Peter Mulvey and SistaStrings – Love Is The Only Thing

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For Love is the Only Thing, Peter Mulvey teamed up with Sistastrings, the sibling duo featuring Monique and Chauntee Ross on cello and violin, who also provide harmonies. Together they set out to create an anti-fascist record, one driven by a sense of community and compassion for others.

It’s bookended by a mission statement defining two covers, opening with an extemporised reading of Stephen Foster’s timeless Shenandoah, the strings complementing the simple acoustic strum, Mulvey seeing it as a musical communal outlet bringing people together to reinterpret and perform across the generations.

Sung in warm, intimate tones with strings-backed hummed passages and tumbling fingerpicked notes, Soft Animal is basically about falling in love, borrowing poet Mary Oliver’s poetic metaphor for “The soft animal of my body wants the soft animal of yours”, describing the experience as how “My footsteps want to walk beside yours somewhere near the river/Oh my eyes they want your dark eyes looking back at me/My arms, they want to hold you until we are both believers/And I want you to be free/I want to touch your face, I want to kiss you by the river/I want you here with me”.

With Nathan Kilen on drums, co-written with Paul Cebar, Oh My Dear (The Demagogue) turns the lens on disenchantment with contemporary America, pondering how to set things right, whether to “Call the bonesetter, bring the hammer around/Or wait for the rain to wash it all down/Bring on the sage to show the brokers the door/Grandmother’s garden or the killing floor/Mother’s milk or a cleansing fire Gabriel’s horn or Orpheus’s lyre”.

The wonderfully titled Old Men Drinking Seagrams was written with John Statz and carries a hint of John Prine with the sisters on harmonies. It’s a snapshot of a small town that’s seen better days (“there’s only one grocery store/And the cannery’s gone…Coyote eating french fries/At the park ’n’ ride… And three shit-hole bars/When the damn day is done”) that now festers with prejudice and hate where “they pick on the queer kid/And they pick on the Jew”  and “on the volleyball squad/There’s one who didn’t make the cut/She just wanted to fit in/And they branded her a slut”. And where nothing changes because “the kids go off to college/And then they drift back home/Find someone who did the same thing/So they don’t have to be alone….they make a few kids/And they take ‘em to church/Just like their parents did/And in the middle of the town/In the middle of the night/There’s a busted skateboard/Beneath a blinking red light”.

Continuing the theme of dislocation (“Lost child and you want to be found”), a collaboration with John Sieger, the pandemic-spawned You and (Everybody Else) is an urgent bluesy shuffle with violin swirl that captures the existential void of modern life, fixated on staring at screens “Tryna figure where it’s at”, where “They gave you everything that you could want/Now you’re sitting there hungry like a ghost/Hungry like a ghost/Full of nothing that you want”.

Another Prine-styled number, the easy loping Early Summer of ’21 is a second pandemic number, a vision of vaccine-driven freedom (“I guess we went a little crazy/Hugging everyone/We rode our bikes to the riverbank/Put our bodies in the water/Watched the little ones splashing/Drunk on the warmth of the sun/We 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 were just so happy /To have been in the world again”), an optimism that spills over into the dreamy slow sway of Five Hundred Days, written with his wife about the possibility of parenthood and a better world where “They got friends here, they got strangers/Hands to help and hands to hold/Everyone tries to say what they mean”.

Played in waltztime, referencing Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States and taking inspiration from The Book of Sirach, a Hebrew book of ethics, On the Eve of the Inaugural again leans to optimism, opening with the narrator observing a baby “in a car seat in the back of a Honda/That your mother is fueling at the pump next to mine/While the screens on each pump chatter at the grownups/American consumers in an orderly line”, the smile on the child’s face engendering hope that, as we live “In the eightieth straight decade of a steady decline/In violence, which used to be the curse of our species”  then “things probably should (and yet they don’t) feel just fine” as we pass the mantle to the next generation (“Little one I bequeath you this hurtling rock/With its rainforest lung and its molten iron heart/It’s tattered oceans and weary flora and fauna”.  It’s probably the only song to feature the word ‘hominids’.

Borrowing the title from James Baldwin, it enters its second half with the soulful, slow tempo strum of Pray For Rain, another song of hope for America in the depths of despair (“Now the better angels have fled the field/And the people sway to a devil’s song/Every bitter seed has come to fruit/And common mercy deserts the throng/The eyes and the hands of the city on the hill/Are hard as stone”) and that “When your weary tale is too cold to tell/And every stranger’s glance turns you away” then “Close your eyes and pray for rain”.

The rhythm tipping the musical hat to Paul Simon, February Too is another love song (“We were married on a winter day/And on a summer afternoon/We’ll get married any time we want to”) before the mood shifts back to contemporary commentary with the simple strum, strings and world-weary vocals of Song for Michael Brown, a hymnal plea for compassion and sympathy for “young dead Michael Brown/And for his family/And for his city/And for the man who shot him down/And for all of the marchers/And for the cops and the soldiers/And for the angry white men on TV/And for the mothers, and the hopeful/And the fearful, and the hateful/And the righteous/And you and me …And most especially for the next child/For the next child we know will fall” as we live under the shadow of violence and hate.

In the penultimate track, another co-write with Mulvey’s wife, the dreamy fingerpicked swaying See You On the Other Side is again fuelled by the pandemic, most especially of Mulvey living a thousand miles from his elderly parents, capturing the feelings of all those equally apart (“I am just like you: a face behind a screen/A voice at the end of a line/And I’m so scared/ ‘Cause I don’t get to know/If I’m gonna see you on the other side”).

Talking about the album, Chauntee Ross shared how “Finding refuge and rejuvenation in these songs with this group of musicians was healing and personally some sort of mission statement for why we even make music in the first place”. That statement echoes throughout this album as it comes to a fitting close on Chuck Prophet’s Love Is The Only Thing. Its reminder that “There’s a rainbow in the gutter/There’s dewdrops on the shutter” and its rousing singalong chorus of “Love is a hurting thing/ Oh, but love is the only thing anymore” provide a final echo of the call to come together that has sounded throughout this uplifting reminder of the common humanity we share.

“Love is the Only Thing” is out August 12th on Righteous Babe Records.

Order via Bandcamp