Mercury Rev - A Psychedelic Dream

Jeff Marcel, keyboardist and drummer of Mercury Rev, would rather not be interviewed in the room that's been set aside for the band at the store. It's not rock-star fussiness, he just doesn't like having several interviews held in the same room, in different corners, as if secrets or confessions were meant to be shared between just two people.

From what I understand, it took you more than two years to make “The Secret Migration”. Do you always work in this slow, meticulous way, or was this an album that was especially difficult to write and record?

It takes a lot of time. Some bands go into the studio for six weeks and record everything in a single 12-hour day, and when they walk out of the studio the record is done, and that's just how it is.

We don't work that way. We try to work intensely for three or four days and then we "step away" from it, take a look at what we've done and listen back to it, or sometimes we leave it there for a month and focus on other things while we make up our minds. We keep talking about it among ourselves, trying to figure out whether we're still excited about those ideas, those songs, or whether our enthusiasm has faded. That's generally how you can tell if a song will be interesting enough to make it onto the record. Because, like I said, it's a long process.

Then, while we were working on this record, we also worked on other projects: we produced and played on a record by a friend of ours, Nicolai Dunger, a Swedish singer-songwriter, so we worked with him both at our own studios and in Stockholm.

We also composed the soundtrack for a film called "Bye Bye Blackbird". I don't know if a release date has already been set. I've realized that the film world is a very difficult one, much more so than the record industry, and I hadn't quite grasped that when we agreed to work on the project: it's really hard to make a film and then actually get people to see it. Anyway, we worked on the soundtrack for this film, which is about a circus travelling through Europe in the early 1900s, so we made a lot of "circus" music. We really worked a lot during the recording of this record.

You also took part in a project centered on some poems written by James Joyce. How did that come about? (The album is called "Chamber Music")

Someone got in touch with us, I don't remember exactly how it happened, but there was this cycle of poems that Joyce had written with the intention of having them accompanied by music, which, of course, never actually happened.

So someone at Fire Records had this idea of bringing the project to life by contacting contemporary musicians and bands to set these poems to music.

We tried not to turn the poetry into a song, we leaned towards "spoken word" instead. Grasshopper did the reading because he has a very deep voice.

Wasn't it a surprise for you to be contacted for a project like this?

Well, actually we get contacted quite often for various projects, many of which we don't get the chance to follow through on because of the other commitments we already have… We get so many strange requests, like playing at birthday parties or weddings. (Her eyes widen in disbelief). I swear! People ask us to do that kind of thing!

Ok, let's get back to "The Secret Migration". I find the release itself was a rather "troubled" one: first you put the album up for sale on iTunes months before it hit the shops, then you supported Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds on tour between November and December, while the CD wouldn't be in European shops until January and in the US until June. Finally, it has a hypnotic cover and a very elaborate packaging.

What led you to promote this record in such a "chaotic" way?

Actually, for us it's the best way to do it. The gap in time between the European and American release lets us come over here and do this kind of promotion, and that wouldn't happen if we put the record out at the same time on both sides of the ocean: people here would tell us, "We need you here for this show", while on the other side of the world they'd tell us, "We need you here to play on this radio station". You get pulled in so many directions that there's simply no way you can do it all. You absolutely have to carve out time for yourself. That's part of the reason.

As for iTunes, releasing music online… It's simply how things have evolved, it's obvious now. It's just a matter of acknowledging that. It's a new way for people to get our music, and I'm fine with it. It really doesn't bother me at all. Some musicians are really against it, but it doesn't bug me. For a band like ours, it creates an opportunity to let people hear our music who maybe never got the chance to hear it before. There's no downside to downloading a 30-second clip of a song from the internet, it's a great way to buy something you don't know well yet. For a lot of people it's still a strange concept, paying for a file. My parents wouldn't really get it: "Okay, wait, I don't understand: you pay money and you don't get anything?" "No, no, no. You get the song." "But where do I keep the song if I don't have it here?" "It goes into your computer." (She smiles) For them it's still a bit of a strange concept.

What about the cover and the packaging, though?

The cover image is a painting by Amanda Wachob that we lived alongside for a while.

We noticed this painting in a gallery where she was holding an exhibition. It's a fairly small painting - you might think it's a huge piece, but it's really small. We spotted it from the back of the room and we couldn't take our eyes off it, it demanded our attention. It doesn't really matter whether you like it or not, because it "commands" you to pay attention to it.

At that point in making the record we had already arrived at the idea of "migration," and the concept of this moth immediately "snuck in" - its stages, its metamorphosis, what it had been and what it was becoming. It made sense to us, for the kind of record we were making.

People can look at that image and say it's unsettling, and in fact it's a moth that really exists in nature, and since it's a strange moth, it's tied to a lot of superstitions: some think it brings bad luck, others think something good is about to happen, they see it as a symbol of life.

It can be a lot of things to a lot of people. It's a bit like what happens with our songs: they can be interpreted differently from person to person.

Do you consider "The Secret Migration" a natural evolution of "All Is Dream"?

Well, yes. We had to make "All Is Dream" in order to make this record. You have to live through certain experiences and carry them forward. If we'd never made "All Is Dream," this record would probably have been very different. If we'd never recorded "Desert's Songs," "All Is Dream" might, who knows, have had a different kind of follow-up.

There were constant changes and certain concepts we wanted to try out on this record. Our main goal was probably to abandon large-scale orchestral and symphonic arrangements in favor of more "ambient" structures, more keyboards, more synthesizers and Fender Rhodes.

It was a very conscious decision, and we were also working on songs that were a bit shorter and a bit faster - not necessarily perfect pop songs, but there are a lot of songs on "All Is Dream" with a very "broad," "epic" arrangement, and you reach a point where, if that's exactly what you're after, you end up recording a 15-minute song with 74 violins, 13 trombones and a 200-person choir. At some point it becomes ridiculous! You have to force yourself to draw a line, in a way, and now it's time for us to move toward something different.

Will we go back to making another record like "Desert's Songs"? Maybe.

Will we go back to making another record like "Yerself Is Steam," with more guitars? Maybe.

All this gives us time to do other things, to consider other ideas.

Mercury Rev have always been a band that, musically, offers interesting sounds. So why do your records always run under 50 minutes? Is that a choice?

Yes, it's a choice, definitely a choice.

You know, we grew up listening to vinyl, and there was a time limit, about 40-45 minutes, and that's what you can fit on a vinyl record without sacrificing sound quality. And that's one reason.

Another reason is that your attention span, as a human being, is limited. The speed at which the world spins is increasing exponentially: we have TV stations broadcasting news 24 hours a day, with headlines scrolling along the bottom of the screen telling you everything bad and ugly happening in the world, constantly bombarding you with everything that's going on.

If you release a 72-minute record with 23 songs on it, no matter how good it is, people will start skimming through the songs, jumping from one to the next.

For us it's really just about figuring out how long we can hold your attention. We think 40-45 minutes is about right, and we don't think it's too much to ask of a listener: "Now you can sit down and listen to our record all the way through without having to get up to stretch your legs halfway through, go to the bathroom, or do something else." It really is just a matter of attention.

How do you manage to keep an album under 45 minutes? Is it hard to choose which songs to include?

Lately we've recorded a lot more songs than you actually hear on the record.

We're constantly "censoring" ourselves, cutting certain songs. Some songs that had been dropped come back, while others you were sure would make the album disappear a couple of weeks before recording. That's because we keep "tweaking" our songs right up until the last minute, making small or huge changes.

There's a lot of material that didn't make it onto this record, and it might come out on a future album someday, or it might not. Maybe it'll get "dismantled": sometimes you "take a song apart" like a car, for "spare parts," and you say, "I really like that chorus, but the verse never convinced me," so you take the chorus and maybe put it together with something else. And there it is, alive again. These are things that can't be created or destroyed.

You've always been a unique band on the international music scene: not just for the genre you play, but above all for all those slightly unusual instruments (it's easy to spot a harp, for example) that some bands wouldn't even think of using to get a particular sound. Is that something you plan out on paper when you're figuring out how a song should sound, or something you figure out in the moment?

When we start talking about a new album to record, we talk about it thinking in terms of a sort of "palette," you know, like painters. We tell each other: "We'll use these colors; we'll make a drawing using only pastels..." That's how we talk at the start, but as you go on, it's the songs that tell you what they need, and usually, song by song, we realize that this one needs more violin, that's what it needs for a more emotional edge. Another song might need more electric guitar, or what we really need for yet another song is both.

It's not about being "quirky" or eclectic or strange, it's literally about listening to what the songs tell you they need. You don't know where to find the right settings, the right sound or the right instruments: you'll figure it out for yourself, you can feel when it's the right choice.

The interview ends here, rather abruptly, just as we were starting to talk about how a foreign magazine described them: "musique déco". But it's time for photos.

(Milan – Feltrinelli – February 4, 2005)

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