A conversation with Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev from 1999
A Deserter's Songs-era dispatch on bands and those funny little plans that sometimes do work quite right
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!
THE OPENERS
We begin this week’s newsletter with a public-service announcement from Nick Cave:
Cave brought the Wild God tour to Toronto’s Meridian Hall this week in all its goth-gospel glory, with a retooled version of the Bad Seeds that included four magnificent backing singers, Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood on bass, and at least one Canadian (Hamilton’s own Carly Paradis). The show ran for nearly three hours and every song felt like a mic-drop finale, with the “Bring! Your! Spirit! Down!” climax of Wild God’s title track currently rivalling the “I'm transforming! I'm vibrating! Look at me now!” mantra of “Jubilee Street” in the crazed-crescendo sweepstakes. And while the show took place two days after the end of Passover, Cave kept the Book of Exodus vibe alive with songs about blood…
…and frogs…
…and a two-plagues-for-the-price-of-one combo of floods and dead first-borns.
I didn’t get a chance to restock the stübermania 2025 jukebox with new tracks this week, but as a consolation prize, here’s a playlist of Cave’s entire setlist from Wednesday night’s show:
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Jonathan Donahue
The date: May 20, 1999
Publication: Eye Weekly
Location: I was at home in Toronto; Jonathan was calling in from New York City
Album being promoted: Deserter’s Songs
The context: Of the nine Mercury Rev reviews that have been published by Pitchfork, I’ve written five of them. And I could’ve done a sixth, but I wrote that up for Stereogum instead. That’s a roundabout way of saying this band has had a profound impact on me for over 30 years now, and to this day, I still often turn to their first five albums for recalibrating reminders of just how powerful, beautiful, and frightening rock music can be. And while their more sporadic 21st-century catalogue may not be as consistently captivating, I’m always eager to follow them down whatever weird, winding path they choose, whether it’s a full-album Bobbie Gentry tribute or spoken-word space-jazz odysseys.
This interview took place in the midst of the Rev’s commercial and critical peak, following the release of their fourth album, Deserter’s Songs. Early promo copies of the record were mailed out to press in a cardboard-replica postal packet, complete with a stamp and a postmark advertising its release date. This was no random act: In 1998, a new Mercury Rev album could have felt like a postcard from a long-lost, old friend. Unlikely beneficiaries of the post-Nirvana major-label cattle call, Mercury Rev initially overcame the inter-band acrimony that fueled their first two brilliantly frazzled albums (1991's Yerself Is Steam and 1993's Boces), only to slip further into oblivion with the more refined but commercially ignored 1995 release, See You on the Other Side. A subsequent improvised recording released under the name Harmony Rockets (1995's Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void) suggested the band was forsaking populist ambition to delve deeper into the psych-noise underground. Aside from a songwriting credit for Rev ringleader Jonathan Donahue on the Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, by 1997, Mercury Rev had effectively vanished.
The arrival of Deserter's Songs on the nascent V2 label was a brow-raiser in and of itself; but that sense of pleasant surprise turned to dumbstruck disbelief once the CD was dropped in the player. Mercury Rev had flirted with symphonic flourishes and sentimental balladry before, but usually delivered them in a haze of distortion (Boces' "Something For Joey") or cheeky, irreverent arrangements (See You on the Other Side's "Everlasting Arm"). Deserter's Songs' opening track, "Holes", however, was something else entirely: Never before had Donahue left his helium-high croon so vulnerable and exposed, and never before had the band's densely textured arrangements been deployed to such moving emotional effect, with the song's eye-welling surge of orchestration and weepy bowed-saw lines perfectly complementing Donahue's crestfallen lyrics. In their darkest, most desperate hour, Mercury Rev effectively came up with the musical equivalent of a bottom-of-the-ninth/two-outs grand slam.
I spoke to Donahue on the eve of Mercury Rev’s first headlining Toronto show since their infamous visit in December 1995, when the band was detained at the Canadian border for possession of drugs and firearms, not declaring their merchandise, and traveling with a crew member trying to enter the country using an alias—an impressive quadfecta of offences that Donahue referred to onstage that night as “hitting for the cycle.” At the start of this interview, I tried discussing the incident with Donahue, who speaks in a rugged folksy twang and matter-of-fact tone that contrasts sharply with the childlike whimsy of his recorded voice. But he gently batted away my inquiries—true to Deserter’s Songs’ rejuvenating spirit, Donahue preferred to leave the chaos in the rearview to bask in the band’s brave new world.
Are you following the NHL playoffs?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. A big series coming up—the Peace Bridge series.
The blood will flow on the QEW. So have you entertained the idea of taking the hockey sticks back out on tour?
Geez, I haven't played in a couple of months now. I played around Christmas time. But last time we had them out, we got thrown off the Dinosaur Jr. tour.
So what do you do now to kill time on tour?
Just drink.
So what was it like touring with The Flaming Lips again?
Oh. It's great. They’ve got a wonderful show going on and a great record. It was a pleasure.
It's interesting then when you left the Lips to focus on Mercury Rev, the two bands set off in different directions. But now, nearly 10 years later, it feels like things have come full circle.
It was a lot of fun. It’s always great to see Wayne and Michael.
Does it feel like the two bands are in the same headspace now?
Well, I think we always are. Our music is different. The roads we’re on are not wholly different from each other, but they are slightly askew. It’s always great that we can do a lot of laughing when we see Wayne and Michael—remembering times and not remembering other times.
Would you say there's sort of a reciprocal influence going on?
I think there always has been. I was in the Flaming Lips for a somewhat long period of time. There's bound to be. I loved the Flaming Lips long before I was ever in them, you know? And so it's always nice to get both bands together, because you can see a lot of [mutual] influences and you can see a lot of places where both of us have a slightly different opinion on certain kinds of things. And it's the diversity between the two groups that people fail to realize that makes both groups quite powerful. It's not necessarily the fact that we both use strings and flugelhorns. The diversity within those sort of parameters is what makes our music quite valuable, even when put together.
Is there any chance of you guys jamming together?
We were supposed to do some shows with them in America, but unfortunately, our time schedules aren't on the same wavelength.
Rumour has it you’re about to get back into the studio again…
I think at some point. We have a lot of ideas here and there, and probably most of them are completely miserable failures. We have yet to record these mistakes and erase them.
So does it feel like Mercury Rev is a proper functional band now for the first time?
Well, I think for the first time I can see firsthand what a lot of groups who are even larger than we are go through. We’ve been through probably up to 25 countries with this record, so we've got to see a lot of places. We don't have a lot of time off. We're lucky if we get 48 hours at home before we leave again for seven weeks. Time is at a premium.
So you’re going out with R.E.M. and it reminded me of when Sonic Youth went out and opened for Neil Young, they said it was a real rejuvenating experience playing to these big crowds who didn’t know them…
I think it'll be quite different. I mean, I've never met them before. But playing to their crowd in much larger venues, you know, we've got nothing to lose. We're just going to go out and play our music and hope some people get switched on.
Do you find American crowds and UK crowds are different overall?
No, not really, because they both just appreciate good music and they're both the first people to let you know when they don't like it.
Whereas Canadians just cross their arms and stare…
No, no, I would never say that. At least our experiences in Toronto have been always positive when we've been there.
If you can make it up here…
Yeah, if we can get through some legal stuff and get over the border.
So that's all sorted?
I guess we'll find out when we pull up, won’t we? A lot of it was our own mistakes and bad judgment—I would never blame it on any Canadian authorities. We just got caught doing a lot of things we shouldn't have been doing. But that was then, this is now, and hopefully we can come up there and play.
So you’ll keep the gun at home this time?
Hopefully. But like I say, we're looking forward to coming up there and playing for the people up there, if anybody wants to come and see us.
Getting back to the whole U.S.-vs.-UK thing: a word that comes up in a lot of Deserter’s Songs reviews is “Americana,” and it’s ironic that the Brits seem to be the most excited about the record…
Well, I think it's because you know Canadian and American influences are so cross-pollinated. I mean, I love Neil Young. He's Canadian. You know we love The Band—four out of five of them are Canadian. There's a lot of cross-pollination. So I think the Canadian audiences can understand maybe where a lot of our influences are. But even within America, America is just a large melting pot of music. We don't have much that's very original. What we do is take certain things and through the way we combine various forms and genres, it becomes somewhat original. You know, blues is just out is a lot of African rhythms mixed with Irish folk reels, and jazz is another spin off of that. And so the idea of “Americana” doesn't really hold a lot of water with us because a lot of the influences we have have nothing to do with America. They may have had their popularity within America, but, you know, we use a lot of strings and I don't remember creating much classical music in the 1700s. A lot of it was European. And we listen to a lot of ethnic rhythms and things like that. So, certainly our background in music is America, because that's where we grew up. But our love of music isn’t where it comes from, it’s just about what's on the vinyl.
There seems to be less of an appreciation of history in America compared to the UK, and not just in music…
Well, I think it's probably true to a large degree. In America, yeah, Jane's Addiction is considered an old-time band, but in Britain, the Happy Mondays are considered an old-time band. So I don't know if it's so much about where the people live; I think it's just people's attention span for music is just very short these days, and what they consider passé isn't really passé. It's just sort of regurgitated in another way that they find palatable—the way it's marketed this year as opposed to five years ago. Having been around for quite a while, I’ve realized a lot of our success is just timing. And what you realize even from people who are at a larger status than Mercury Rev, it's just a lot of timing and a lot of luck involved. And to say that just because you're in music for 10 or 15 or 20 years, that, “well, you get what you deserve and you finally deserved it and you got it,” that doesn't hold water to me. There's a lot of groups who have been around for 20 years and never had some of the success we have, and have done music equally as passionate. So you learn a lot of things about fame and popularity and success that you really don't want to hear?
While we’re on the topic of timing… one thing about this record is that, with the millennium approaching, one theory floating around is that people are looking back to reclaim a time when things were more defined and less unpredictable...
I don't know if it's the millennium. I think people in general, including ourselves, are looking for something that they believe to be real and genuine and sincere and heartfelt. A rock group that you can believe in and that will hopefully consistently please you, and that won't just break up because they don't have any Top 10 singles, or because the single you heard on the radio sounds nothing like the other nine songs on the record. We're a rock band regardless of radio play, and I think people picked up on that. Certainly a lot of our long time fans appreciate the fact that we keep going and that we're we keep trying and pushing ourselves and not just release the same record over and over again. I think that's what we find overall: people are just really thirsty for some music they can sink their teeth into, and often due to radio stations and MTV, they don't get a chance to hear it. And so they're forced to choose between schlock and shinola.
It’s interesting to look at what's popular now and think about what albums people will still be pulling out in 25 years…
Well, that's something we've always tried to take to heart, is that maybe some of our music will still be heard in 25 years. It may not sell millions when it comes out, but over the course of time people will go back to it through word of mouth. A lot of the records we listen to are by old blues guys who sold a thousand copies when it came out in 1928. But since then, people have been buying it consistently for the last 70 years. And those are people like us.
And through that, you get things like the Smithsonian Folkways box set, which preserves that music for future generations…
I remember buying a lot of those when they first came out. A lot of that work was great work, but it didn't sell the first time. So, if it reaches more people now the fourth time around,more power to it—it's the music that stands out, not the packaging.
We’re also at the point now where we’re seeing which Nirvana songs get absorbed into classic-rock rotation.
Well, as time goes on, they'll make it into the best of the ‘90s or the best of the ’80s stations. But I don’t think they’re being played in between “Free Bird” and the Allman Brothers on classic-rock radio, because it's a very small genre of music. It's not to say they don't deserve to be. They're just not there yet, and that's due to the peculiar tastes that the industry seems to have.
Rock ‘n’ roll is often referred to as a young man’s game—do you see yourself still doing this in 20 years?
Well, I do, but I wouldn't necessarily think of it as always having to be just rock ‘n’ roll. If you play all you have is your looks and a flashy sense of style on stage and that's all you're banking on, then you're playing a young man's game. If you're basing it upon the music, you could live forever in this business. And that's something we've tried hard to do: let the music speak for itself. It's a young man's game only if that's the game you choose to play. It's a wide open game if you choose to play the game of music, you know?
I feel ageism was an unfortunate byproduct of punk, which was initially about pitting the younger generation against the old…
Well, I don't think that was necessarily a philosophy that was based on wisdom. I think it was just based on anger and revenge in a sense of frustration at the time, which is always valuable. It’s not a lasting philosophy that I think many of those punk rock-era people would still hold up today and say, “Well, that's what I believe in.” You know, when you're 18, the world is a little bit of a different place than when you're 28 or 38. So we've just always chosen to let the music speak for itself and take our lumps there.
Do you have any sort of first-hand experience with young fans who check out The Band because you had Levon and Garth on your record?
Well, yeah, people might read an interview where we quote a certain musical reference and they say, “I went out and bought that Band record, and I can see what you're talking about, and where these songs are coming from.” it's better that people learn, rather than try to mystify your audience and say, “Well, it just comes from the stars and we don't know how it happens, and this is wholly original stuff that no one's ever done.” It's more important that people actually see some of our own inspiration, because then their own appreciation for music widens. And then what we're doing, I think, becomes even more valuable, not less, by knowing where some of our inspiration comes from.
Well, by now, every type of hyperbole has been attached to Deserter’s Songs, and I’m wondering if that hype has affected your opinion of the record in any way…
I'd rather people got to hear the record for themselves and made their own decision, or saw us live and made their own sort of decision, rather than reading somebody else's interpretation. And because we're selling records now more than we have before, that seems to be working in our favour. When people buy these records, they're turning other friends onto it, and not just believing what they read in the press, because that's a very dangerous game to play. You know, we've been compared to everything under the sun, and our record has been called everything you possibly can with all the accolades and acclaim. But for us, we hope that people just think of it as another good record made in 1998.
Looking back to when you were making it, did you get the sense that this would connect with more people than anything you’ve done before?
No, I think when we finished it, I think at best we hoped that maybe some of our hardcore fans would appreciate it, but we didn't really have a lot to bank on, because we had put a lot of heart and soul into our previous records and they hadn't really been well-received publicly—they hadn't sold a lot of records. And so there was really no historical basis for us to go, “well, this record is just going to go through the roof.” The other three we had done had certainly gotten critical acclaim, but really hadn't sort of spanned any sort of large sales gap.
Unfortunately, rock critics get all their records for free. It seems like there’s almost two Mercury Revs now: the studio line-up and the touring line-up. Are you going to keep it that way?
Well, I don't know. Susie's gone back to university, Jimy's left the group and started his own project. So, the people that actually made Deserter’s Songs were myself, Grasshopper, Dave Friddman and [keyboardist] Adam [Snyder], and Dave can't tour because he's in a studio. He'll always play bass and piano and things like that in the studio, but he's just not able to be on the road as long as we are.
Are the Russo brothers still doing Hopewell?
They're still doing Hopewell when we have downtime, they're always going into the studio doing some stuff. And so I'm sure when this touring is done, they'll be slogging it out just like we do.
Are these side projects and bands necessary for keeping everyone’s sanity?.
They are. I mean, there's a lot of pressure on us now to do Harmony Rockets records, which in the past there was none. And you tend to react the opposite way—I don't respond well to threats of having to do a Rockets record. The reason I did them in the first place was because nobody was giving a shit about Mercury Rev, and I felt I could just do something a little different. It starts out of spontaneity. And then once you see a deadline in front of, you tend to just rebel and say, “Well, fuck that,” you know? And so I'm hoping we'll do a Rockets record when Grasshopper and I look at each other and say, “let's do a rocket's record,” and not before.
So do you see Mercury Rev and Harmony Rockets as two separate entities?
Well, they're just two separate head spaces. The two are very interdependent musically. We learn from the Rockets and apply it to Mercury Rev and then learn from Mercury Rev and apply it to the next Rockets stuff. But it's just something that will happen when it happens and not before.
At the risk of being reductive, it seems like the Harmony Rockets are a way to tap back into the free-form energy of the early Mercury Rev records…
Certainly that headspace does exist there, where you can sort of step out and you don't have to apply it to a three-and-a-half minute song structure. But some of those ideas certainly found their way into Deserter’s Songs. It's just a way for us to wake up that day and say, “let’s just do a Rockets thing.” It's just a way to climb out from the large miasma of clouds that follow Mercury Rev around all the time.
Well, Mercury Rev have always been a melodic band, even back on Yerself Is Steam, but it seemed like you were sort of testing your melodies to see how much noise they can withstand.
At times we were, and at times, with the Rockets, we were just sort of just blowing off some steam, where we might’ve felt certain things in the Rev were becoming a little bit narrow at times, and we would just turn to the Rockets and do something completely on the opposite spectrum—a 45-minute song or something, and vice versa. So it's hard to say. Some of the stuff we did on the last Rockets EP with “Golden Ticket” actually had more commercial angles than the new Mercury Rev did. So it's just give and take, so to speak.
But do you feel more confident as a singer and as a songwriter now?
No, not any more than I was five years ago.
What's your crippling insecurity?
Well, I think as anything, there’s the built-in inferiority and insecurity and paranoia that goes along with writing music and bringing it into the group and saying, “What do you think of this?” And everyone takes all their stabs at it and they say, “ that's great, let's do that!” And the next time you'll come in with something, you say, “guys, you got to hear this one. This is amazing!” And everybody goes, “that's bullshit,” you know? So you just can never tell. It's a very tough crowd to please in Mercury Rev.
But is that sort of feedback helpful at all?
Well, it helps you get to the bottom of things. There are no Yes Men, so in that respect, you tend to weed out a lot of things that you might let fester for too long.
So in the few Mercury Rev shows I’ve seen over the past year, I’ve noticed the setlist is exclusively Deserter’s Songs and Yerself Is Steam material…
Yeah. Boces had a lot of emotional things attached to it, so it's kind of difficult for us to go back to. We’ve done “Everlasting Arm,” and we've done “Racing the Tide” and we do “Peaceful Night” and “Young Man’s Stride” from the third album. But, a lot of nights, depending on how long we're allowed to play, we like to do some of the new stuff and we like to go back a long ways to Yerself Is Steam for some of the older fans that have been with us for a long time.
It’s interesting going back to “Car Wash Hair” now—it sounds like a preview of Deserter’s Songs…
Yeah, there was some of that going on, and certainly the third record had a lot of similarities to Deserter’s Songs—it had bows and saws and things like that—but nobody gave a shit when it came out in ’95.
But looking back, could you have made the progression from “Car Wash Hair” to Deserter’s Songs without going through the violence of Boces?
No. Without question. For us, it’s always been a progression based on what you actually do, not what you actually think you can do. And so some records, we've done some amazing work and some of the work that we've done has been utterly horrible by our own standards—not by the standards of anybody else, but just by our own.
What's the least favorite thing you’ve done?
Well, I won't get into that, but it's not even so much what I don't like on the record, but what seemed to be failed expectations. Things that I thought were going in one way and really could have been something and, for whatever reason, I lost focus and didn't grasp it quite right. And so I try to learn from those and say, “well, you know, on Deserter’s Songs, I'm going to try this.” And on Deserter’s Songs, there’s a lot of things that, on the next record, we’ll try to work on and get better at and change—it's the only way to keep going. If I thought this was the best record I could do, I wouldn't bother doing another one.
A common theory relayed through the press is that the dark clouds have lifted off this band. You guys seem to be all smiles onstage now…
Things are gelling in a way. It's not a love farm on stage but, at the same time, we're beginning to come to grips with who we are as people. Instead of rebelling against each other, we tend to embrace the fact that people are different and we've learned basically what not to play and how not to play. Instead of trying to fill up every little thing either live and in the studio, we've learned to play with silence a lot better and learned when to hang back and not step on somebody else. It takes time—some groups get it the first time, but for us, it took a while.
Would you say you’re actual friends now as opposed to before?
Well, we've always been great friends. We've always been the best of friends now for about 15 years. But as friends are, you have ups and downs that are sometimes the size of Everest because of your passion for each other and what you do. When you do come to a perceived loggerhead, it seems like a civil war.
Are you still in touch with [former vocalist] David Baker?
Yeah, actually, we saw David the last time we were in Chicago playing.
Is he doing anything musically, like another Shady album?
I think he's always working on music. I don't know what he plans to release, but I think he's always in the studio. He has a studio and he's working with groups and not just on his own music. So I wouldn't be surprised if he released something at some point soon.
Have you had any sort of major disasters on this tour to rank alongside your previous misadventures on Lollapalooza or the Dinosaur Jr. tours?
Well, there’s always things that are bizarre? The last few months have been stranger than the first eight years. Those stories always seem to follow us around, but I try not to dwell on them as much as we had to in the past.
So you’ve never felt cursed as a touring entity?
I would never say I was cursed, because that implies some outside force putting the nails on the coffin, so to speak. But a lot of what happened in the past, some of it was due to us, and some of it was due to the fact of timing—maybe at some points, we were just a little bit in front of where people thought music should be. And sometimes that tended not to gel with people's perspective of Mercury Rev itself, and it sometimes brought us into some confrontations. And at the same time, we were six very confrontational people when we began.
So you’re on the new Chemical Brothers record—did you record the track in the same fashion as the last one?
No, for this one I was in the studio, packing up the pianos and the horns and the guitars.
So would you say there’s a cosmic connection between you two?
Well, I think it's just based on a great love of music. Both groups have their own sort of way of getting the sounds on the tape, but at the same time, we both love music to a degree that for us seems very communal. It's very easy for me to go into the studio with Tom and Ed and pick up on the vibe very quickly, because we just have a great love of music. We actually saw them play their first show in a year and a half a couple of weeks ago.
One last night: I’ve noticed that a lot of your Neil Young covers seem to come from the On the Beach record…
Yeah, it's just a record that I like a lot, as well as some of this other stuff. It's not a well-known Neil Young record, because it's not in print for whatever reason. So when I tell people it's Neil Young, they’re like, “no it's not—I've never heard it.” But that record just seemed to stick with me and it seemed to shed a little light on where my own headspace was at, at the time.
ENCORES
So the main reason I resurfaced this interview this week is that I saw Mercury Rev perform at The Great Hall last Saturday, their first Toronto show in 17 years. They were supposed to open for The Brian Jonestown Massacre at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in 2022, but cancelled at the last minute; coincidentally, their opening act for this show—Ryler Walker—did the same. So when I showed up at The Great Hall, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the opening act for Mercury Rev was… Mercury Rev. Or, more specifically, Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper, who performed as a stripped-down “tribute” act called Fritterer and dusted off a clutch of ‘90s classics:
For the proper set, Donahue and Grasshopper were joined by keyboardists Jesse Chandler and Marion Genser, and beast-mode drummer Joe Magistro. Though the Rev are ostensibly on tour in support of last year’s Born Horses, they only played one track from the record, opting instead for a set heavy on Deserter’s standards and 2000s-era deep cuts that gave Donahue ample opportunity to stake his claim as rock’s foremost air conductor.
Just to bring things back full circle to Nick Cave: On their 1999 tour, Mercury Rev covered “Into My Arms,” which was barely two years old at the time, and in hindsight, it was a small but significant step toward canonizing the song into the alt-rock “Imagine”:
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!