Grumpy Young Men

onathan Donahue isn’t the most enthusiastic of interviewees. Well, either that or your hotpress correspondent bears a strong resemblance to somebody who used to bully him back in his upstate New York high school.

It’s the second Monday of November, Bush has just been re-elected, and myself and the Mercury Rev frontman are sitting in a tiny and grimy backstage dressing room in the Bristol Bierkeller. Out front, his bandmates Jeff Mercel and Sean ‘Grasshopper’ Mackowiak are soundchecking for tonight’s show (only their second gig of the year, and their last headliner before heading off to support Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on their UK tour next week), and making a hell of a lot of noise. Unfortunately, their vocalist is making very little.
Uncut recently called Donahue “the introvert Wayne Coyne.” It’s not a bad description (and lest we forget, back in the late ’80s, he used to play alongside Coyne in The Flaming Lips) but, today, he’s coming across more like moribund illusionist David Blaine. On a particularly bad day.
While the dark-haired 39-year-old doesn’t actually avoid any questions, he barely answers them. We have little or no eye-contact, the singer constantly looking ceiling-wards or fiddling with one of the many silver skull rings on his fingers instead. Every question hotpress puts to him is carefully considered, and then answered in flat monotone in as short a space of time as possible. He doesn’t expand on anything. Nor does he look like he particularly wants to. It’s all a little unsettling really.
Here’s the first few minutes of the tape . . .

HP: You recorded your new album in your own studio in the Catskill Mountains. Was that setting inspirational?
JD: “Um. . . we’ve had that studio for three years now.”
Just that there’s a strong nature theme in some of the lyrics. . .
“Uh. . . I guess.”
Some of the echoing guitars occasionally reminded me a little of Radiohead’s OK Computer.
“Uh. . . OK. . . hadn’t occurred to me. . . but OK.”
You used to play with the Flaming Lips years ago, didn’t you?
“Yes.”
That’s funny because I actually met them a few weeks ago in Tennessee!
“Oh. . . right.”
Do you make any deliberate attempt to be musically fashionable?
“We never have been so, when we are . . . I’ll send you an email!!”
AAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!! It’s like pulling teeth – and I’m starting to panic that maybe I’ve lost my interviewing mojo. Perversely enough, it’s only when I mention interviews, that the singer finally starts to lighten up and talk a little more expansively.
“This isn’t going very well,” I say. “Do you not like doing interviews?”
Donahue fidgets slightly in his couch, pulls at the silver chain around his neck, and looks me in the eye for the first time.
“Interviews have their place and they’re certainly valuable but, rather than getting too caught up in what comes out of my own mouth, I prefer to be a good listener,” he smiles, almost apologetically. “It’s easy to get too pontificating in this world, and there’s enough people who feel comfortable talking and blabbing their mouth off. I’m just not one of them. I’d rather not colour the music with my own personal views. The music and the songs live on their own.”
So you prefer to let the music do the talking and for people to interpret them themselves. . .
“I generally prefer songs like that,” he nods. “Rather than have a whole load of history or malarkey come out of an artist’s mouth that may or may not have anything to do with the emotions that went into the song. Now this doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable to hear from artists in interviews but, from my own perspective, I prefer to just be a little more quiet and reserved.”
Is this a recent thing or have you always been like that?
“I’ve always sort of felt that way. I’ve just done better at communicating that to journalists rather than just shutting up and saying nothing and having them walk out – which has happened more than a few times.”
Well, you don’t seem to be enjoying this very much...
“I am enjoying it!” he laughs (for the first time). “Again, I’m just quite reserved in the way that I go about it because it’s easy to just sort of get on a rant. You’ve probably done a lot of interviews where the artist just babbles on incessantly. I’m just not like that. But I am enjoying this.”
In truth, it doesn’t really matter that Donahue – who’s obviously more of a serious musical artist than a “celebrity rock star” – isn’t exactly the best salesman or spokesperson for himself. He doesn’t have to be. The new Mercury Rev album is called The Secret Migration and, while it isn’t due to be released for another two months (next week by the time you’re reading this), it’s already guaranteed to be one of the best albums of 2005.
If their 1998 breakthrough album Deserter’s Songs was autumn, and 2001’s All Is Dream winter, then The Secret Migration feels like spring (“Ain’t it amazing when the seasons begin to change,” he sings on the gorgeous ‘My Love’, “someone behind the scenes just seems to pull some strings”). Over thirteen tracks and just under forty-five minutes, the band take you on a magical musical journey of change, hope, regret and renewal. It’s a fresh and optimistic sounding record, a grower, one to fall in love to, as well as with.
Produced as always by David Fridmann, it’s a gorgeous piece of art – sometimes quiet, mellow and reflective, others guitar-charged, rhythmic and memorably melodic. Donahue’s voice is one of the most distinctive in contemporary music and it shines here. One song ‘Moving On’ is a 78-second classic, the entire lyric of which goes, “You gotta start movin’ on/It will be better in the sun/Just move ahead, it won’t be long/and it’ll be brighter.” Positivity – the band had obviously taken their plus-signs that day.
Work on the album began in their Catskills studio in the autumn of 2002, just weeks after the final date of their world tour to promote All Is Dream, their orchestral-tinged follow-up to the mega-selling Deserter’s Songs.
“Before we make these records, I always have this idea in my head,” he explains, “and this one was gonna be the same way I thought All Is Dream was, and the exact same as Deserter’s Songs – I thought they were all gonna be very quiet, acoustic, ballad-y, two-in-the-morning, reflective records. All of them. I realised as soon as I had those expectations and as soon as I spoke to David Fridmann about them you could see them flying away, and I just gave up. I’ll be damned if I can put any reins on it. How did it turn out the way it did? I don’t have the faintest idea.”
What does the title The Secret Migration refer to?
“I suppose it’s a sort of quantum-esque movement from within,” he muses. “And the idea of a secret isn’t really a secret that’s kept from anyone, it’s generally something that’s unbeknown to yourself, myself – a movement from within you that you don’t recognise right away. That maybe people around you recognise going on in you first. Later on, you catch up and you realise you’ve subtly changed your perspective – or at times dramatically – but not all in one motion.”
Are we talking musically, spiritually or philosophically?
“In our case, or in my case, with this record, it would be all of them. Musically, spiritually if we wanted to use that word – just paradigm shifts from where they were to where they’re going. And in this way . . . it was a sense of wonder to me. I didn’t see it coming. I wasn’t quite aware of it while it was happening, but it was something that was reflected back to me by friends and loved ones around me, that a number of my previous perspectives of life and love and music and the whole spectrum had shifted in various ways.”
Are you in a relationship?
“I’m in relationships, yeah.”
Relationships?
“Well, in terms of the one – it’s always shifting and changing,” he smiles.
Just that some of the songs seem very personal – about women wanting their men to grow up and mature and that kind of thing (“Has she found a way to make her man work out right?/And has she found a way to let her man into her life?”).
“Well, probably a whole bunch of give and take between that,” he avers. “That would have been the basis on some levels but not generally. I don’t go person-to-person. I don’t really direct a single song to a single person.”
Is that something that might have got you into trouble before?
“Em . .. it tends to be quite self-indulgent in that way. What I find more useful is, if anything, the songs have a direction from within me and back towards me -‘Look man – what are you doing? What’s going on around you?’ It’s not everyone else wake up, these are often somewhat wake-up calls to myself.”

Although Mercury Rev have been operating with a core membership of three for the last six or seven years (Mercel signed up just before Deserter’s Songs), the band has actually been in existence since 1990, releasing their debut album Yerself Is Steam in 1991. Founding members David Baker (vocals), Jimy Chambers (drums) and Suzanne Thorpe all gradually left for various reasons. However, Baker’s departure, following a fractious 1993 tour in support of Rev’s second album Boces, was apparently particularly bitter. Were any lessons learnt when he left?
“When David Baker left?” he says, looking surprised that I’d mention it. “Yeah, there was of course and that’s the same whether you’re in music or just in simply a purely love relationship with someone – is that it’s the friendship that is to be most valued. And at times you can lose sight of that and fall into the illusion of, ‘Well, it’s the music that matters, man’ and step over the people around you in this attempt to make sure that the music is what’s mattered. And that’s false.”
Are you still friends?
“We are.”
Did that take a while?
“It did. A number of years.”
Has it affected the way the band operate now? Are you a musical democracy?
“Um . . I don’t know that we’re a democracy, so to speak. We’re a series of particle collisions, as it were. We don’t ever have a sort of set way that things happen, a route, we don’t have a stream that things always go through. They tend to come in at all angles. And it seems to work for us.”
Are Mercury Rev a rock & roll band? For instance, do you drink much on tour?
“In terms of partying and drinking, that would be something you might want to steer clear of, because that’s generally the norm in this business. But no, I’m no longer a heavy drinker. I was for a period of time, but no longer.”
Do you meditate or do yoga?
“I practice an awful lot of quantum theory. I dunno . . . I’m alive, I’m living, I’m being. So I’m one up on 99% of the rest of the world.”
Quantum theory?
“I have an interest in quantum theory and quantum mechanics,” he explains. “I enjoy it. I don’t understand it very well and therefore I enjoy it immensely. Quantum physics for me is not a matter of just pushing numbers. There’s a deeper sense of wonder that I find within quantum science right now that’s very applicable to what I do musically. Just a different perspective but of the same manifestation of vibration. So, for me, that’s something I enjoy.”
There are quite a few references to nature and higher powers in some of the songs. For instance, in ‘Vermillion’ you sing about, “An unseen force behind the turning leaves”. Do you believe in God?
“Which one?” he asks, somewhat challengingly.
I dunno. The Christian God?
“You mean in monotheism? No, I don’t. I don’t have any attention for monotheism at all.”
That’d put you in a minority back in your home country. With Bush being re-elected last week, America seems to have gone all-out fundamentalist Christian. . .
“I don’t know if I would point it exactly there,” he says, frowning, “though I understand for a large section of the country it’s backtracked into fear. The religion is simply one manifestation, one anchor that they feel they can lean on in that time, but it generally points to a period in people’s lives where they’re very uncertain of their future. They don’t understand, they’re very confused by the things going on around them, and oftentimes unfortunately they’ll reach for the cane of a God or monotheism or moralism or absolutism to help them through. And that’s my perspective on what’s happened in America, unfortunately.
“America’s very polarised right now,” he continues. “Friends and best friends not agreeing on a very deep level about political, social views. And that hasn’t been a part of America for a very long time. The wound is fresh, you know, so any time within interviews recently that that subject comes up . . . myself and probably a lot of American bands just sort of back off a bit.”
Your music isn’t at all political, but do you think it’s important for musical artists to use whatever influence they have to politicise young people?
“Well, I don’t know that it’s important that I influence them,” he says, shaking his head. “What is important is that in America that you get people out to vote. Because for a long time we, as a country, have been somewhat very lazy in exercising that privilege – especially among younger people. And so I’m very glad that Springsteen and other rock artists like REM were really pushing people. Not to vote one way or the other, although of course they have their own political bent, but to just go out and vote. To form an opinion. Because in this case, forming an opinion is crucial to the way that America will proceed for the next number of years. I’m very grateful for that.
“But as for telling people what I think politically, that’s no better than going into a bar and talking about religion. It doesn’t have any sort of place to me in my perspective. They have their own. If they come to a rock concert, hopefully it doesn’t come across as a political rally. It’s about enjoying music. It’s easy to get lost in that. A lot of bands do.”
Given your obvious aversion to interviews, do you feel compromised when you have to go out, talk to people like me, and sell yourself to the public?
“Well, in essence, yes,” he smiles, “but in theory and in practice, no of course not, there’s always compromises. There’s compromises that Mercury Rev makes, that the Rolling Stones make. If you wanna sell records you have to understand that this is a business. If you never care about making a dime out of it, if you never care about getting your music out to anybody but your friends, then you don’t have to have a record deal. You can just print cassettes up and hand them out to a few people at the bar, and never have to make a compromise in the world.
“But for those of us who understand that this is what we love to do, and we love to be supported within that to be able to make the records we wanna make, yes, it’s a business. The business is changing now because the market is shrinking. There’s so many bands and so few outlets to showcase those bands to the public – the radio stations are shrinking, the magazines are less and less, that there’s sort of a bottleneck there. And everyone suffers. And so generally the only thing that actually gets spit or shit out of the bottleneck is the lowest common denominator. Something that might just blanket-bomb everybody – and that tends to be very pop commercial language stuff.”
Having wallowed in relative obscurity for more than a few years, when Deserter’s Songs took off were you nervous of the success?
“Yeah, a little,” he says. “But there was a deep sense of appreciation and a gratefulness there because the record before that had gone straight into the budget bins and hadn’t sold a dime. And so when all of a sudden Deserter’s Songs began its momentum, we were very appreciative because we had been at the bottom. We knew what it felt like from experience to not sell any records, to have no-one pay any attention to you, to have no-one show up to your shows. And so we were very well grounded by that experience to not go overboard and start thinking that we were the new form of sliced bread. Because you can easily go back that way.”
Is this new album the pinnacle of something for Mercury Rev?
“I don’t really see it as a linear time-based equation, going forward or backward. I see it as a really engaging perspective that I haven’t sort of fully understood yet. But I’m enjoying it.”
Well, what are you hoping for?
“I’m just hoping to remember all the words tonight,” Donahue laughs. “To hit one out of every two high notes, and to get home safely.”