Sometime last year, the City of Buffalo inducted Mercury Rev into their Music Hall of Fame. I’m not sure if Kingston will ever get around to starting a Hall of Fame, but if it does, Mercury Rev should top the list. They’ve been stealthily centered here for decades longer than their formative days in Buffalo.
With singer Jonathan Donahue and guitarist Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak at its core, Mercury Rev has consistently gone their own way musically and waited for the world to catch up. When 1998’s Deserter’s Songs achieved pop success in Europe, the band continued to experiment fearlessly, right up to the present moment with the release of their highly-anticipated new album, Born Horses.
Defying expectations yet again, Born Horses features spoken word reveries by Donahue overtop lush orchestration, dynamic and meditative at the same time. Deep, engaging, I can’t stop listening to it.
Full disclosure: I was a member of Mercury Rev for many years, so I’m thrilled to circle back as friend and fan to talk about their great new album. Last week, Jonathan and I met in front of the old Woodstock Library, a favorite hangout while it still exists. What follows is excerpted from a longer interview.
Adam Snyder: Congratulations on your new album!
Jonathan Donahue: Thank you.
AS: The biggest surprise to some listeners might be the spoken word aspect. Maybe some people don’t know that you had a longstanding connection with poet Robert Creeley. I was hoping you could talk about where this spoken word element on Born Horses is coming from.
JD: I didn’t know I was making a record. I was sitting alongside the Hudson River, and I was just musing to myself into an old cassette recorder. Just entertaining myself with these stream-of-consciousness phrases and things.
One day by accident when I was working on the music that became Born Horses, I inadvertently dragged the wrong audio file on top of one of the first two songs. At first I heard this voice, and I thought it was somebody behind me in the studio. Then I realized it was me, with this crackly voice. You can hear the steamships and the barges going up along the Hudson, crows and things.
It struck me, I thought, that’s interesting, I like the lyricism. I’m sure I’ll go into a big studio with a German microphone that costs more than my car. And I tried with Sean. We tried a hundred different ways of re-presenting these lyrics on top of the songs, singing it, this and that. It didn’t take.
I struggled with it for a long time. After a while I just abandoned the idea that it had to be what I wanted it to be. That’s maybe where, I don’t want to use the word mature, but the more experience an artist has in these ups-and-downs, you abandon the idea that it’s yours. You open to this idea that you’re more like a faucet, and the water runs through.
AS: Let’s talk about the music. If you’ve been following Mercury Rev, you can see where it’s coming from, but it’s also very new. The orchestration is very lush, which you’ve done before, but there are more horns. It’s not just symphonic, it’s almost more meditative in places? Maybe you can talk a little about what went into the musical production ideas.
JD: Well, if I was to be honest, I would reflect it back on you. One of the differences between our early music and your participation and collaboration on Deserter’s was, there became more space between notes. It wasn’t all filled up with the heavy guitar, feedback, or beating drums.
Again, with experience in life, you realize that the real information in the relationship is the distance between things. It’s in the distance between two notes that tells us the emotion. The distance between stars. The distance between words in someone’s sentence. If you’re having a deep discussion with your partner at the kitchen table, chances are the space between your words is gonna grow, if you’re sincere.
This is part of why Deserter’s Songs seemed to strike people. There were these long passages, where they could reflect on something while still listening to the music. They could go into memory.
AS: I think there are times when you want to pay close attention, and times when you’re happy if the music provides a kind of a soundtrack to your own life. And I think your new record does both, it rewards careful listening, but you can also leave it on in the background and it enhances your own experience.
JD: That’s probably a balance that every artist would love at points. When we were younger, our generation had punk rock, or post-punk. It wasn’t really meant to be self-reflective, it was more self-propellant, projecting you into the years to come. Later in life, you tend to recline into music, where you can sit back and reflect.
AS: You and Grasshopper have been the longtime core of Mercury Rev. Can you please talk a little bit about your relatively newer members, Jesse Chandler and Marion Genser, and what they bring to the table?
JD: Jesse is a local, a piano player with a deep background in jazz, grew up literally across the street from Levon’s. He now lives in Texas, but he’s been playing with us on our records since 2015.
There’s a real melodic quality that has a sensitivity to the avant-garde, minimalism. Jesse has also an incredible library within his fingers, he can bridge these gaps between the melody that we all love, the Disney side with the touch of a Terry Riley. The piano on Born Horses is primarily Jesse, he didn’t write it all, but primarily Jesse playing.
Marion Genser is from Austria, a classical painter but also a keyboardist. She paints some of the cosmic microwave background radiation ambiance that goes from the beginning to the end. She would use words like contrast and depth, words that a painter might describe using a canvas, that tilt myself and Grasshopper to see the work in sort of a multi-dimensional space rather than just a left-right.
So those two, in combination with myself and Grasshopper, give some autonomy to the songs. Sort of allows them to speak, rather than going into the recording studio with a hammer and a chisel and telling them what they’re gonna be.
AS: I wanna talk with you about the early days of Mercury Rev, about something I think you guys don’t get enough credit for. Late 80s, early 90s, nobody has any MacBooks, nobody has Garageband, you couldn’t click-and-drag a few loops and sound like a rock star.
At that time a lot of bands would work things out in a practice space then go into the studio. Mercury Rev, you were figuring stuff out as you went, the studio was part of the process early on in Mercury Rev.
JD: Well, as we all know, from the 50s and probably even earlier, there was the idea that the artist would create a demo, then you would take this demo into the studio and do it for real.
And in the 80s this was beginning to die out a little bit for indie bands, where we couldn’t afford this dual process. What came out at that time you recall very well, are these early 4-track machines that anybody could buy. And we could overdub on them. You would make these 4-track cassettes that sounded rough and smashed and compressed and weird and noisy.
Strangely, what developed was something in the industry that was called “demo-itis” where not only the band but the A&R would fall in love with the demo. You would spend two thousand dollars a day in the studio, it sounded clear, crisp, and clean, and no one was happy. The A&R guy would go, What have you done? You’ve killed the song.
The engineers thought everything was perfect, but in that perfection we lost something. And so more-and-more bands began to just try to do what they could to keep the early version and goulash it with a few new things. It was that freedom to not have to redo things again.
And it happened quite early for us. I bought a four-track, and I was making four-tracks at home with much of what would become Yourself Is Steam, but I was also writing with Wayne and Michael [of The Flaming Lips]. The idea of overdubbing is something I did bring when I was living in Oklahoma with them before the fourth record. I won’t say they didn’t know about it, it was just something they hadn’t done.
And that was really the beginning for myself and for Wayne, certainly, the idea of the demo sort of began to go out the window. Cut out the middleman, if there’s an idea, let’s record it the first time and go from there.
AS: Another thing you guys don’t often get enough credit for is moving to Kingston in the mid-90s. IBM had just closed, we still had the remnants of a crack epidemic, there was no economy to speak of. Not to sound negative, but it took a different kind of spirit to move into that Kingston than today.
JD: It was, in some sense, like Berlin before the wall fell. Not to say they were equal culturally, but you could be what you were very cheaply. And that makes all the difference to any artist. When you’re looking at the clock in the studio because every hour’s three hundred dollars, it messes with you, I don’t care who you are, unless you’re at some stratospheric level of money, it messes with you.
Kingston was very different. You could take chances financially, and survive them if they were a failure. Which in essence you could say was our third record. In some sense you could say it was Deserter’s Songs, which turned out to be a success, but when you look at what was popular at the time, it looked like it might’ve been a failure at first.
People living in these situations now, there are these financial puppet strings that you’re afraid to cut, you know. You’re thinking I can’t afford to take a bold chance in this painting. I can’t afford to not work my job because I really want to do this other thing. Writers have this immensely. Poets especially.
AS: You’ve been in the area long enough to see it change, maybe some of it you like, and some of it you don’t?
JD: There has to be a gratefulness and an appreciation for the atmosphere, that’s been held together quite literally in Woodstock since the Maverick days. And the same now with Kingston, the fact that it can support so many young people in the arts, entertainment, that the city itself is able to generate this oxygen that they can live on. The oxygen level in the mid-90s was much lower, you really had to be like a goldfish at the surface.
Of course some of the places have changed, there’s more cafes, there’s more of a bohemian wagon train up from Brooklyn, but I’m grateful for it too, because it doesn’t take too long of a car ride out into the hinterlands of New York and Pennsylvania and see the opposite. Places that are deserted, that cannot support the arts. Or maybe just vehemently against anything that’s alternative to 1949.
AS: True, true. Anything else?
JD: This idea that a thin crust pizza in Kingston has to cost 24 dollars. It has to stop.
Links to Born Horses and other Mercury Rev albums can be found on the band’s website: mercuryrev.com
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