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Courtesy Peter Mulvey

Peter Mulvey will finish his 10-day bike and music tour with a concert Saturday at the Iron Horse in Northampton.

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Peter Mulvey's twelfth album, "Letters From a Flying Machine"

Singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey will pedal his way into Northampton this weekend just in time to play a gig - his last stop on a 10-day bike and musical tour that has taken him from Grand Rapids, Mich., to western Massachusetts. Mulvey has cruised some 1,100 miles on his recumbent bike, and will conclude the tour that he has dubbed, "The Long Haul Tour," Saturday with a 7 p.m. concert at the Iron Horse.

"It's just like bicycling to work," said the husky-voiced singer by phone last week from New York, one of five stops.

Mulvey and fellow singer-songwriter Brianna Lane - his opening act on the tour - relied on Google maps on their cellular phones to get them from gig to gig. And, while Mulvey says he hopes his unusual mode of transportation will get people thinking about how they travel, he also has used the journey - and the landscape - as musical inspiration.

"When you're on the road, all you really see is the airport, highway and hotel," Mulvey said. "That's another reason to do this bicycle tour. You get to travel at a civilized pace."

Choosing the bike over other means of transportation takes some serious dedication; it can be very tiring and physically straining, Mulvey said. "I began today in New York, biked downhill to Great Lake Basin in Rochester. I'm looking at the Erie Canal now; I had traveled 80 miles today. That was my day of work."

Traveling troubadour

Mulvey, 40, who lives in Milwaukee, Wis., comes from a colorful musical background and says he loves to travel. He performed in Korea at the Asian Games in 1986 and also has graced the stage in Amsterdam, London and Paris. His current tour coincides with the August release of his twelfth CD, "Letters from a Flying Machine," his seventh with Signature Sounds, based in Northampton.

He uses his music, he says, to speak to today's youth. In one song on his new CD, "Bears," he even addresses his own nieces and nephews, in a loving manner.

"It's a pretty extraordinary thing to be alive to see a fresh young life, especially if you're an old crusty guy like me," Mulvey said.

Mulvey says he hopes to inspire young people to protect the world they will inherit. "Even something as small as biking to work (and in the grand scheme of things this whole tour, big as it seems to me, is teensy) can collectively make a difference in the world we leave behind. And people who are, right now, little children, will spend their adult lives in the world we collectively make," he said "Both this tour and my new record are keenly focused on the future."

And he has a word of advice for up-and-coming musicians: "Play gigs," he said. "It's great that there's Facebook and MySpace, it's great that you can download MP3s. But the reason why we invented music was to play it to each other, face to face. Back to Mozart's time, if you wanted to hear music there was only two damn ways to do it - you had to go to someone to play music or play it yourself. There wasn't a medium. The reason why we invented music was to play it to the people and make connections."

Peter Mulvey will perform Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton. Tickets, available at www.iheg.com, cost $14 in advance; $17 at the door. Brianna Lane opens.