Free of all societal expectations, musical constraints, or personal expectations, Mercury Rev has always been a sort of avant garde project, but their originality and conceptual melodies as a genuine band has kept them not just alive, but alive and well.
“It isn’t very often that we play New York City. It’s one of those strange things where you just don’t find yourself at your own barbecue very often,” says Mercury Rev vocalist/guitarist Jonathan Donahue, during a recent phone call from his home in the Catskill Mountains.
He’s referring to his band’s upcoming show on April 12 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, and he estimates that it will be one of only a handful of times that they’ve played in that borough, despite the fact that he and his bandmates formed the band in upstate New York more than 30 years ago.
At the show, the band will play a few songs off their latest release, Born Horses, which came out last September – but Donahue promises that they don’t plan to inundate people with new material. “We’re aware that people come for various older pieces, in general. You come with an idea from the past, and if you can color in that old Polaroid with some new shades, then that’s fantastic.”
“That’s probably the irony of what most artists struggle with: their later works are often what they’re most fond of, and yet what they’re known for is probably something much earlier, when they were still in that cracked egg and just climbing out into the world,” Donahue continues. “But usually what an artist is really fond of is some of the latest works in their life, because it seems to be informed by their whole life, rather than just by a few brief sparkly moments in their early teens.”
So, he hopes that longtime fans will give Born Horses a chance, as he believes the lyrical themes – wrapped in the band’s signature swirling psychedelic rock – might resonate with listeners. “It’s just a somewhat intuitive yet universal idea of that human condition,” he says. “18,000 years ago, we were trying to find where the buffalo live, and you fast forward to now and you’re just trying to find how to live in a world that seems to be so overwhelming to us all.”
Donahue and his bandmates knew it was time to create another album simply because, “It feels right.”
He says, “When it’s done, the songs tell you, ‘Hey, we’re ready.’ Like children on the first day of school: you have to give them a little nudge out the front door onto the bus, but once that happens, the world has them. And any artist, or probably any mother, [would say], ‘Stay home, you don’t need to go to school, stay with me!’ But it’s natural that they’ll want to find their way out into the world.”
Born Horses is Mercury Rev’s 10th studio album, but Donahue tells us that it’s not hard to stay inspired. “It’s realizing you’re the faucet, not the water,” he says. “The water flows through you, and if you can keep your pipes clean and unclogged with expectations and your idea that you own the water, it seems to come much cleaner – much more pure, much more free flowing. And it has its own pressure that allows it to fountain out of you, instead of drip.”
Donahue formed Mercury Rev in 1989 when he was a student at the University of Buffalo, along with fellow student and multi-instrumentalist Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak. Over the years, the rest of the lineup has changed, but Donahue and Grasshopper have remained, and Donahue says their deep friendship has been an intrinsic part of the band.
“There isn’t really that threshold you walk over and say, ‘Ok, now we’re in the band, and then at four o’clock we’ll be back into our own worlds,’” Donahue says. “The worlds are so entwined, one within another, like quantum fields or something. When there’s a disturbance in one field, it sort of emerges in another.”
“That, quite literally, is the way that Grasshopper and I have seemed to always be,” he adds. “There’s not a judgment there, in the case of he and I, and it’s very special. But it takes a lot of cultivation and nourishing, and also a lot of forgiveness. You tend to walk over each other once in a while over the years, just like any relationship, and the more forgiveness you have and the less judgment you have seems to almost double the momentum you have going forward.”
Together, Donahue and Grasshopper have seen Mercury Rev rise to become indie rock darlings starting with their acclaimed 1991 debut album, Yerself Is Steam, and go on to become respected as alternative rock innovators. But, Donahue says, he is always careful to keep his ego in check. “The moment you walk around with this sticky note on your forehead that says, ‘I’m a good writer, I’m a good singer, I’m unique,’ it seems to create shade under which you don’t really heat up the way you could.”
In fact, he takes a modest view on the band’s legacy overall: “I don’t think of it as a career. I understand we can use that word in common and in this context, but overall, it’s just the life I’ve been offered, and I work hard to keep the soil fertile in that way.”
Most of all, Donahue is grateful for the fans who have helped Mercury Rev endure for more than a quarter of a century so far. “I’m glad to be able to talk, still, and have people not only interested in what I say, but to give an ear to the music that seems to come out [of me] these days,” he says. “That is what gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s not money. It’s not travel. It’s not someone buying a t-shirt. It’s the fact that they lent some very precious time, or an ear, to what you do.”
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