Poetic psych-rock/avant-pop outfit Mercury Rev is back with their new record, Born Horses. We spoke to the charismatic, gentleman frontman Jonathan Donahue to find out more, only to delve into an intensely intellectual and spiritual chat.
Although it has been five years since the last Mercury Rev record, there has been so much going on since then for a lot of us. I mean, I’m a relatively young guy, and I feel like I have lived through at least ten years during this era.
Jonathan Donahue: (laughs)
How did you spend that whole process exactly? What were you up to?
Well, since we last released a record, which is Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited in 2019, to us, like everyone else, time doesn’t even seem like time anymore. It just seems like one event on top of another. There doesn’t even appear to be any linear sequence to it. It just seems like a multi-layered cake. And as an artist, you’re always deciphering these events on top of each other, almost as though you’re reading a tarot deck and you’re trying to figure out the symbolism and the relation of the cards to each other.
Yeah, I know it’s been a while for us since we’ve released an album of original music, but we’ve been very busy. And at the same time, time plays a very big role in the recording process that we do enjoy. Not just allowing time to tick away like moments on a clock, but allowing time to reveal the statue beneath the sand as it is. And I’ve always found this to be incredibly intriguing, rather than approaching a block of stone or marble with a giant hammer and chisel. I enjoy just watching the wind and the rain reveal the statue inside.
Time does seem to take a huge part in your new record Born Horses, and there is obviously a lot of reminiscing towards what’s going on. It all sounds very spiritual-
Yes.
I also have the impression that the the decades-long friendship you have with Grasshopper has probably reached new heights through the making of this album, right?
Heights and depths.
How so?
The wonderful achievement of just continuing to make music together requires an increased depth in each effort. Otherwise, you’re just two businessmen kicking out hamburgers, and I don’t feel like that. I don’t know that I would do very well under that kind of umbrella. The depth that you may discover in certain aspects of a new album or through our career would be a direct mirror or a reflection of the depth that we both hope, Grasshopper and myself, that continues to grow to experience it. Without sounding too sentimental about it, it is a great part of any relationship, whether it’s an artist one or just one at home talking over the kitchen table. Whether in Turkey, in America, or even Mars, now more than ever, we do value the depth of the relationships because we see around us how shallow and how fleeting the moments we do experience can be.
And for any interpersonal growth, you need to have both highs and lows. That’s how growth works, I think.
Yes, very much. There has to be that experience, and a shared experience. It doesn’t mean it’s the same one, but it’s a shared experience. And that seems to expand both ways, upwards and inwards at the same time.
While your new album is called Born Horses, it’s fair to say that birds and the concept of flight takes a much, much larger part. This question may seem funny, but I’m just wondering, do you have a favorite bird?
I have a present relationship with a bird that I had not recognized in me. And you may hear it in the vocals on the new album. It’s a new bird inside. That’s the best way I can describe it. It wasn’t something calculated or conscious. It simply came out this way, and it did knock me to the side when I heard it. I thought, “My goodness, what bird is this? It’s not familiar to me.” I don’t have any idea where it came from. I don’t have any idea how long it will stay.
Symbolism is quite often found in my lyrics. It’s not simply a study of ornithology or birds. I just see the similarities between what goes on in the nature around me and what goes on inside of me, whether it’s the seasons or the way that the animals around seem to change and adapt. And I look at the inside of myself, and I can’t help but notice and see correspondences, relationships to that. That’s something I feel close to. I didn’t grow up in an urban environment inside of a deep city, and there are many wonderful bands that can write brilliantly about the nature of an inner city. But I grew up in the mountains. I still live in the mountains. I visit the city every once in a while.
I don’t know if you’re calling from Istanbul or where exactly-
Istanbul.
Okay. The seed of civilization, you know? America is very young. Turkey may well be the oldest civilization we’ve known on earth. So I always am curious when I have the opportunity to go to Istanbul, it’s not just being in any city, it’s being in the city where you have thousands of years of nature.
Do you have a favorite memory from Istanbul?
Well, I remember the famous bridge fondly, because for an American, you’re looking at two continents. This is unavailable to nearly anywhere else in the world. And I do love that. I absolutely devote myself to learning, as much as I can, the history that is modern day Turkey. So when I go there, it’s like living in a book, or many books for me. I always cherish the times we get to go there, and I guess we’re looking at heading back over there in 2025. I’m really excited for this possibility.
Cool. I guess you can’t reveal more details.
Not at the moment, no. But it is something Grasshopper and I always put very early on in the touring cycle. We say, “Hey, how are things in Istanbul for bands of our size and nature?” Because, as you know, it’s not an easy economic situation in the world these days. There’s thousands of more bands and there’s not a lot of money to go around. So when an opportunity comes up for Istanbul or other places, we always seize the moment.
I will say one funny anecdote about our time from Istanbul: We met up with Peter Murphy, the singer from Bauhaus, walking around. That was an incredible juxtaposition of worlds. I’ll never forget walking through one of the street malls with Peter and seeing all the kids in goth clothing walking past us, just smiling at him. (laughs) So far away from London and Los Angeles, and yet not only seeing the influence of the man, but seeing it in such a strange context.
For the next question, I want to read two quotes, one by you and one that is anonymous. The first one is from the album’s lineer notes, where you say, “We didn’t make Born Horses by throwing clay on top of clay; we allowed Time to reveal what was always there.” The next one is: “Art is never finished. It’s merely abandoned.”
Very true. I love that second quote as well, because if it were up to the artist, we would still be working on our first album, even 30 years later, our first painting, first article, first book. Maybe they’re never finished. Fortunately, it is the universe that steps in and rolls it over the horizon, out of range, so that the artist doesn’t continually poke at it or nag it, and it allows the space for it to just be. The hardest part of being an artist, I find, is letting go. It’s probably the hardest part of being a parent, I would imagine, letting your child go to the first day of school alone without you.
Yes, and the way I interpret the second quote, it seems to be the first quote by you in reverse, because you mention something being already there for a long time and you found it as opposed to the situation of leaving something.
Yes, very much.
Let me ask a more concrete sort of question. When you think of the album’s recording process, can you name two tracks from this collection, one easiest and one hardest to make?
Okay. Wow. That’s like pointing at your pet dogs and saying, which one of these is the most difficult to control and which one is the easiest.
It’s a valid question, though. I will say that not only in Mercury Rev, but probably for many other musicians and bands, songs without drums, in the modern context of rock and roll or whatever you want to say what it is that we do, are sometimes more difficult, because you don’t have the beat there to carry you from point A to point B. You have to do the walking yourself. These can be tricky. So in the album Born Horses there is “Patterns”, where you’re always wondering, “Should we do drums? Maybe it’ll be more accessible.” We did try, and it didn’t work.
In songs like “Endlessly” from our album Deserter’s Songs, again, the temptation is always there to put a beat on it, because it always seems like the post we want to lean on the easiest. It always seems like the salt in the soup. “Oh, just add more salt.” And of course, it’ll taste fantastic. But there are those songs that just say no. They shake their head and say no, and it requires some patience and usually a little bit of experience down the line where you say, “You know what? Okay, no drums.” But the temptation is always there.
This also relates to the last question, I think, through the topic of knowing when to abandon stuff.
Yeah. It’s a hard call, because you are never sure: “Am I abandoning it when I stop, or am I letting go so that it can be itself the way it is?” And this perspective can change even over the course of one evening. You go to sleep thinking, “Okay, I’m letting it go.” Then you wake up the next morning and go, “Oh, my God, I think I just abandoned a song.” These two kittens roll and play fight within every artist all the time.
It’s the ultimate question of sorts.
It is. It is. And you just think, isn’t that the ultimate question about ourselves? Letting go of an old viewpoint, an old way of thinking, an old self, and saying, “Okay, I’m letting go of you. Wait, or am I leaving it behind and I shouldn’t leave it behind?” So we’re faced with this in life. And it would make complete sense if it was reflected in the art we do, or the ideas and beliefs that we hold.
A friend of mine who is a fan of both you and The Flaming Lips asks: Can you name one fun memory you have with The Flaming Lips that you haven’t shared before?
I can name not just memory, but the relationship itself that I have with Wayne (Coyne), to this day, makes us both smile and crackle in laughter. Just the other day, I discovered something on the YouTube, an old video from the eighties where we were doing something together. I just sent it to him and I said, “Can you believe somebody filmed this that long ago?” You know, it was 20 years before the Internet was doing that. There are these moments you think are forgotten by all but yourselves, and suddenly they fly back up into view. So it is these recurring smiles that I can still share with Wayne that I find very endearing and highly precious.
I have been recently asking this question to artists: Do you have a vivid dreamscape? What do you dream about mostly?
Well, my dreamscape is as vivid as they come. Maybe you will agree, but it’s becoming harder to separate the waking life from the dreaming life. I’m not alone in this. It’s not some escapist ideology or fantasy that I have set up. It’s very difficult at times, and maybe it’s not even very useful to separate them the way we have been conditioned to think of them as two worlds that have this stripped iron curtain between. I don’t feel that. I don’t find that true in my own experience. So the dream world, if we say it’s the one where I’m lying horizontal with my eyes closed, yeah, it’s as vivid as the next person’s. But it doesn’t stop the moment the alarm clock goes off. It seems to change in color and vibrancy, but not necessarily in meaning.
The funny thing is that, I just recently talked about the concept of dreams and reality becoming harder to separate with John Dwyer of Osees. He basically said what you just said, that there is so much stuff going on all the time that you can hardly process it.
Yeah. If you notice, in dreams, the space time reality that we live in our waking world is inverted, where it becomes time space, where things happen instantaneously. In the dream world, there is no distance of “I’m waiting for this or that.” Everything happens on top of each other. And that’s what I think we’re all experiencing in the world right now. The events are not necessarily having this noticeable time delay, they just seem on top of each other. So, to me, the reality of the dream world and the reality of the waking world are finally in union, and it may even get grow closer than we can imagine. When we say reality, I no longer think of it as the nine-to-five day order when the sun is up. The reality is all encompassing of the dream world and the waking world. Probably, it’s a very Buddhist perspective too, the dream world being just as valid, if not more than the waking reality.
Obviously, our subconscious is not directly influencing what we produce, but I know your art is very associated with symbolism. Do you ever have dreams that may involuntarily influence your songwriting?
The song “Born Horses” comes from a dream that I had. I tend to scribble, late at night on the nightstand on a little piece of paper, whatever’s there when I wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night. I had a dream about being born as a horse, not as a human inside a horse, but as a horse, and the way that a horse looked. At least for myself, this is the art. The conscious part of our brain takes over in the skill of describing the unconscious world that we access, or are sensitive to as an artist, allowing these two worlds to mesh completely in the center, right down the two hemispheres there. That’s the real art of art. Not saying it’s one or the other, but allowing both to do what it is they’re designed to do.
Let’s imagine we’re at a Musicians Theme Park 100 years from now, where every artist or band featured have their own memorial stone with a certain lyric by them written on it. Which one of the lyrics would you like to see written on Mercury Rev’s stone?
It’s not necessarily one that I would choose or not choose, but one that may be the most universally understood would be All Is Dream. Not a fantasy, not as an escapism, but as an embrace of what may be the actual.
I love how everything we talked about in this interview seems to connect in the eventual context. That’s all my questions. It was very nice meeting you. If you have something to add to, please do.
Please say hello to whoever may be listening to us. We’re really looking forward to coming back. It’s a city we love. It’s a city I really love the history that you are fortunate enough to walk on and under and around every day. I hope you’re all able to appreciate it, because it really is so wonderful to see so many layers of civilization and life right there in one place. My hat is off to everyone there, regardless of how they feel about the current world or politics. I hope everyone there is feeling well and are aware that there are people out here in the world like myself that really do love and cherish a place like Turkey for being that sand in a bottle that shows us the time. Not only where we’ve been, but it also has a great possibility to show us where we all could go, hopefully.
Thanks for the beautiful answers.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions.
Looking forward to the concert next year.
Thank you very much, my friend.
You can check out Mercury Rev’s Bandcamp page here.
