have their heads shaved, and then be branded with the scarlet letter. Didn’t happen.

Dr. Kent: Where do you find your documents? There’s so much material, I’m sure. You certainly culled through a lot of materials, but where did you find the most valuable material for this book?

Thomas Childers: The kind of thing I was just talking to you about, the numbers: psychiatric cases, the number of divorces, those were written up in ‘Time’ magazine and ‘Newsweek.’ You can follow them also in government statistical records. There are a lot of oral histories one can consult, but I did a lot of interviewing, all over the country: from California to Maine. Asking, talking to people, actually mostly many veterans of course, and now, unfortunately, widows of veterans, that generation passing away with great rapidity, and also people my age, that is now the grown children of veterans of the Second World War. What I discovered was that so many people had grown up in broken homes, had had fathers who had suffered from alcohol abuse, and so on, estranged parents and so on, and they were finally happy that they weren’t alone, that this has been the sort of great silent story of the aftermath of the Second World War. I have to say that one of the things about these oral histories is that you may be able to get veterans to talk about their combat experiences, but that’s not easy. It’s much more difficult to say, ‘Excuse me, but during the war, did you have an adulterous relationship? Did you drink too much when you came home? Did you abuse your wife and kids? Did you have nightmares? Were you ever treated for psychiatric problems?’ So it really takes pushing beyond this. One of the things that I did in the book is to write about my family, which had its great difficulties, the family of my best friend, whose father lost both legs in December of 1944, and had a very stormy relationship with his family when he came back. Then another man, a doctor, a very distinguished physician, a brilliant man, who was diagnosed in his 70s with a chronic case of post-traumatic stress disorder, which had led to divorce and estrangement from his children.

Dr. Kent: What is it like putting your own story into this book? Obviously it colors it in a different way.

Thomas Childers: It was a harrowing experience, and my parents are no longer alive. I’m not sure what they have thought about it, except that it’s true. It’s very, very difficult to do, and it was very courageous of the other people that I interviewed, the Alums, my best friend’s family, Michael Gould in Rhode Island, to be able to talk about very difficult personal experiences. But what it does do is to make those stories come alive, so that you’re not just dealing with divorce statistics, and statistics on psychiatric troubles.

Dr. Kent: Right. So what’s your take on this, the greatest generation? Obviously it’s in your subtitle to the book, it’s something that a lot of people think about, and it was a fantastic victory in some ways. Obviously these men were liberators, these men were heroes, whereas in Vietnam, it wasn’t the same situation. What did that stigma of the greatest generation, or of hero, or whatever, how did that affect this whole soldier from the war returning?

Thomas Childers: I think that nothing that I found in any way, it seems to me, diminishes the wartime generation’s accomplishments: they deserve all the testimonials and public tributes they get. But, what it does suggest is that the price they paid was far higher, the toll extracted from them and their families far greater, and their struggles far more protracted than the glossy tributes that we find in Tom Brokaw’s ‘The Greatest Generation’ would lead us to believe.

Dr. Kent: And you are a professor of history. When you’re teaching history to today’s young generation, how do you teach World War II history? How do you teach modern history to college students?

Thomas Childers: Well, the Second World War for college students now might as well be the 30-Year’s War from the 17th century. They’ve certainly seen movies; some of them watch the History Channel, even. But that generation of men and women that experienced the war is quickly passing away, and so what I try to do is to certainly deal with the major events of the war, give this great forward history, but also to bring as much of the experience, the emotional content of the war, what it was like for so-called ordinary men and women in the United States, or in Britain, or Russia, or Germany, or Japan. What it was like for them, and how they experienced what was the greatest, and by ‘greatest,’ I mean the most extensive conflict, in human history.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been such an honor chatting with you. The book is out on Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and of course I’ve been speaking to Thomas Childers, author of ‘Soldier from the War Returning.’ It’s a powerful testimony to the suffering of soldiers no matter what the conflict is. We might think that these folks didn’t go through the same thing that the soldiers are going through these days, but it seems to be the case.

Thomas Childers: Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Kent: And where can we find out more about you and about the book?

Thomas Childers: The Houghton Mifflin website, that certainly has information about the book and the University of Pennsylvania website has things about me and the books that I’ve written.

Dr. Kent: And students that are lucky enough to take your courses, what are you teaching now?

Thomas Childers: I teach a course called the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and then a course on the Second World War in film and fiction.

Dr. Kent: Well, a lot of us would love to be a fly on the wall in your classroom. Thank you so much for chatting with me today, and I hope to hear about the next one.

Thomas Childers: Well, thank you very much for having me.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Politics, Entertainment, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Thomas Childers | Soldier from the War Returning

October 24, 2009 | Comments Off

 
icon for podpress  Interview with Thomas Childers [14:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Thomas Childers was born and raised in East Tennessee. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Tennessee, and earned his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1976.

Since 1976, Professor Childers has taught in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. In addition to teaching at University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Childers has held visiting professorships at Trinity Hall College, Cambridge, Smith College, and Swarthmore College, and he has lectured in London, Oxford, Berlin, Munich, and other universities in the United States and Europe.

Professor Childers is the author and editor of several books on modern German history and the Second World War. These include ‘The Nazi Voter’ (Chapel Hill, 1983), ‘The Formation of the Nazi Constituency,’ (London, 1987) and ‘Reevaluating the Third Reich: New Controversies, New Interpretations’ (New York, 1993). ‘Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II’ (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1995), was praised by Jonathan Yardley in ‘The Washington Post’ as “a powerful and unselfconsciously beautiful book.” ‘We’ll Meet Again’ (New York: Henry Holt and Company) was published in 1999 and is set in wartime Germany, France, Britain and the United States. ‘Soldier from the War Returning,’ examines the difficulties of veterans returning home from the Second World War.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under History, Politics, Entertainment, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Peter Mulvey | Letters from a Flying Machine

October 11, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is the award-winning musician, Peter Mulvey. A great hero of mine, and just an incredible singer/songwriter. I’m going to play a song from not his most-recent album, but an acoustic album that he put out just before this called ‘Notes from Elsewhere.’ This is a song called ‘Black Rabbit,’ and it’s an instrumental song that Peter Mulvey’s played probably for the past decade or so. We’ll talk to him just after the break, after this song plays, about this song, and about a whole bunch more, and his new album and all of that. So listen to ‘Black Rabbit,’ and we’ll come back in a minute and speak to Peter live.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: That’s a beautiful track called ‘Black Rabbit’ from one of Peter Mulvey’s recent albums called, ‘Notes from Elsewhere.’ It’s one of my favorite songs, and it really showcases his virtuosity on the guitar. I’m excited to welcome Peter to the show. We’ve got him here. Welcome to the show, Peter.

Peter Mulvey: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: I’ve been a fan of yours for quite a while, and you’ve been playing that song for quite a while: ‘Black Rabbit.’

Peter Mulvey: I have, yes. That’s a musical song. It kind of beamed itself directly into my head when I was just a kid. Obviously I was listening to a lot of Michael Hedges at the time, but the thing that’s always been interesting to me is that I was not listening to a lot of Irish traditional fiddle tunes, but it also reminds me of Irish fiddle tunes, even though I really hadn’t heard any at that time.

Dr. Kent: It’s intriguing. So it uses a lot of Hedges’ techniques too; the harmonics, I mean it’s ridiculous to play, in a way, unless you’ve been playing it for a long time I’m sure. You could probably play it in your sleep now.

Peter Mulvey: Yes, it does kind of play itself. I’ve been playing it at my shows since I wrote it. I really enjoy playing it. It’s an anomaly. I think in some alternate universe there’s a version of me that really pursues instrumental guitar music and has a whole bunch of tunes like that. But it’s the only one in my little canon.

Dr. Kent: It’s the way I wanted to get into asking you about the guitar in general. So you listened to Michael Hedges; who else did you listen to back then?

Peter Mulvey: I was a great big Leo Kottke fan for a long time, and still am. They were kind of my guides, and I think in that era I wanted to get into guitar playing along those lines. In truth, what sort of snagged me along the way - I think that’s what I set out for, and I was immediately detoured into songs - I think it was songs that I liked more than guitar heroism. In fairness, I think that bug also bit Michael Hedges, and it has also bit Leo Kottke. They’re known as guitar players, but I think if you ask them . . . you really can’t ask Michael Hedges any more. But songs are kind of where it’s at, and then you need to find out where you belong in songs. For me, I think I became over the years much more someone who would refer to himself as a singer than as a guitar player.

Dr. Kent: This latest album I love. Several years ago, at a show you said that you do some voiceover work. Then every once in a while you’ll insert a spoken track. I think even back on ‘Rapture’ you did the voice.

Peter Mulvey: Yes. And then on ‘Deep Blue’ there were spoken word tracks. I’ve got a spoken word track on, I would say, more than half of my records. It’s something that I do. On the new record, I’ve found a way to integrate four of them with music. They’re performed as almost a small piece of theater where I’m narrating a letter that I’ve written to a niece or to a nephew.

Dr. Kent: Do you have little nieces and nephews?

Peter Mulvey: I have 17 little nieces and nephews.

Dr. Kent: Seventeen?!

Peter Mulvey: Yes, Catholics, you know.

Dr. Kent: [Laughs] Wow! That’s impressive. I’d love to play the track ‘Letter from a Flying Machine.’

Peter Mulvey: Oh, please do!

Dr. Kent: Yes, it’s a beautiful album, the way that you link the two. But let me ask you first, what has the reaction been to having the spoken word on there?

Peter Mulvey: People really, really like it, and I really like doing it. The most fun of it is that it makes the show into almost like a small play. I start out with songs, but then these letters give it a very focused direction, and by the end of it, I’ve made a little arc of a story that I wanted to get across. You’ll see. It’s just the first letter that appears in the record, and it’s the first one that I do on the show. You’ll see more what I’m talking about when you hear it.

Dr. Kent: When you do this live in the show, are you playing a backup to it?

Peter Mulvey: No, I actually just bring along a little iPod.

Dr. Kent: You’re kidding!

Peter Mulvey: So the iPod is the rumble of the airplane jets, and then whatever music accompanies the letter. In this case, it’s a friend of mine playing the Bach violin sonata.

Dr. Kent: Wow. You bring that person along with you?

Peter Mulvey: No, it’s just -

Dr. Kent: Oh! On the iPod, yes. Here’s my little friend, and he lives in the iPod.

Peter Mulvey: Exactly.

Dr. Kent: Cool. Well, let’s listen to this: ‘Letter from a Flying Machine,’ from Peter Mulvey’s latest album. Here we go.

[Spoken word music]

Dr. Kent: That’s a great track from Peter Mulvey’s latest album, ‘Letters from a Flying Machine,’ and that’s of course called, ‘Letter from a Flying Machine.’ I love the cookie references in there.

Peter Mulvey: Thank you. It’s Midwest Airlines here in Milwaukee - I’ve been flying for years to get out to Boston, and they bake you chocolate chip cookies on the plane. A million times a week I find an occasion to just shake my head and say, ‘My God, primates! The things we primates have thought up. Chocolate chip cookies baked in the sky, that’s right! The opposable thumb. Look out everybody!’

Dr. Kent: I really love that you’ve brought us back to all of our childhoods. For me, listening to ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’ with Meryl Streep and George Winston, this has got that same vibe to it. You’re bringing us these intellectual concepts, and these wonderful ideas, and yet you always bring it back to cookies, and to childhood, and to the simplicity that kids see the world with.

Peter Mulvey: Thank you! I appreciate that. I mean, that’s kind of what I’m after. I think it’s kind of where I’m coming from. They always had ‘Free to Be You and Me’ on the Muppet Show, and what I always liked about that, and Sesame Street, and that Peter Rabbit and all of those things, is that there’s just something both felt and childlike. There’s something both high-flown and very simple about it. I think two books that have been really good to me over my life were both written by E.B. White. One of them is of course ‘Charlotte’s Web,’ but the other is Strunk & White, and that’s the style manual. I’ve always been attracted to that marriage of basically very grown-up and childlike things.

Dr. Kent: They’re basically short stories in a way, but in the way you present them on stage and on these albums you’ve got me sitting there listening to a story, and I don’t generally pick up books these days. How about your folk audience that you’re out there singing to all the time: does it feel like story hour at times? Do you really have them in the palm of your hand?

Peter Mulvey: You know, people have really responded well. People really like this show, and they like the letters. I like doing it. It just makes sense. My degree is in theater; that’s what I went to school to study. I’ve also just been a fairly restless soul. I’ve made all kind of records. I’ve made live records, dual records in Ireland; I’ve made big, loud rock and roll records; I’ve made acoustic records; I’ve always been into old Americana folk tunes, but I’ve also been into spoken word. I listen to avant-garde stuff. I listen to Steve Reich; I listen to traditional fiddle. And so, for me, it’s always been interesting to try to find various unorthodox combinations of things. In this case, with this record, I really feel like it’s kind of in the wheel house. This is what I’ve spent my time getting ready to do: all of the study that I did in theater, all the guitar, the study of singing - just the study of jokes, and the mechanics of jokes; even little grace notes, I try to tack it all into the record. Like the record begins in the key of B minor, and it contains a reference to a poem by William Butler Yeats called ‘The Second Coming.’ Then the whole record ends in a relative major key of B, which is intentional, but they both are related, the first and the last song. There’s another shout out to the exact same poem in the last song. That stuff has always fascinated me. It’s always been my goal to try to create a little complete world. It’s just art [laughs].

Dr. Kent: Also, in a world of iTunes - and we both love our iPods I’m sure - but in that world you’ve created a real album.

Peter Mulvey: Yes, yes. You have it exactly right. This thing is meant to be listened to in a given order. I’m not going to compare myself to Shakespeare, but the funniest thing comes right before the most serious thing. I’ve got something I’ve learned, a little bit of the mechanics in Shakespeare: you ever go check out his tragedies, just before the heaviest part reaches the tragedy, he gives you a breather, and sort of takes you in one direction so that he can take you in the other direction. That’s just a little bit of craft. I’m just sort of trying to soak up another artist’s craft. I’ve always admired that about Shakespeare, that he was very thoughtful about the way he treated us. I try to do the same with whatever audience I can assemble. On another note, and speaking of iTunes and the iPod and culture, I’m perfectly aware that as a live performer, I’m competing against the Internet and television. It was David Mamet that pointed out that we now a’days are competing against the Internet and television, but bear in mind that Shakespeare had to compete against bear bating and public execution, and he came in third as well.

Dr. Kent: Cool. I’d love to listen to another track. When I bought this album, when it came out, I gave it to my fiancé to put in the car. In all honesty, she wasn’t a huge fan of your music, and I always have been. I was like, ‘One of these days, she’s going to come around.’ I put the CD in the car, and she listened to it, and she came back, she said, ‘We’ve got to sing this song together.’ And I said, ‘What song?’ She said, ‘Mailman.’ I love this song. To me it kind of hearkens back to that album you did: ‘Glencree.’ It kind of has the sound of Ireland in there, some kind of lilt to it.

Peter Mulvey: Yes, thank you, thank you. That one came all at once. I’m proud of that tune.

Dr. Kent: Before we play this song, tell me a little bit about the ‘Glencree’ record. You did a little bit of that all on the streets over there, right?

Peter Mulvey: Yes, 20 years ago this year, I was living in Ireland as a foreign exchange student. I cut classes to be utterly frank and just would take the bus into Dublin and hang out with all those guys; that’s what they did full time. So I sort of fell in with that crowd, was singing Waterboys tunes, and Peter Gabriel tunes on Grafton Street in front of the Burger King, on a pedestrian cobble-stone street. Then, I didn’t return there until about 1997, eight years later. Things had changed some, but I’ve been touring Ireland ever since then. I made a record there in ‘98. You travel, and then you pick up what you travel through. My experiences of touring in Ireland have become definitely a part of what I bring to the road. I’ve had my head altered. Ireland is a lot to wrap your head around.

Dr. Kent: One of the songs off of - I think it was ‘Rapture,’ but you sang it live all the time - was ‘The Whole of the Moon,’ a great, great tune.

Peter Mulvey: That’s where I learned that tune, was right there on Grafton Street from all those guys. Standing in the rain in Ireland, you’re 19 years old, it’s something else, man.

Dr. Kent: Well let’s listen to a beautiful track called ‘Mailman’ from Peter Mulvey’s latest album, ‘Letters from a Flying Machine.’ Here we are.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: What a beautiful song, ‘Mailman,’ from Peter Mulvey’s latest record, ‘Letters from a Flying Machine.’ I have a mother who’s a poet, and I understand the beauty of cracking those books of poetry open, and the sense of the divine that’s within the pages.

Peter Mulvey: Oh, it’s the best. It’s the best. In this case, it was Tony Hoagland, the poet, and I’d been on tour with a woman named Chris Pureka; she was the opening act on this tour I did. She sent me the book of poems as a little thank-you, and I mean, literally, this song, I love it when this happens, and it’s rare, I guess, or it’s rare we actually get to notice it. The song was just recorded. I went up to write her a thank-you note, and just wrote, ‘Dear Chris - the mailman came. Thank you for the book of poems.’ And then just set the pen down, picked the guitar up, and four notes later, the entire tune was done. All good things are true, you know?

Dr. Kent: Wow. There’s a couple of lines in there that really, really resonate with me. One of them is, you say, ‘The pack of lies.’ The part about what God wants. Then, later on you talk about, there’s a part that we can’t quite name, and of course you’re talking about a funeral of someone you know. So this song really is about the divine, about God. But I wanted to point out that part, the pack of lies part. There’s so much hatred out there right now being shown in the media, but there is a flip side.

Peter Mulvey: There is. That whole line, ‘It’s beautiful, but it’s a pack of lies’ is about the way that I would say it. I am so, so, so tired of hearing people tell us what God wants as though they’ve got a direct line. These things are mysterious, and they are mysterious enough that I don’t think we can safely say we know what God wants. We just can’t say that, and especially in the past 10 years, when we have watched, more so than ever as the world comes together. We’ve got people who are absolutely convinced that God wants them to do atrocious things, on every side of all of the arguments that we have. It’s so tiresome. I wanted to just put a strong, blunt argument out there maybe for all of us to perhaps chill out a little bit and admit that we just can’t name it. We’re going to have to go on instinct here. We can name love, we can name behavior, but we cannot name what God wants. The minute you start telling somebody else what you’re sure God wants, you should probably just shut your mouth.

Dr. Kent: You’ve written some great, I wouldn’t say ‘political’ songs, over the years, but really issue-songs. Early on, your song, ‘I Smell the Future’ - tell me about that one a little bit.

Peter Mulvey: Yes, that’s how I approach a political song. I’ve never been the overt, sort of Phil Ochs, Woody Guthrie variety. There’s a certain use for that, God knows: Utah Phillips, and Ani DiFranco, they’ve managed to be overtly political in very powerful ways. But I cannot achieve what I need to achieve, it just falls dead when I try to speak in those terms. When I am able to speak about things, it tends to be detail oriented, and it tends to be just focused on a simple human story. ‘Smell the Future,’ I guess is about the Rodney King beating, but the most that I’ll say of it is my experience, which is I think most Americans’ experience of just seeing things on television and then being personally hurt and outraged and troubled by it. Bruce Springsteen’s sort of my hero for that. I think he’s so good at writing. It’s very, very tough to write overtly about a situation, but it is very resonant. He does this, and I try to do this, to just get into one character’s head. Once you’re in one character’s head and you’re sympathizing with that character’s experience, I think you’re better off.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely. There’s an aspect to your music that I was actually going to bring up. Early on you did a cover of ‘Clap Hands,’ and I heard you do it live before you recorded it. I love this song, love your version of it. Actually, sometimes you’ll sing, what is that sweet Tom Waits song, ‘Time’?

Peter Mulvey: Yes, that’s a great song.

Dr. Kent: Tom Waits is one of those guys that paints his characters really well, and I think that’s something that you also do very well, and Springsteen does very well: to create characters and really paint them. What’s it like living with these characters?

Peter Mulvey: Well, it’s like living with anybody that you know. I think that we all create characters, maybe more that we are even aware. We make up a little character of even our friends, and sometimes we don’t really see them: we just sort of see this idea of them that we made. The nice thing about writing is that at least the characters don’t come and bite you on the posterior, and prove to be different than you thought they were. It’s certainly an interesting thing. I like writing in terms of characters, and I like trying to tell other people’s stories because somehow that rings more true with me. I played a gig this summer, just on the street in Madison, Wisconsin. This guy came up to me - he’d never heard me before, he was just wandering by - and he stopped and he watched the show. When I was done, he came up to me, and he said, ‘Man. Everybody’s singing about themselves, and you’re singing about everybody else.’ I thought, ‘Oh my, God! Thank you! That means that I actually manage to do some of the things that I was trying to do, and that you noticed!’ It was a real good day.

Dr. Kent: You know, that’s part of the beauty of this ‘Letters from a Flying Machine’ concept: you are writing about yourself, but it’s in this wonderful form that we’ve had for so long. The letter is the lost craft. Some of my cherished possessions are letters from my grandparents that are gone. We keep these things because people sat down and poured their heart into them.

Peter Mulvey: Yes, absolutely. I also love what a modestly little contained form it is. It’s just a little moving line of ink on a piece of paper. That’s all it is! It’s just a human action. It happens to leave a trace that lasts a little while, and, wow! I really love letters.

Dr. Kent: It’s a lot like a song: something that you can listen to or read over and over again.

Peter Mulvey: Yes. Exactly.

Dr. Kent: Speaking of characters links well into Vlad, of course my favorite character on your newest album. Is he indeed a true character?

Peter Mulvey: Oh yes! His name’s Vladimir Chaloupka. He’s an astrophysicist, or a physicist; there’s hardly a demarcation. He’s a physicist on the department in the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle. I met him at the National Youth Science Camp; several times I’ve met this guy. He more or less told me this whole analogy about the way the world actually is. It was one of the most mind-altering things that another human has actually told me. As soon as he told me, I thought, I have got to find a way to get this into my show and onto my record. I finally did. The thinking up the idea of framing these things with letters allowed me to get this word out. I figured, it’s one of the most valuable things anyone ever said to me.

Dr. Kent: I’d love to play the track, ‘Vlad the Astrophysicist.’ If you were just zooming through the album on iTunes or somewhere else, it’s not necessarily the track you’d land on, because you have to listen, but in listening through this album, it’s really a moment that you stop and think about your life. Let’s listen to ‘Vlad the Astrophysicist,’ from Peter Mulvey’s latest record, ‘Letters from a Flying Machine.’ Here we are.

[Spoken word music]

Dr. Kent: That’s a beautiful track called ‘Vlad the Astrophysicist’ from ‘Letters from a Flying Machine.’ I love how you’re able to bring it from the universal down to the crib. If you had left us all alone there in the universe, and you looking up at it, I wouldn’t have felt the same completion. Bringing it back to the crib is an incredible circle.

Peter Mulvey: That’s what I was after; that’s the entire point of that track, and kind of the entire point of the album: to make that confrontation with the physical universe that we live in and the scale of what we have learned sort of check in on a real, demonstrable level; to say, ‘Here’s what we know.’ And knowing that then, do we still care? Is it still significant to us? And I think the answer is probably different for everybody, but my answer is ‘Yes.’

Dr. Kent: To wrap up here, I appreciate this interview; I love your music. You do these crazy tours, but in the same way, very earthy, natural tours. You bike from place to place. Where did this whole idea come from.

Peter Mulvey: It’s just biking to work on an enormous scale. That’s all it really is. There’s a little club called the Cafe Carpe in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, about 50 miles from our house. I thought for years, man, I could just ride my bike there and play the show, ’cause I go there all the time. Fifty miles is not impossible. Then one year I had the fatal thought, wait a minute, then I’d only be 35 more miles from Madison, and I could do a little weekend. Then I expanded it into doing an entire circle in Wisconsin: 300 or 400 miles. Then just a few weeks ago, I did an entire tour out to the east coast on a bike. For me it’s an enormous undertaking: it’s time, and it’s pretty staggering, but it is a tiny little gesture in the grand scheme of things. I’m just saying that we could bike to work. We can all bike to work, even people like me who travel regionally: if we need to, we can bike to work. It’s a meditative little thing. I don’t feel like I’m going to do this and then every city on earth is going to install electric rail and we’re all going to become sustainable because a little folk singer made a point on his bike. In my own tiny little way, this is just me pointing in a direction for my nieces and my nephews. That’s really what matters, isn’t it?

Dr. Kent: And for folks to think about on the radio, what does your biking rig look like?

Peter Mulvey: This year, it was a long wheel-base recumbent bike, sort of like one of those big long aluminum lawn chairs, with tires front and back. It was great until I hit the mountains. It’s not really designed for those, and it was quite an effort to climb the green mountains in Vermont, but it was worth it.

Dr. Kent: The beautiful thing about that, too, is the simplicity of it. It’s such a simple concept. The people that are touched by it are probably very moved by it. What kind of reactions have you had from folks when you come biking in?

Peter Mulvey: I think most people thought we were pretty crazy, but they appreciated it too, definitely. It speaks for itself. It is so simple. Get on your bike and go to work.

Dr. Kent: In the early days, I remember you pulling up in your car, but you definitely had your car parked at the little place in Middlebury, Vermont. I recall, you had your guitar stolen back then. Have you ever heard tell of that guitar you loved so much?

Peter Mulvey: I never have. It’s been nine or ten years now. I guess that day, that was kind of a drag to lose my guitar. But the thing that came out of it was that I became much less attached to guitars. A guitar to me now is like a pencil. Pencils don’t have thoughts; people have thoughts. Guitars don’t make music; people make music. That was a lesson for me. A rude way to learn it, but . . .

Dr. Kent: You’ve been with so many different folks through the years. You’ve opened up for some amazing people. You’ve played with amazing people from Greg Brown and Chris Smither, and folks like that, all over the place. Who are you hanging out with now? Of course, David Goodrich toured with you for a long time.

Peter Mulvey: It’s David Goodrich, Jeffrey Foucault, Kris Delmhorst: my colleagues. It’s been so interesting to meet a bunch of young songwriters who are the next generation beyond me, like Anais Mitchell, and Brianna Lane, and Gregory Alan Isakov, Carsie Blanton. It was my mentors, and then it was my peers, and it still is my mentors, and still is my peers, but it’s a little strange to think that there are people considerably younger than me going after that, but that’s life.

Dr. Kent: I’m a guitar player, and some of my first lessons - I had that ‘Goodbye Bob’ album where you played ‘Deep Blue,’ and it changed the way I thought about a guitar.

Peter Mulvey: Oh, good!

Dr. Kent: Have you gotten some young people come to you and say, ‘Your techniques really changed me?’

Peter Mulvey: Yes, I have. That’s really all you can ask for, I guess, as an artist. We find some good people to draw influence from, and then if people actually find some value in what you’ve done down the line, that’s great too.

Dr. Kent: What do you think about your voice? It’s changed a bit over the years, and of course you now have a great deal of skill doing the voiceover kind of thing. How has your voice changed over the years?

Peter Mulvey: I just settled into it; finally gave up trying to be a tenor, and decided that I was a baritone. Fine by me. One part Greg Brown, one part Hogi Carmichael, one part Mark Knopfler, it’ll work.

Dr. Kent: Greg Brown hasn’t quite given up the tenor part. He’ll come out every once in a while with a good tenor.

Peter Mulvey: Once in a while, yes. He’ll still croon.

Dr. Kent: Can you also be persuaded every once in a while?

Peter Mulvey: Yes, once in a while; depends on the jazz standard.

Dr. Kent: That’s one thing you talked about in the past also: David Goodrich, in playing with you for so long, influenced your guitar playing a bit. Your guitar playing is astronomical now, beyond reach. Whereas when you began, you had kind of your thing, but now you do all sorts of things.

Peter Mulvey: Yes. It’s been an expansion. In the past four or five years where I’ve been at is just finding the old American jazz standards, and standard tuning. Hank Jones put it really well: the best thing about music is that it’s never over. You can be better at the age of 94 than you were at 93. It’s such a limitless territory. It’s like an enormous mountain, so wherever you are it’s just like one little speck kind of moving up that mountain. That’s deeply satisfying. Music’s pretty large. It’ll do.

Dr. Kent: Looking back over a dozen-plus albums, what are your proud moments in all those albums?

Peter Mulvey: I don’t know. It’s just the emergence of the voice, which takes time. I’ll say this, you play for a long time, you learn to sound like yourself. Hopefully, we all are, and everybody ends up sounding like themselves. I think I have a certain voice; I think you could hear something written and know that I wrote it. That took a lot of work.

Dr. Kent: There’s this one song for me that’s always resonated, and it’s called, ‘Shirts.’ I love corduroy shirts. That’s part of it. The song is about growing older. I feel like all of your songs, it’s like this emergence also of getting older. This album is so mature. You’re looking at younger people in a different way. How have you gotten older in the music? How have you grown up in the music?

Peter Mulvey: I think I was always a little too old for my own good. That race to become a curmudgeon. But it’s over now: I’m a curmudgeon. I’m an old uncle. I’m only 40, but I’ve been talking like an old man since I was a little kid. Now I think, hopefully, I’ve settled into it, and maybe I’ll get to be childish over the next 10 years, 15, 20, 30.

Dr. Kent: You can do the reverse aging, exactly. Some of the rock and roll kind of stuff that you were doing for a while, will there be a return to some of that?

Peter Mulvey: Oh, yes. You’ve got to make a loud record every once in a while; you’ve got to.

Dr. Kent: Nice. It’s really fun to see you every time also because I saw you down in Tulsa, Oklahoma at a place down there. I believe it was just you. Then, I’ve seen you in groups with other people. Your style changes from gig to gig.

Peter Mulvey: Yes. You’ve got to stay interested. You just have to. I’m not going to run out of things to say, and I’m not going to run out of ways to learn about music and express music. That’s a nice thing. It is not a limited supply. That’s just the way music is.

Dr. Kent: What are you working on now? Are you just taking some downtime after your bike tour?

Peter Mulvey: No, I’m just on the road playing the new record. In the future, I could see a record of jazz standards, a record of old Americana tunes, a record of songs by my friends, and there’s always the next batch of my own songs. That should get me going until about 2013.

Dr. Kent: So you’re still in love with it.

Peter Mulvey: Oh, sure. Absolutely.

Dr. Kent: Do you ever find yourself just pulling out the guitar and just playing for fun?

Peter Mulvey: Every day.

Dr. Kent: Wow.

Peter Mulvey: I love to play. My favorite thing about being off the road is that I don’t have to play, so I can play anything I want to play.

Dr. Kent: The road is really the hard part, isn’t it?

Peter Mulvey: Yes, although you just get a sense of balance. I’m not too hard on myself anymore.

Dr. Kent: Totally random question, what do you eat on the road? Do you always go to the potluck dinners they make for you when you get there?

Peter Mulvey: Oh, I sure do. I do, I just eat whatever’s at hand. Although, what I make a point to do early in the tour is to go to a grocery store and get a bunch of apples and bananas and nuts, I mean plants. You’ve got to eat plants.

Dr. Kent: Nice. Cool. Well it’s been such a pleasure. On the way out, I’d love to play just one more track from the new album which is, ‘On a Wing and a Prayer.’ So tell us about this, and then I’ll be really happy to talk to you when the next one comes out. I’m a real follower of your music. Let’s say, I try and get everyone else to be too.

Peter Mulvey: I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. I do appreciate that. This tune, ‘On a Wing and a Prayer,’ actually my friend, Tim Fagan, out in Los Angeles, wrote the lyrics, and I just made a few tweaks to it. It was one of those shot in the dark things where I just sent him an mp3 of a little melody that I had. Back with his lyrics, and it’s almost like he was able to sum up everything I was trying to get at in this record. It was one of those strange experiences.

Dr. Kent: Isn’t that interesting? So you work both directions: you’ll work with lyrics first and then make the music, and you’ll do the other way around.

Peter Mulvey: Of course, yes. Anything that works; any port in a storm.

Dr. Kent: On that note, before we go out: you talk a lot about journaling all the time. Do you have just notebook upon notebook after being on the road for 20 years?

Peter Mulvey: Oh yes. Every five or six years, I’ll burn them all.

Dr. Kent: [Laughs] Do you really?

Peter Mulvey: I do, yes.

Dr. Kent: Wow. That’s part of the corduroy shirt song you sing.

Peter Mulvey: Exactly.

Dr. Kent: Does it burn a special color? I mean, a blue flame or something?

Peter Mulvey: Nope. Just your ordinary paper.

Dr. Kent: Awesome. Well it’s such a pleasure. We’re going to listen to ‘On a Wing and a Prayer.’ I hope you have a wonderful day. Where are your next tour dates?

Peter Mulvey: Chicago and Milwaukee, the 9th and the 10th of October.

Dr. Kent: Very nice. All right, well thank you so much Peter. It’s such a pleasure.

Peter Mulvey: Thank you. Talk to you soon.

Dr. Kent: All right. Let’s listen to ‘On a Wing and a Prayer’ from ‘Letters from a Flying Machine.’ Peter Mulvey put this out this year. It’s a gorgeous album. Combines storytelling and songs and it’s the kind of album you’ll want to put on and get a cup of tea and listen to the entire thing. Put it in your car for a half hour drive or a 45 minute drive. Listen to the whole thing. Really an incredible album. So here we go, the last track from Peter Mulvey, ‘On a Wing and a Prayer.’ Here we go.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: What a gorgeous track from Peter Mulvey called, ‘On a Wing and a Prayer.’ What an up-note to end his album, and end the show today. My favorite tracks from this album are called, ‘Vlad the Astrophysicist’ and ‘Mailman.’ It’s an incredible record; you’ve got to go pick it up. It’s something you can listen to from start to finish, back to front, over and over. Just like letters, it’s something that can grow old with you. He’s really matured as a singer/songwriter, and what a great guest he is. We talked to him all of this hour about his music and career. It was also my pleasure to speak to two authors at the beginning of the show. Of course, Tony Fucile talking about his new picture book, ‘Let’s Do Nothing,’ and Tom Edwards, the author of ‘Blue Jesus.’ What a fascinating story and I can’t wait to read more of that. It’s been a great show today. Later on this week, tomorrow, we’ll be talking to Elizabeth Fournier, ‘True life dating stories of a marriage-minded mortician.’ That’s a hilarious interview that’ll be coming out tomorrow at 3pm. 3pm every day at Sound Authors. Then of course on Sunday, we’ll be talking to Del McCoury, who’s a bluegrass legend. He’s been around the business for a very long time. We’ll talk to him about his music. Then on Monday, we’ll talk to Marcus Wells: ‘Understanding body thermodynamics for a healthier lifestyle.’ And all of next week, at 3pm, we’ll talk to fascinating guests, and then next Friday, we’ll have a show with multiple guests again, and I’ll look forward to that. Pick up a book, in the meantime, and pick up a CD. Peter Mulvey’s CD certainly listens just like a book reads. It’s been my pleasure, and be safe everybody. We’ll talk to you the next time.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Bluegrass, TRANSCRIPTS, Folk, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

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