In April 2025, Peter Mulvey and Jenna Nicholls, along with guitarist Ross Bellenoit, traveled to Floyd, a small mountain town located 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 (you guessed it!) Floyd Mercantile — a weathered wooden building standing 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 those old walls, the trio recorded the album live — no isolation booths, no heavy overdubbing — just three musicians in a room, listening closely and letting the songs unfold in real time.
The visual and sonic tones of the project 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.
Floyd Mercantile is not just an album. It’s a document of place. Of three musicians in a room. Of songs — old and new
