Mercury Rev’s long-awaited eighth album,The Light In You, is on its way this weekend.
While the New York alt-rockers never ceased activity, it’s been seven years since their last LP, Snowflake Midnight. For a time, the arrival of another album from Mercury Rev looked fairly unlikely, especially considering the tumultuous experiences in the lives of the band’s two driving forces, guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Grasshopper and vocalist/guitarist Jonathan Donahue.
“We got started one time and then there was a huge hurricane and Jonathan’s house was kind of destroyed,” says Grasshopper. “That was right before we came to Australia last time [in 2011]. He lost everything, pretty much – his clothes, a lot of his equipment; I had written a bunch of songs and I lost a bunch of stuff that I had at his place. So we had to start all over again.”
Despite the ominous whims of fate, the band wasn’t going to be discouraged, restarting the album in 2013. However, some more unexpected events lay ahead.
“We were recording with Dave Fridmann up at his place [Tarbox Road Studios],” Grasshopper says. “We recorded a bunch of songs there and then I found out my wife was pregnant with a baby – my first child. So then we had to rethink things. A lot of people think Dave Fridmann lives right around the corner, but he’s actually seven or eight hours away. So with my wife being pregnant with a baby, Jonathan and I just started recording a lot in the studios around where we live.”
Recording in New York’s Catskill Mountains region wasn’t entirely unusual for Mercury Rev – 1998’s Deserter’s Songs was partly tracked in the nearby NRS Studios. However, scheduling conflicts meant Fridmann was unable to join them, making The Light In You the first Mercury Rev album to feature no input from the producer and former bass player.
“It was cool,” says Grasshopper. “It was a different process and stuff. I think it was kind of refreshing – not to diss Dave or anything, we’ll work with him again I’m sure. He was kind of there in spirit; we would call him a lot. But we got on a roll.”
While Grasshopper and Donahue largely took charge of production, the recording sessions weren’t actually restricted to their hometown. To get the ball rolling, they visited their old friend Ken Stringfellow (The Posies, R.E.M., the reunited Big Star) in Paris.
“This is weird, because I’m saying Dave Fridmann was eight hours away, but meanwhile we went to France and worked with Ken Stringfellow,” says Grasshopper. “That was just like a different way of working. We’d never recorded outside of New York State, really. I think that was the catalyst for this bunch of songs that ended up being The Light In You – a lot of that stuff we worked on with Ken Stringfellow.”
The band’s relationship with Stringfellow dates back many years. “During Deserter’s Songs we toured with R.E.M. when he was playing with R.E.M. Then also after that, around All Is Dream [2001], we played a bunch of festivals with Big Star and saw Ken again a bunch. “We lost contact with him for a couple of years. We were rekindled two summers ago. Ken does this Big Star tribute with Mike Mills and a whole bunch of people – they play all of Big Star’s third album [Third AKA Sister Lovers]. They do it in different cities and they get different people to sing. So Jonathan sang ‘Holocaust’in Central Park. That’s how we reconnected.”
Working apart from Fridmann for the first time in their 25-year career gave Grasshopper and Donahue a fresh perspective, and Stringfellow’s input also had a significant impact on the nature of the new album.
“I was a big fan of a lot of his production stuff, like with Damien Jurado, so it was great to work with him,” Grasshopper says. “Music is coming out of him all the time. He’s so positive and he really gave us a boost on some of the songs that we were working on. He gave us a lot of confidence and added a lot – vocal parts, some production ideas. He’s a great guy.”
In contrast to the abstract, electronic bent of the band’s two previous releases, The Secret Migration and Snowflake Midnight, The Light In You has more in common with the orchestral density of Deserter’s Songs and All Is Dream. Grasshopper says the major inspiration for The Light In You came from a series of Deserter’s Songs retrospective shows.
“We’ve always played songs like ‘Holes’, and ‘Goddess On A Hiway’ has been a staple through the years, but a lot of the other songs we haven’t played. So just to be out there playing it in 2011, we fell in love with it again, I guess. We found some of the stuff on there – we hadn’t really mined everything. We had some loose ends to tie up with using some of that instrumentation.
“We didn’t want it to be Deserter’s Songs Two or anything like that, but I think the spirit of [that album] was in the songwriting of The Light In You. We really wanted to make a, what we call ‘cinematic psychedelic realism’ album. We were shooting for something like that.”
[Mercury Rev photo by Alise Marie]
The Light In You is out Friday October 2 through Bella Union. Mercury Rev play Oxford Art Factory onMonday December 7, with DJ James Dela Cruz.
