This Friday, 9th October, sees the release of a Live at the Cafe Carpe from Peter Mulvey with SistaStrings. Recorded over two nights in January 2020 the album finds Mulvey delivering 18 songs in collaboration with SistaStrings, comprised of sisters Monique and Chauntee Ross on cello and violin, respectively, and drummer Nathan Kilen. The venue has some significance to Mulvey who started playing at Milwaukee’s Cafe Carpe when he was just a kid, only to return 30 years later to record this album.
“It’s about a couple of magic nights SistaStrings and I spent, crammed into the tiny back room of a listening room called the Cafe Carpe, jammed full of people, joyfully playing the songs we’d learned over our few years of becoming an ensemble, all happily unaware that the world was already changing, that because of the pandemic already underway the entire world of listening rooms and intimate live audiences was about to disappear for who-knows how long.”
As well as older and unreleased numbers are some covers of songs by Iron and Wine, Daniel Johnston, and Gary Louris and Mark Olson. There’s also a Woody Guthrie song – Ingrid Berman. Although there is no recording of Guthrie performing the song, it got plenty of public attention in ’98, thanks to Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue album which featured previously unheard lyrics written by the American folk singer. That all said…this isn’t a typical Guthrie number as the lyrics makes no attempt to hide his lust for the Swedish actress in the overtly erotic lyrics…
Ingrid Bergman, you´re so perty,
You´d make any mountain quiver
You´d make my fire fly from the crater
Ingrid Bergman
This old mountain it´s been waiting
All its life for you to work it
For your hand to touch the hardrock,
Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman
Of course, this all got a nice audience reaction at Cafe Carpe as you can see below.
Mulvey tells us ‘We learned this for a Woody Guthrie tribute night in Milwaukee. Obviously, someone was gonna sing “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” but if you want to do true justice to the Woody, you also need to sing the line, “You’d make fire fly from the crater.”’
Live at the Cafe Carpe is released October 9
Pre-Order via Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1989726136/peter-mulvey-with-sistastrings-live-at-the-cafe-carpe
Photo credit: Matt Dayak