Love is a gift that is usually given with the utmost sincerity, but there’s no way of telling how long it will last. It’s not just the fickle nature of the human heart that guarantees this, but the simple cruelties of fate, which can take away the person who has given your life its greatest meaning without a moment’s notice. While singer and songwriter Mark Mulcahy has shown he knows more than a little about the nature of love in the fine songs he’s written as a solo artist, and with his bands Miracle Legion and Polaris, he learned an especially harsh lesson in September 2008 when Melissa Rich Mulcahy, his wife and the mother of his two daughters, died suddenly and unexpectedly. Beyond the human tragedy of Mulcahy and his children losing someone so important in their lives, there was the unfortunate reality that life as a single parent would make it a lot harder for Mulcahy to continue his career as a musician, songwriter, and composer of contemporary operas. So Ciao My Shining Star: The Songs of Mark Mulcahy is a very real act of love on behalf of a handful of friends and admirers of Mulcahy and his music; this album, created in tribute to Melissa, a woman who loved music and was fiercely supportive of her husband’s career, features a number of Mark’s most memorable tunes performed in a rich variety of styles. The presence of Thom Yorke (contributing a spare, electronic-based treatment of “All for the Best,” a Miracle Legion number he’s covered in concert with Radiohead) and Michael Stipe (performing “Everything’s Coming Undone” with a band including Tom Gilroy and Hahn Rowe) will doubtless lure a great many listeners previously unfamiliar with Mulcahy’s work, but everyone on this album turns in work ranging from quite good to excellent. And the musicians approach these songs in enough different ways to demonstrate the full spectrum of emotional colors in his songs, from Vic Chesnutt’s spare solo turn on “Little Man” and the lightly sweet country-rock of Josh Rouse’s “I Woke Up in the Mayflower” to the noisy, expressive eccentricity of Frank Black (“Bill Jocko”) and Rocket from the Tombs (“In Pursuit of Your Happiness”), and the epic-scale guitar crunch of Dinosaur Jr.’s “The Backyard.” For the stylistic variety of these interpretations, the consistent strength of Mulcahy’s songs and the wise, compassionate tone of his lyrics give this collection a unified voice, and if it unwittingly raises the question of how someone as talented as Mulcahy could gain little more than a cult following with this level of talent, it also demonstrates that the belief these musicians (and the late Melissa Rich) placed in his work was in no way misplaced. Ciao My Shining Star: The Songs of Mark Mulcahy wasn’t created to give some critical favorite a musical high five or raise money for a worthy charity — it’s a concrete demonstration of caring and support for a fellow artist in a time of need that will also put some publishing royalties in his pocket to help care for his children. If that’s not a show of love when and where it’s needed, it’s hard to say what else would qualify. – Mark Deming