A Conversation with Peter Mulvey (continued)

PM: So let's see, we covered some of my other questions just in our way. How many dates are you going to play this year?

PeterM: This year, probably about 160.

PM: Yo!

PeterM: Yeah. In my forties I'm probably going to cut down to maybe 130.

PM: [laughs]

PeterM: But you got to keep rolling. I'm one of those guys, I need to keep rolling, or else I just sort of get really out of shape.

PM: Yeah.

PeterM: It's just my way. It all depends on who you are. Like Greg Brown does maybe fifty shows a year, forty shows a year, and he sounds really great. He doesn't really suffer for it. Leo Kottke does upwards of 200. The man is insane, but what are you going to do?

PM: He does 200 shows?

PeterM: I know!

PM: Oh, my God! I mean, that's how he probably developed hand problems at one time in his life, too.

PeterM: Yeah, I would imagine.

PM: He had to reteach himself how do it.

Where will your action abroad be?

PeterM: Well, we finally have an agent to do Holland and the continent--Holland and hopefully Germany, maybe, and France. And she's going to do Great Britain as well, which leaves my agent in Ireland to do Ireland. So we're going to take September, and we're just going to spend the whole month just touring England, Ireland, and the continent.

PM: That'll be great fun.

PeterM: Yeah, it'll be wonderful. And for once I'm going to actually have support. It's coming out on Rounder Europe, so that should be fun. I think it was distributed by them in the past. But this is the first time where I actually sort of have the label on board to do publicity and stuff.

PM: Oh, man. That's a beautiful development, good to hear that.

PeterM: Yeah, I'm really pleased.

PM: Where would you look to tour that you've not yet cracked, aside from where you're headed in September?

PeterM: New Zealand. I'd love to tour in New Zealand, just because I've heard it's so utterly beautiful.

PM: I've heard it's very hard to get a visa there.

PeterM: Yeah, I would imagine. I mean, small population, small--well, but I bet I could do it. I believe, yes, I'll do it.

PM: [laughs] Can you recall any--the instances where your songs have appeared in films or TV? Do you know that stuff off the--

PeterM: Yeah. The television show Felicity used one of my tunes, and it paid handily.

PM: It did, right?

PeterM: Yeah. And they used one on the DVD, I'm happy to report.

PM: Oh, now, that's a big deal, right?

PeterM: It is. Well, yeah, you wind up--I mean, a lot of people get a hold of it. I have to say I'm more interested in like--there have been small documentary films--there was a documentary film about neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon, they used my music. There was a small independent film called Origin of the Species, they used my music. And we didn't see any money for that kind of stuff. But I find that stuff interesting, like more interesting, artists sort of working at the margin.

PM: Yeah, because I mean, you're a guy that could score an indie film.

PeterM: Oh, I would love to do that.

PM: You have so many different kinds of songs.

PeterM: Yeah, I'd totally love to do that.

PM: I wanted to get that in the interview so indie filmmakers would say, "Oh, good, he wants to score my film, I'll get in touch with him."

PeterM: Yeah, exactly.

PM: [laughs] So, yeah, I'm almost out of questions. You and I could talk all day, but that's as many questions as I wrote down. I'm very happy to talk to you.

PeterM: Yeah, I'm very happy to talk to you too, Frank.

PM: You're just the kind of guy I thought you were.

PeterM: That's good, that means your sense of smell is working. So I'm going to be at Joe's Pub, I believe, in November.

PM: Oh, okay, because I'm in the city all the time. I live in Nashville, but I get to the city a lot. Great to meet you.

PeterM: Yeah, good to meet you, Frank. Talk to you soon.

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	davidgoodrich.com
	photo thanks:
	Elisabeth Witt
	Liz Linder
	Waldo Jaquith
	Dave Clark
	and many more*
	puremusic home

* designer note: Sorry if we've given you the impression (false) that the songs on The Knuckleball Suite are especially concerned with baseball. (Based on our visuals, you might well imagine that Peter is trying to make a play for Chuck Brodsky's territory...) Actually, on this album there's almost no baseball to speak of. What happened was just that the CD's title sent the Puremusic design department off on a knuckleball tangent.

We were fortunate to find a great shot of Tim Wakefield in action, taken by writer/photographer/blogger Waldo Jaquith. Many of the more vintage knuckleball images were lifted from Dave Clark's outstanding webpages on the subject (Knuckleball HQ) over at oddball-mall.com. Dave is the author of The Knucklebook (the perfect gift for that certain someone) and he's currently reading & signing at various bookstores in New England. You also might enjoy checking out a page that features something called "Erratic Behaviour of Knuckleball (Quasi-Steady Flutter Analysis and Experiment)," even if you don't happen to read Japanese, just for the handsome diagrams. And if the paragraph below, from a New Yorker essay by Ben McGrath, excites you to read the rest, you'll find it here, at newyorker.com:

"The knuckleball--also known as the knuckler, the fingernail ball, the fingertip ball, the flutterball, the floater, the dancer, the bug, the butterfly ball, the moth, the bubble, the ghostball, the horseshoe, the dry spitter, and, curiously, the spinner--has been around, in one form or another, for nearly as long as professional baseball itself, though for much of that time it has been regarded with suspicion. Spinning is precisely what it does not do. In fact, a lack of spin is about the only identifying characteristic of the pitch. There is no right way to hold a knuckleball when throwing it (seams, no seams; two fingers, three), and no predictable flight pattern once it leaves the hand."