Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon has a curious fixation with being in rock bands. Over the past two decades or so, he's been in three: the Shakespeare-interpolating Rackett, the Princeton basement band Wayside Shrines, and now Paul Muldoon and Rogue Oliphant (and those are just the ones I know about). But from my perspective as a music critic, his current output with Rogue Oliphant is far and away the best music he's ever made. That's likely because the group's members have been making rock music for years, whereas his previous bands have mostly featured his fellow rock-curious faculty members at Princeton University, where Muldoon teaches poetry.
Rogue Oliphant, by contrast, features singer-songwriter Chris Hartford (who takes the lead on "Skin in the Game," the lead single from their new album "Visible from Space"), Warren Zanes, Cait O'Riordan, Ray Kubian, and David Mansfield, whose résumés collectively include acts like Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, the Dean Ween Group, and Ringo Starr. At the band's show at Joe's Pub last week, Muldoon took the stage for banter, and to lead some gravelly spoken-word numbers like "Fatty Liver Blues," but then retreated backstage, leaving the band behind.
"There's obviously more music stands up here than at the London Philharmonic," joked Zanes, who, to be fair, teaches at New York University. "That’s only because we’re trying to get the words right. We come from punk rock. We are a rock band, basically."
Muldoon, as he has in all his rock bands, writes the lyrics for Rogue Oliphant, which I think are wistful and nostalgic, and a good deal more effective against a backbeat than referencing Tristan and Isolde, as he did in Rackett. As he describes it, the process has evolved from jamming in a Princeton basement to the current arrangement, where he delivers a package of lyrics to one of the experts who then makes it a song, without so much as a chord from Muldoon.
And what do you know, it works: The songs, and especially the lyrics, on "Visible from Space" sound modern, and complete.
It's hard not for me to project a journey onto Muldoon, who told me in a phone conversation that he didn't even bother joining bands as a kid, because he was interested primarily as "a listener," and because he was "somewhat stymied, because my instrument at the time was a banjo." But he's always been most fascinated with rock lyrics and the music they possess on their own, so much so he's willing to leave the guitar at home these days. I told him I thought Rogue Oliphant was a triumph over the wordier and nerdier music he made in Princeton, but he didn't see it that way—in fact, he told me he doesn't believe in the notion of artistic improvement at all. We spoke about that, the age when poets peak, and Muldoon's career as a keen observer of rock and roll.