Kevin Mullaney: 'Busman's Holiday' a Tall Order

SARATOGA SPRINGS - The café is crowded with a lunchtime crowd confused by the weather and trying to decide between hot soup and cold sandwiches. When Kevin Mullaney walks through the doors, even Funny Cide owner Jack Knowlton, apretty well known known fixture
in the Spa City, aims his eyeballs at the ceiling to cast a glance at the 6-foot, 7-inch musician.

The urge to lay some witty ice-breaker on him (Hey, how's the weather up there?)
is thwarted, thankfully, by the intervention of some subconscious pang of decency,
in addition to being distracted by Mullaney's intentions at the coffee counter.
Setting his frothy, milk-steamed cup on the countertop, he proceeds to squeeze
enough honey into the mug to quench the desires of a generation of bees.

'Ah, the breakfast of champions,' he laughs, taking a sip of the concoction.

Mullaney grew up in New York City, a Queens-born, Bronx-raised youth who eventually
settled down with his family on Long Island. He was raised in an Irish-American household
with a sister and two brothers.
His mother passed away while he was still a child and when the young man with a penchant for poetry grew up and headed off to college, he discovered a life-altering destiny with his muse.

'I was 21 years old and in my last year at (SUNY) Potsdam when I first picked up a guitar,' Mullaney says. 'I just became enthralled with it.'

It was at school he developed a passion for the likes of Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin and
James Taylor. Nearly a decade later, that early pop/soul/reggae influence has fused with
a healthy dose of folk and a case of the blues that Mullaney delivers on his debut CD
'Busman's Holiday.'

'It's a throwback kind of record, one where you get the best possible musicians you can and throw them all together,' Mullaney says. That formula includes guitarist Torey Adler,
Tony Markellis on bass and long-time friend Mike Miggliozzi on drums.
'With Torey, Tony and Mike, you couldn't buy a band like that,' he says.

Miggliozzi was one of the first people Mullaney met when he first came to Saratoga, a place he stumbled upon by mistake. Heading north on his motorcycle, he missed his exit and decided
to pull into town for some gas and a cup of coffee. It was July and the streets of the Spa City teemed with life. Mullaney was hooked on the area.

He spent a few years shuttling back and forth, between New York and Saratoga, vacillating between the homegrown ties of youth and a new-found independence of adulthood.
The 'In Between' is a recurrent theme on Mullaney's psyche.

'In between the glass, and the faces,
rolling fast,
I see the green, green grass
in a tinted past,
of a bar at twilight,'
Mullaney sings on 'Busman's Holiday' end-song, 'In Between.'

'I had just written that and when we went into the session I knew I wanted to put it on the record,' Mullaney says. 'I thought it capped the album really well and it gave a sense
of where I was personally.'

While half the world it seems, is busy scurrying up the mountain in search of life's highs,
and the other half runs away as if being chased by a volcano ready to explode,
Mullaney finds the style for his prose in the small details of gray matter in that twilight
he calls the in-betweens.

The goal is to keep moving forward. Mullaney cautions against believing there is some
ultimate destination. His vision of destiny is found curbside in the people and the places alongside the long and winding road.

'It's a symptom of being an artist that you can't ever expect to be 'there.' Because if you
think you're going to get 'there' - then that's where you falter,' he says.
'I see it as one long process, one with no end.'

Among the songs of the 10-song CD is the imagery of that endless road. It is in the lonely cross-country rambles of 'Miles from Somewhere,' and in the two-chord folk bop
of 'Fate's Arm' and 'Melancholy Skip.'
There are the soul churning, sorrowful grooves of the blues-inflicted 'She Like Ripe Mango,'
as well as the funky rasta-fused rim shots that define the tune 'In the Streets.'

Mullaney credits the talent of the musicians for the ability to take a song and make it swing or bop, screech and skronk or just lay pure blue melancholy across its skin.

'I went into the studio with the best musicians this area has to offer, so I felt really lucky,'
he says. 'If you stay in a comfortable spot, you don't get any better. As a songwriter, I try to take my experiences and open them up a little bit,' he says.
'If it hits you, if it resonates with you, than that's a really good thing. That's when I'm doing my job and that's what I hope to do with the songs.'

By Thomas Dimopoulos / published in The Saratogian, April 2004