A Different Bird Sang: Indie-Rock Greats Mercury Rev Talk 'Born Horses'
Wednesday, 23 October 2024
Written by Jeremy Blackmore
The idea of flight permeates ‘Born Horses’, Mercury Rev’s latest album. “I dreamed we were born horses waiting for wings,” sings frontman and lyricist Jonathan Donahue during the title track, while on the closing song he declares “there’s always been a bird in me”.
But, when Donahue first sang one of its melodies into a cassette recorder along the banks of the Hudson River, he was taken aback. “I opened my mouth and out comes this bird,” he says. “It was a completely different bird that sang. I didn't expect it. I didn’t know the name of the bird. I didn’t know where it came from. I didn't know how long it was going to stay. I was surprised at the lower register, the whiskery elements to it.”
It’s a voice full of intimacy, awe and wonder, lending itself fittingly to a reflective collection of songs that finds Donahue pondering humanity’s yearning for love, and its need to seek order in the seeming randomness of life. “Maybe it’s the same way we all wake up in the morning, and we expect to see who we see in the mirror,” Donahue continues. “One day you wake up and you see someone different, maybe with older lines on the face or the eyes are burning a little brighter.”
On the riverbank, he captured sounds that would make their home on the finished record — from that new voice to ambient noise. “I wasn’t singing, and I wasn’t not singing,” he says. “I wasn’t listening to the music in the headphones. It was just musing, amusing myself. Without someone there, without a microphone on, you have this stranger on a train effect where you open up to the cassette, turning itself.
“If I had known I was doing the vocals, I would have been my own worst enemy. I would have been judging every enunciation, every motorboat, every passerby behind me giggling, wondering what this man’s doing into a cassette player.”
It was his longtime bandmate and friend Grasshopper [Sean Mackowiak] and the band’s new keyboard player Marion Genser who reassured Donahue and encouraged him to trust his new voice, although not before he went into a “fancy studio with expensive Telefunken microphones”.
“The engineer pulled his ears off trying to mix the seagulls and the steam ships out of it,” he admits. “We had some of the most modern software to ‘de-seagull’ the vocals, because they were recorded without any music to them, just along the banks of the Hudson. But in the end, they nestled in there, and they wouldn't leave. I didn’t force them out, so I have to trust that that's what was meant to be. I know it takes some people aback.”
More than 30 years on from the release of their first LP, it’s very apparent that Mercury Rev are still learning things about their craft. An illuminating part of their process here – as they sculpted their first full-length of new, original material since 2015 – was to give songs time to reveal themselves.
Midlake’s Jesse Chandler is again part of the line-up, with Donahue giving him the accolade of a modern-day Nicky Hopkins for his lyrical piano work. Genser, meanwhile, brings her experience as a classical painter with a unique approach to music, viewing it in terms of brushstrokes and gradients of colour and depth. She also contributes what Donahue calls a “cosmic microwave background radiation” through her synth work, which “hums along with the songs” while creating a distinctive theatrical atmosphere.
“We have a few old synths here,” he explains. “As broken as they are, they sometimes seem to emit these waves that you’re not sure what you’re listening to. I might make a comparison to Vangelis, certainly in Blade Runner, where you're not sure whether it was an organic instrument or something somewhat synthetic for the late ‘70s? We liked that blur, this smudging, that, once you hear it, the song won’t let it go. That inspires the rest of us.”
“When these elements come together, it’s pure magic,” he adds. “When they don’t, it’s incredibly frustrating. Almost to the point of despair. This is where we allowed time to do its work with the wind and the rain to reveal the songs as they’re already in there. For myself, that requires a lot of patience to step back in the listening process, and not immediately break out the hammer and chisel.”
The record’s other major theme is ancient love, brought back to the surface by desert winds. The album opens with the sound of a trumpet, evoking bohemian mariachi and the terrain of the prairies. At first, such imagery seems in contrast to upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley, where Donahue was born and raised and where Mercury Rev have recorded since 1998’s beloved ‘Deserter’s Songs’.
“It’s using the idea of statues being revealed beneath the sands as allegory and metaphor for something very old,” he explains. “But here in the Catskills, I could liken it maybe to the Brecon area in Wales, the mist-covered mountains. They’re not like the Rockies. They don’t look like the Himalayas, or even the Pyrenees. They’re spooky at night in their way and they're gentle and open during the day.”
It’s a landscape that informed Donahue’s outlook as a child. Not a hotbed of urban decay in the late 1960s, early 1970s, he sought imagination and inspiration elsewhere. “I didn't grow up thinking I was fighting against the man or pushing against authority, or in some way needing to rebel,” he says. “When I grew up, it was the mountains here that were often spoken of with the mythology of the witches, the ghosts, the goblins. These things were much more on my radar as a young child of things to be alert to, to watch closely for. It wasn’t inner city crime that might have obviously sparked and stoked punk.”
Growing up around such mythology surely helped lend Mercury Rev’s music a cinematic feel, one that evokes a strong sense of imagery, although Donahue admits there are other influences too. “We've worked very hard through the years to widen that screen,” he says. “This comes from the music I grew up with, and Grasshopper as well: children’s records where you would have Boris Karloff or Vincent Price narrating some witch’s tale over classical music. I didn't grow up with an older brother. So, to me this music was rock music. It was only later I would understand: no Jonathan, there are these other creatures called Zeppelin and The Who and that’s real rock.”
“But it stayed with me, this Disney Technicolor landscape,” he continues. “We’ve certainly cultivated it, worked hard at it, made a few happy accidents along the way. But it’s very much in the way that the dreamworld or the unconscious is always very active. I don't really make too much of a distinction these days between the waking world and the dream. So, it’s quite natural to work with that in music.”
‘Born Horses’ exudes smoky, jazzy vibes, a genre for which Grasshopper has a strong affinity. Donahue, meanwhile, gravitates more towards its more romantic side, citing ‘Sketches of Spain’ and ‘In a Silent Way’ by Miles Davis as particular inspirations. “I can’t read or write music, so I have no bearing on the more technical sides of jazz, and Marion comes from the painter’s side,” he says. “So, the imagery is something we spend a lot of time [on], listening, and literally watching the songs as we’re recording them. We’re watching them too, almost as films, or certainly I am, and the lyrics help not only anchor that, but they nest in that atmosphere musically.”
The band’s Catskills base provides a convivial atmosphere for making music, where musicians meet in relaxed surroundings. “We offer free beer and pizza, and we see who shows up,” laughs Donahue, talking about the crop of local players who appear on the album. “There are so many people in this area. You would think you would meet them at the local club or after a show. But where you meet most musicians in the Woodstock, Hudson Valley area, is at the hardware store, because we're all there buying different gadgets and tools and wondering which snowblower is the best for the coming winter.
“You meet the uppermost crust of musicianship locally in the most down-to-earth places and circumstances. It seems to cut through the idea of ego and you can simply approach someone even if it’s someone who’s sold platinum records, like Levon [Helm], or Garth [Hudson] or Rick [Danko] in the past. You approach them one-on-one. That often leads to the best collaborations because they’re the most sincere. You're not talking over a big cheque in the middle of a table.”
The beating heart of Mercury Rev, though, is still the enduring relationship between Donahue and Grasshopper. He talks of the glue that has held the two men together: “It’s been 40 years. In some sense, there’s a metaphor for my relationship with Grassy in Ancient Love, where the winds of time reveal aspects that the two of us didn't see in the mid-80s, when we just were hammering on guitars and clarinets.
“You never see it going the distance, you are always looking at it in the present. I think that’s the way he and I see it now. We certainly have a long history, but we always just see it as two 18-year-old kids. He was just here, and we were bouncing some ideas around or looking back at old guitar pedals that don’t work. It really has that playfulness at its best — just two teenagers, wondering what's going to happen and where this all could lead.”
Mercury Rev’s ‘Born Horses’ is out now on Bella Union.
Mercury Rev Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Sun October 27 2024 - BELFAST Mandela Hall
Mon October 28 2024 - LIMERICK Dolan's
Tue October 29 2024 - GALWAY Roisin Dubh
Wed October 30 2024 - CORK Cyprus Avenue
Thu October 31 2024 - DUBLIN Button Factory
Sat November 02 2024 - NORWICH Arts Centre
Sun November 03 2024 - BRISTOL Trinity
Mon November 04 2024 - NEWCASTLE Boiler Shop
Wed November 06 2024 - GLASGOW Garage
Thu November 07 2024 - LEEDS Brudenell Social Club
Fri November 08 2024 - CAMBRIDGE Junction 1
Thu March 13 2025 - LIVERPOOL Content
Fri March 14 2025 - MANCHESTER New Century
Sat March 15 2025 - NOTTINGHAM Rescue Rooms
Mon March 17 2025 - PORTSMOUTH Wedgewood Rooms
Tue March 18 2025 - LONDON EartH
Wed March 19 2025 - LONDON Islington Assembly Hall
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