Floyd Mercantile

In April 2025, Peter Mulvey and Jenna Nicholls, along with guitarist Ross Bellenoit, traveled to Floyd, a small mountain town in the Blue Ridge Highlands of Southwest Virginia, for five uninterrupted days of recording. What emerged is Floyd Mercantile — a record that feels both intimate and timeless.

The makeshift studio was a decommissioned general store called Floyd Mercantile — a weathered wooden building across the road from an open pasture where cows wandered and grazed in the gentle early spring. One cow even volunteered to be on the album cover. Inside, the trio recorded live, with no isolation booths or heavy overdubbing — just three musicians in a room, listening closely and letting the songs unfold in real time.

The sessions were recorded by Jeff Oehler and filmed in their entirety by partner Sue Bibeau and associate Skylar Locke. Sue and Jeff comprise Beehive Pro, an audio, visual, and design collective known for intimate recordings and thoughtfully considered visuals. They captured not just the sound, but the atmosphere: the wood floors, daylight through dusty windows, and creaking porch boards could all be considered session players on this album.

The repertoire bridges eras. It is mostly made up of songs Peter and Jenna wrote separately, with a few gems from the Great American Songbook: “Skylark” (Hoagy Carmichael/Johnny Mercer), “Them There Eyes” (Maceo Pinkard/Doris Tauber/William Tracey), and “I’ll Be Seeing You” (Sammy Fain/Irving Kahal).

The visual and sonic tones reflect the periods these songs evoke; even the newly composed tracks feel in conversation with another time. The goal was not nostalgia, but continuity: to stand inside the lineage of American song and add something honest and present to it.

In The Grace Note

Price: $20