nothin Mark Mulcahy Makes A Village | New Haven Independent

Mark Mulcahy Makes A Village

The corn rustles in a field. There’s a crunchy chord from a guitar, an upward-curling croon, and Mark Mulcahy and another man step out of the field. They’re handcuffed together. Mulcahy’s missing his shoes. Together they head into town.

What’s their story?

You can find out — or can you? — by diving into The Gus, the latest album by New Haven icon Mark Mulcahy.

Mulcahy has made an Aug. 24 stop at the Space Ballroom in Hamden part of a tour in support of the record that will take him to Britain and back again.

Reviews of The Gus have described it as a collection of stories about, say, people living in one town, with Mulcahy as narrator of their lives, and not his own.

That sits well with Mulcahy. It did come off — more than I was aware of — that it’s a collection of songs about circumstance instead of songs about ideas,” he said. They’re more like story songs…. I don’t think any of them are about me, other than that I’m one of the characters. I’m in the story, but I’m not the story.”

The literate bent of The Gus makes even more sense given that a touchstone in making the album came from reading Tenth of December, the short story collection by acclaimed author George Saunders. A friend of mine gave that book to me and I had it for a while.” By had it,” Mulcahy meant in his car.” By the time he read it, it was all crinkled up from being in the car,” he said. But it hit him hard, at the right time.

He’s completely singular. It’s so inventive — everything about it, you’ve never heard it before,” Mulcahy said. It only made me want to be better.”

I don’t know that I wrote songs because I read George Saunders,” he added. I did write more lyrics than I usually do.” For The Gus, sometimes, Mulcahy said, the words to the songs came first, and then the process was to build the song around them; other times he recorded music first and then wrote vocal lines to fit. He remembered meeting guitarist Phil Manzanera from Roxy Music, who explained that was how that band had written its material.

We used to just record the whole track and then Bryan” — meaning Bryan Ferry — would come in and do the vocal,” Mulcahy recalled Manzanera saying. You put yourself in a spot where this is how it is, this is how the song goes,’” Mulcahy said. The song Happy Boat” on The Gus was done that way.

Mulcahy.

On the other hand, there was Wicked World,” the album’s opener, about a relationship that goes really, really wrong. That was a song I’ve had for a while,” Mulcahy said. I recorded it a few different times until I got it right.”

Did Mulcahy prefer one method over the other? Any way you do it is fine,” he said. But both had their difficulties, too. There’s two traps,” he said. You can really try too hard with the vocals” when you start from nothing. You tend to have a lot of lyrics when maybe you don’t need that many.”

The other trap is that I made this thing I like and now I can’t redo it,’” he said.

But for Mulcahy, there was another trap in writing the lyrics first. Typically when I have a song done, I demo it a lot,” he said, meaning that he made scratch recordings of it to see how it sounded put together. He recalled being in the studio with producer Marc Seedorf and being dissatisfied with the way a song was turning out. Seedorf asked what the problem was.

It just doesn’t sound like the demo,” Mulcahy recalled saying.

Yeah, you feel like you’re doing something wrong,” Mulcahy recalled Seedorf answering. You do the job, and your mind says, no, you can’t do that,’” Mulcahy added.

That sense of not settling, however, was part of the work ethic involved in making The Gus. I worked pretty hard on this record — harder than I have in the past to make everything fit,” Mulcahy said.

Many of the songs have multiple versions. I started out recording with people I didn’t know at all,” Mulcahy said, a strategy he decided to try after reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. He talked about driving to New Orleans to record with Daniel Lanois, and he shows up and he’s got a billion songs, and there’s five guys there and they start recording.”

I thought about that,” he added. Thought about just trying to get outside myself.” But what worked for Dylan didn’t work for Mulcahy. They were super-great,” Mulcahy said of the other musicians, but I wasn’t feeling quite right. So then I started playing everything. And then I went back to Kenny.”

That meant longtime collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Ken Maiuri. Once he and I started going at it, it started to move a lot quicker.” Mulcahy and Maiuri started recording songs. If it was a guitar song, Mulcahy played guitar and Maiuri played drums. If it was a piano-based song, Mulcahy switched to drums and Maiuri took the keys. With Seedorf as producer, they fleshed out the songs. They added bass. They brought in another old collaborator, Dennis Crommett, to play guitar. John Panos played trumpet; Dave Trenholm played saxophone, clarinet, and flute. Northampton-based musician Quaverly played cello. Rain Phoenix added backup vocals. J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. made an appearance on guitar.

There’s a million amazing people,” Mulcahy said, and a lot of people want to play.”

They edited, and edited more, and at last ended up with the version of The Gus that Mulcahy wanted. I was just trying to make something really refined,” he said.

That attention to craft carries over into Mulcahy’s live performance. I really like there being characters to sing about, because when you’re playing live, I enjoy retelling it,” he said. In my mind, I picture that the audience knows every word, and I’m retelling the story.” On Aug. 24, we’ll get a chance to hear what he means.

Check out The Gus — and buy tickets to the Aug. 24 show at the Space Ballroom — by visiting Mark Mulcahy’s website. The Aug. 24 show has doors at 7 p.m. and show at 8 p.m., with the Split Coils opening.

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