Floyd Mercantile Duo

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 isFloyd 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 sessions were recorded by Jeff Oehler and filmed in their entirety by partner Sue Bibeau and their associateSkylar Locke. Together, Sue and Jeff compriseBeehivePro, an audio, visual, and design collective famed for their intimate recordings and thoughtfully considered visuals.They captured not just the sound, but the atmosphere—the wood floors, the daylight through the dusty windows, and the creak of the porch boards could all be considered session players on this album.

The repertoire bridges eras. Mostly comprised of songsPeter and Jenna wrote separately, there are a few gems from the Great American Songbook: “Skylark” (HoagyCarmichael/Johnny Mercer), “Them There Eyes” (Maceo Pinkard / Doris Tauber /William Tracey), and “I’ll Be SeeingYou” (Sammy Fain/Irving Kahal).

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 ofAmerican song and add something honest and present toit.

Floyd Mercantile is not just an album. It’s a document of place. Of three musicians in a room. Of songs—old and new—allowed to breathe in the quiet of a Virginia afternoon