An interview with Mercury Rev

Jonathan Donahue talks about the band's new album 'Born Horses', pissing off the mayor of Denver at Lollapalooza, being the reason for Coldplay's existence and the emotional heft of the saxophone.

A few summers ago, my family and I drove down to the Catskills in Upstate New York for a family vacation. One of the destinations we visited was a place called Opus 40, a jaw-droppingly gorgeous park filled with earthwork sculptures that you really need to see to believe. Little did I know beforehand that it was the inspiration for the Mercury Rev song of the same name. I had a real, “How about that?” moment. Then driving in the area, we drove by a sign that read “BOCES,” a word I recognized again from Mercury Rev, who used it for their second album’s title. I knew the band was based in that part of the country, however, I never gave it much thought when we had planned our road trip. From that point on, all I could think about was how intrinsic this area was to the music of Mercury Rev.

Mercury Rev have been a part of my record collection for more than 30 years, after picking up a copy of Yourself Is Steam (with a bonus disc of Lego My Ego) in England without knowing what they sounded like. Fast-forward a few years, and they put on one of the best concerts I’ve ever witnessed at the Opera House in Toronto on June 15, 1999. (Sparklehorse opened, which I still pinch myself over.) It was such a memorable performance that it seemed like everyone at the show just decided to stand around outside the venue afterwards chatting about how they were collectively blown away. I distinctly remember being astonished by how perfectly they had captured the magic of Deserter’s Songs, the album that brought the band back to relevance, after its predecessor - 1995’s See You On The Other Side - sold only “five copies worldwide” and almost sunk the band.

Not to be a contrarian, but See You On The Other Side is actually my favourite Mercury Rev album. I bought one of those five copies in 1995 and even broke my rule of never buying a picture disc to own it on vinyl. But before that, both albums released with original frontman, the eccentric David Baker - 1991’s Yerself Is Steam and 1993’s Boces - offered up noisy, prismatic avant-rock sound collages that opened up my teenage ears to this equally hypnotic and turbulent weirdness.

But Deserter’s Songs was an era-defining album, a slice of sublimely cosmic Americana that opened the door for like-minded works by comrades The Flaming Lips (The Soft Bulletin) and Grandaddy (The Sophtware Slump). Often considered their masterpiece, it was widely acclaimed by fans and critics, giving Mercury Rev a new lease on life after they struggled to re-establish themselves following the departure of Baker. 

Originally formed in 1989 at the University of Buffalo by long-standing members Jonathan Donahue and Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiak, Mercury Rev have long been flag-bearers for America’s psychedelic (indie) rock scene - first as acid-fried freaks alongside brethren The Flaming Lips (Donahue was briefly a member), then as a two-man team of sonic explorers conjuring up lavishly outré orchestral pop. And they’re still going strong.

I’m not proud to say that I lost track of them following 2005’s The Secret Migration, but I was clearly missing out. Their new album, Born Horses, is a self-described “glistening psych-jazz-folk-baroque-ambient quest” that immediately grabbed me with its sweeping, ornate arrangements, smooth-ass saxophone solos and Donahue’s poetic verses. At first I expected the spoken-word vocal approach would present a challenge I wasn’t looking forward to, but the more I listened, the more I was intrigued by how Donahue’s voice navigates these soaring, cinematic landscapes. At times it had me thinking, “Did Mercury Rev record an album of breezy new age-jazz rock simply to catch my attention?” Because it sure has, and I feel like I’m discovering this band all over again.

I wanted to start off by going back in time a bit because the first time I actually heard Mercury Rev’s name was when you were playing Lollapalooza in 1993. I was 15 and really discovering music through that festival and the bands on the bill. What do you remember about being on the Lollapalooza tour? 

Jonathan Donahue: Well, it was a crazy time and it ended very strangely. We were playing in the parking lot outside the football stadium in Denver and towards the end of our set, all of a sudden we looked over and some security person had put our soundman in a headlock. He was carrying him off by his neck and it was strange, because the soundboard was on the side of the stage where the monitors were. So anyway, we kept playing and we noticed that the audience was looking really uncomfortable or confused, and it became clear that they had cut the power on us during our last song. So, of course, we just sort of got off stage thinking, “Okay, maybe we ran over a few minutes or something.” But it quickly became clear that something bigger was going on.

Apparently what had happened was the mayor of Denver (Wellington Webb) had pulled up to the festival for some photo ops and check it out, but he got out from his limo near where we were playing and thought that noise was coming from a bus idling out of control. But it happened to be us performing and apparently this disturbed him a lot. Our volume was louder than the bands inside the stadium, so I guess he immediately started yelling to the powers that be to turn off this “out of control bus,” which was us. So they lifted up the soundman and sort of threw him off the soundboard, then they came on stage and started throwing our amps from the stage off onto the tarmac. I remember our tour manager at the time was saying, “Everybody get on the bus!” Meanwhile you could hear the amps getting smashed up. So we were not only asked to leave, I remember people actively chasing our bus out of the parking lot. I guess at the time we didn't really know what to make of it, but later we were asked to go on tour with Porno For Pyros by Perry Farrell and he was very very kind about it. He laughed. 

I don't mean to test your memory so early on in the interview, but I read that your second gig ever was opening up for Bob Dylan? That’s unbelievable! 

Yeah, it was the third show we did. Before that show we were playing the Reading Festival, which was only our second show, and there were many thousands of people there. It was the famous weekend with Sonic Youth and Nirvana, where all that famous footage of Kurt Cobain throwing himself into the drum kit. It was a pretty crazy weekend because at that time, what would have been 1991, and all of the American bands were sort of barnstorming Britain. Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Hole, Dinosaur Jr, Mercury Rev, everybody over there were heavily opening up to American music and it was a big day for us because it was our second show. But John Peel introduced us on stage and that was a really big moment for us. We got to talk with him and meet him and spend some time with John. After that we did a number of Peel sessions, so he was a very big rocket booster that got us out of the small orbit. We might have been just some Buffalo group without him. So he broke the earth's gravity and got us into that interstellar space with his encouragement. He played a lot of our early stuff and was always talking about us. We we're just overwhelmed because it was our second show and we were not really thinking we'd ever play festivals of any size. Remember back then festivals were pretty rare in America for younger bands, so to walk out on stage and see 10,000 or more people, and you barely even know the five songs you're going to play was overwhelming. 

How did your booking agent manage to get these gigs for you so early on? 

Well, remember it was somewhat of the Wild West at the time in music. Then American bands were like many jazz bands from the ’50s and blues artists from the ’60s, we were more appreciated. Not by the audience but by the media, where we could be on British radio or French radio at that time. You couldn't really do that in America so easily and to such a wide audience. That was really what led to the wave of bands like us and Pavement, that early part of a second generation of bands, with Sonic Youth, the Replacements and Hüsker Dü in the first wave. We might have been somewhat of the beginning of a second wave or the end of a first wave of bands really penetrating NME, Vox, Sounds, Melody Maker - this was before Mojo and Uncut. There were quite a few papers all competing for publicity with bands. It was before Britpop, so the more avant groups like ourselves could find a way into these outlets, which dominated the landscape in Britain. 

What do you remember from the crowd at the Bob Dylan show? What was the response like to Mercury Rev opening? 

It was very loud. When we finished we looked a little bit puffed up like a peacock and said, “Look at that!” And then you realize that half the people were booing, and half the people were sort of cheering, the older hippies who'd probably been following Bob through all of his booing and cheering days in the mid-’60s. So it was loud but it was sort of a cacophonous loudness, it wasn't necessarily all aligned. 

It's funny because I feel like Bob Dylan fans could really get into your music from Deserter’s Songs onwards. 

You know, Bob is that Shakespearian writer and performer in a way that most bands of our age can always lean into him because there's always such a depth there. There's always a part for you in the play and that's something you rarely find in your life. Where there's a cut out of you in the masterpiece on the museum wall, that you feel you could walk into that painting and fit right in the back of one of the Flemish masters or something. 

Born Horses is your first album of original songs in nine years. How do you find the songwriting process at this stage? Is it any easier or harder than it was in previous years? 

I'm not sure the eye can see itself okay, and from my own vantage point on the branch that I'm overlooking, the hidden valley below of creativity, I'm more like the faucet than the water, it flows through me. And in that way you develop a sense of patience that you may not encounter or embrace when you're younger. When you're younger it's yours, if you made it you created it. It only came from you and never from anywhere else and you have this possessiveness that borders on mega control. I decide when I write, I sit down now and write and out comes the genius. When you have more experiences you realize that the best of what is available to you and from you is outside of you and seems to flow through you. These years, I'm very close to this. I listened very closely, not only to when the the ideas or the lyrics or the melody may come, but I'm always listening very closely, all the way to mastering of the song itself and what it's saying and what it's not. 

What inspired the decision to do your vocals as a spoken word for this album? And does that change how you write lyrics? 

I never considered it speaking. It was just musing into an old cassette tape player. I never considered it as going on the record, I never considered it as the final finished version of something. The way it developed was somewhat serendipitous and synchronous in its own way, but I never considered it singing or not singing. And in that way I'm sort of freed up from what I understand. I can hear it in people's voices, “Okay, it seems like he's doing spoken word or something like this,” but for myself I never heard it that way out of my own mouth. Again the ear cannot hear itself. You're just allowing something to land on the cassette tape. 

Well, I was pleasantly surprised at how accessible it was. I’m also really enjoying the amount of saxophone on this album. Just the other day I was saying to my wife and daughter that the saxophone can make me enjoy almost any song. What made it so right for this record? 

It's funny you say that because I was just listening to a bunch of very early ’80s groups, and if you go back in time nearly all those groups had a saxophone player. It was something of the moment, you know from Romeo Void to The Psychedelic Furs, a bunch of others just seemed to have a saxophone, which now might seem sort of strange or quasi-jazz. But maybe in the same way that we use organic horns along with treated horns, affected horns, it's the vehicle for conveying the emotion. It's not important overall to us whether it's simply organic or it's a treated heavily reverbed cornet, maybe like John Hassell or even Vangelis at times, where you're not sure what that instrument is but it's bringing you the emotion or it's bringing you to the emotion. Once you stop questioning if it’s real or if it’s Memorex, like the old commercial, it frees you up to understand much more closely is the emotion being carried by the right bucket. 

Who will be playing those saxophone parts on tour with you? 

Well, Jesse Chandler [of Midlake], who does our pianos also plays saxophone. Grasshopper plays the alto. He was an all-state clarinetist outside of Buffalo, where he grew up, so he is a master of the woodwinds. And Jesse can play the flute as well, so we have a lot of those horns covered. I myself studied a bit of cornet when I was young and it comes to us again in the way we used flute early on in our days. We never thought of it as something outside of music. We thought, “Hey Suzie [Thorpe, former flautist/horn player], why don't you plug into a distortion pedal? Now we have a new spectrum of colours beyond just stepping on a Rat pedal through a Stratocaster.” 

With Deserter’s Songs you realized “that you don't have to step on that distortion pedal.” Was there any realization you came to making Born Horses?

I don't know if it's so much a realization in the beginning, it's much more in talking to you, one of the early people now that I've done interviews. I'm getting a reflection back of the album from you, whether it's inadvertent on your part or you're willing to talk about it. I'm watching and listening closely because it's still quite close to myself and Marion [Genser] and Grasshopper and Jesse. Sometimes you don't realize what you've done or not done until after and much was the case with Deserter’s Songs. We didn't realize what we had done or hadn't done until everybody started calling. Sometimes you have this feeling with albums that you feel, “Hey, look what we've done. This is us. We've been building to this our whole life!” And the world shrugs and goes, “So.” And you think, “Ahhh…” And there's other moments like Deserter’s where you feel like you're just going to get another giant shrug or swept under the carpet of Britpop at that time, but it didn't happen and people picked up their ears. 

Are you referring to the reaction that See You On The Other Side received at the time? 

Yeah, I suppose it's a reaction to where we felt we were at the time. We weren't an anthemic, three-and-a-half-minute, stadium-rock-producing-hit-singles, always-in-the-tabloids group. And so, of course, you can feel uninvited to a very large party in a giant stadium next to you and you look around you say, “I never got the invitation to this giant stadium festival or radio hits.” And you can recoil a little bit. You feel vulnerable, you can feel less than. 

You did play stadium shows with Coldplay in the 2000s. Did you feel at that time like you're getting that invitation? 

Yeah, because they were one of the kindest, most generous bands at a time when they were literally the largest rock group in the world during those tours. They didn't have to be as generous as they were to us. They didn't have to go out of their way to say, “Hey fellas, we formed our group in part because of Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs.” That was the one of the first things they said to us, when we ran into Chris [Martin] on the hotel steps. I said, “Hi, I'm Jonathan,” and he said, “I know who you are. I started a band because of you.” And that was not a vindication, but it was a sign that you could be a massive group and still have your feet on the ground, and still be down to earth and understand that it's a long tradition of music. It's not an ownership. You don't patent a sound. You are a part of a spirit. And I always speak very highly of Coldplay, no matter what people say about music or anything else. The Coldplay members that I met were incredibly human. And in a world where many people at that level of fame and fortune turn into monsters or wraiths, they were the best version of a band I can imagine at that level. 

Right, I’ve interviewed them before, but I’ve also been to a couple of parties with members of Coldplay, and in speaking with them I found them to be incredibly personable and engaging. I had a pretty lengthy and memorable conversation with Jonny Buckland about Will Oldham’s music. I wasn’t expecting that.

They're fans of music because so am I, so are you. Just because I'm not a singer doesn't mean I'm really not a big fan of some music and and very willing to go up to someone I really felt inspired by. For example, Alan Vega, let's just say, who most people don't know. 

I interviewed Alan back in 2007 and it was an incredible conversation.

Right, and I couldn't wait to walk up to him and say, “Hey, thank you! Thank you!” And that's the best part of being out in the world and on the circuit of touring. Sometimes you run into people and it does reaffirm humanity. Believe it or not, in a music industry that seems to be being amputated of this on a nearly yearly basis.

You once said, “What I thought was going into All Is Dream was nothing like what came out of it.” How did the finished Born Horses compare to what you thought it would be going into it?

I suppose the crown jewel of any writer like yourself or artist, is that what you put in something unbeknownst to you comes out. If it was simply in and out and nothing changed, almost as though it was a car wash, you can see where artists begin to devolve or certainly collapse upon themselves like a black hole, when they already know what's coming out by what they put in. And yet for artists like myself, and I feel everyone at some point, you want this uncertainty, you desire it, you work so hard for this level of uncertainty. And the moment you do know what's coming out you would feel, or at least I would feel, like I cheated myself. There's a famous quote by Muhammad Ali where he said, “If you think the way you did 30 years ago, 30 years later you've wasted 30 years.” And for every artist or just every person, there's some level of uncertainty or threshold that you want with all your heart you're willing to give up sacrifice for this uncertainty. And now the audience wants a consistency, right? They want to know that the album they bought three years ago is going to sound like the album they bought today, plus a little bit of weirdness around the edges… but not too much. And yet for the artists that I do lean into a lot, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, certainly many others, that level of not knowing or unknowing, that cloud of unknowing we always hear about, this is precious, this is what's meant to be held the closest, the not knowing. 

Obviously Deserter’s Songs is considered by many people as Mercury Rev’s masterpiece. An album that reinvented the band. Is there an album you feel gets overlooked in your catalogue?

I suppose I'm no different than maybe some critics, who might revisit our older catalogue at times and go, “Hey, I missed this the first time around.” And so there are there are pieces of music that we've done that maybe at the time I thought one way about, and then later I re-approached, almost the way you re-approach a puppy. You don't make any sudden movements to it, you let it come to you. There might be some songs on The Secret Migration that I felt were still strong to this day. If I was just playing at the Holiday Inn on Monday nights, singing karaoke to my own songs, I would choose a few from that album. I also still feel very close to Snowflake Midnight. 

I know David Baker was the main vocalist on Yerself Is Steam and Boces, but has there ever been any discussion to dive deeper into those two albums when you play live?

I feel it would be a disservice to the song. But some of them we do now and again. We have played “Chasing A Bee” from time to time. We may play it on the upcoming tour. We will probably revisit some other songs as well from that period. But you have to be very clear with yourself too, if you are not bringing something as endearing to the song as David did then we won't do it. 

It’s funny, we vacationed in the Catskills two summers ago and driving around I saw the signs for BOCES, which I recognized from your second album. And we visited Opus 40, which is just an awe-inspiring park. That was my wife’s idea, and immediately I went, “This must be where they got the song title from!” But I get why the band is based there. It’s such a beautiful part of the country. And I was wondering how much do your surroundings continue to inspire you as an artist? 

I grew up here in the Catskills. It’s inspiring still in the same way that no matter where you live, let's say you're The Velvet Underground and you're inspired by the Lower East Side in ’65 or The Strokes in Manhattan. But I feel you would be cold and callous and concrete if you weren't a part of the very atmosphere and the oxygen that you were relying on. Of course, there's a lot of allegory and metaphor about nature in some of my lyrics. I don't sit outside with binoculars counting birds but I do notice the correspondences between what goes on in nature and what goes on in me. 

Okay, my final question is pretty unrelated, but I only just recently learned your song “Holes” was featured in the movie Sing 2. What was it like seeing your song in an animated film for kids?

I must admit it was Grasshopper who gave out this giant howl when we learned about that because he has some young boys and he understood the magnitude, the gravity of a Sing movie. Again, I didn't see it when it came out but I got the texts over and over again from everybody I knew. You know, Wayne [Coyne of The Flaming Lips] would send photos of his kid watching Sing 2 with “Holes.” So it pretty quickly hit that this was special because it's the whole song that plays, which is quite rare for movie soundtracks.

That song has always been a favourite of mine, so it's been interesting to see it gain a new audience over time. Recently I saw a video of Brett Anderson from Suede covering it with an orchestra, which was fantastic.

Matt [Berninger] the singer of The National did a version of it too. It’s had this strange resurfacing right now, from the depths of the deep Catskill Lake it seems to surface and it's really wonderful when that happens.