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[title]Nick Mulvey is cooking up something special. A song has been simmering away in an Ibizan recording studio this summer, and against the paradisial backdrop of the palm-fringed Balearic island, Mulvey dials in to fervently reveal an upcoming music collaboration with the exiled Iranian actress-activist Golshifteh Farahani.
“I saw that Coldplay invited her up on stage to perform an Iranian protest anthem, and I was blown away,” admits Mulvey via video link. “I thanked Golshifteh for her activism, and she said she loved my last album and suggested we do something together. A couple of weeks later, I started writing this song called ‘Freedom Now’, and I’m really excited to share it with the world.”
Scheduled to hit the airwaves this month, ‘Freedom Now’ is neither the first nor last time the singer will temper the political with the personal through his melodic folk. Throughout his career, Mulvey has used Afro-Latino rhythm and emotive lyricism to share his musings with the world – and about it. His latest album, New Mythology, is a testament to his philosophy, orbiting around the sacrosanctity of land, interconnectedness and spirituality.
But while he may have the gnarled beard and open-flowing khaki shirt to fit the bill of a 21st-century hippie-evangelical, this is a singer who has clearly spent his career thinking very deeply and seriously about his role – and ours – in an age so rife with hyper-individualism and environmental destruction.
I like to explore music individually. But it is always with an awareness of how it can be relevant to others.
Born in 1984 in Cambridge, England, Mulvey started writing songs at 18 and confesses to growing up on a soul-nourishing diet of Paul Simon, Nina Simone, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Nick Drake.
“As well as writing, I began to use the guitar to explore and get lost in the patterns,” he recalls. “Getting lost in patterns is at the heart of my artistic practice; it’s a dance between pattern-making and the vernacular craft of songwriting.”
Before studying ethnomusicology at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Mulvey lived in Havana, Cuba, where he picked up Latin-influenced guitar techniques. He professes he was never “destined to be an academic” but still immersed himself in modules that spanned everything from shamanism to dissecting tracks by Britney Spears. It was a schooling about the cultural and social aspects of the people behind music, a lesson that clearly still informs Mulvey’s songwriting.
It was also during this “fertile” formative time that Mulvey came into possession of two hanging drums (only 100 or so exist), which is an instrument that largely resembles a giant wok with knitting needles.
Armed with this precious instrument, he met his fellow Portico Quartet bandmates, and the jazzy collective would tour the world with their contemporary instrumental music. Their debut album, Knee-deep in the North Sea, was nominated for the 2008 Mercury Prize (alongside Radiohead, Elbow and Adele) – the band had yet to even complete their university degrees.
However, as Mulvey delved deeper into his spiritual side, tension began to simmer between himself and his more “rational materialist” leaning bandmates, and the singer decided to break free of the band and go solo.
“[Being in the Portico Quartet] gave me a taste of what it was like to be in a band, but I’ve learnt over the years that my role as an artist is to stay immersed in studying my heroes and my craft,” he candidly reflects.
When I write songs, it’s my instinctive nature to write about what I find important and often that is subjects of a spiritual nature.
His debut solo album, First Mind, was released in 2014 and nominated for a Mercury Prize, with songs like ‘Cucurucu’, ‘Fever to the Form’ and ‘Meet Me There’ met with unanimous critical acclaim. Mulvey has since released two more albums, Wake Up Now (2017) and New Mythology (2022). He is set to perform a trio of shows along the Australian East Coast to support his latest album, performing in Brisbane, Sydney and at the Croxton Bandroom in Melbourne on Friday, September 22.
Throughout his music, the singer has not shied away from braiding the personal with the interpersonal. In New Mythology particularly, Mulvey has used the album as a vessel to reimagine “our future” and, inspired by the likes of the Vietnamese monk Thích Nhat Hanh, wrote songs to “feel the Earth’s cry”.
“The songs on the album are all about land and grief,” the singer confesses. “I was enamoured with exploring ideas of my own Celtic ancestry as a Northern European and moved by the wisdom of Indigenous cultures and teachers over the years.
I wanted to better understand our place in the world and asked many questions like what it truly meant to belong to the land.
The surefire starlet of the album is the song ‘Begin Again’, which – other than ‘Fever to the Form’ – is one of Mulvey’s favourites to play as it is a deeply personal track with a story that began with a San Pedro cactus.
After a hallucinogenic experience with the mescaline-producing succulent, Mulvey found himself overwhelmed with tears about his maternal grandmother, Mary. “I was a snotty mess,” he divulges. “But I was lucid in my mind and knew my tears were for Mary and began to see a lyric take shape that read ‘Mary was my mother’s mother and my sister too’”.
Bleary-eyed, he began to think of the tears of the land and rivers, soil and sky, and began to see the next lyric take shape: “There’s rain in the river, there’s a river running through”.
“It was through these practices of self-inquiry that I began to etch the blueprint of ‘Begin Again’,” he reveals.
I think the song is a very deep prayer for these times.
New Mythology may be an album, but it appears to also be Mulvey’s manifesto on the need for collective responsibility. Written in the midst of the pandemic, the song ‘A Prayer of My Own’ – also from New Mythology – may be a sermon on grief and heartbreak, but it is also a redemptive track, inviting listeners to think more compassionately about the future of the planet and society.
“Can we bear the unbearable?,” Mulvey posits in the song before professing, “if I do it for my own, my little boy, my little girl. And we do it for our home if we do it for the world.”
Lyrics to live by.
Nick Mulvey is performing dates in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. He will take to the stage at the Croxton Bandroom in Thornbury on Friday, September 22. Get tickets to see him on the Frontier Website here.