Visiting certain cities while on tour can make Jonathan Donahue wistful, the Mercury Rev singer and songwriter lingering on what might have existed in particular spaces when the band first crisscrossed the country more than three decades back.
“We were just in Buffalo, and you see new skyscrapers – just as you might wherever you live,” said Donahue, who will join his bandmates in headlining Rumba Cafe on Thursday, April 24. “And it’s more that you’re seeing these glass and steel tombstones rising up over the grave of a place that might have been something sensitive to you 30 years ago, whether it was an old club you played, or an apartment you lived in at one time.”
In those earlier days, Donahue said, his youth led him to be more possessive of the creative muse, which reached full bloom on albums such as the shivering, emotionally fragile Deserter’s Songs, from 1998, and its comparatively warm, lush follow up, All Is Dream, released just three years later but existing in an entirely different universe.
“It was often, ‘This is why I’m doing it. This is my reason. This is my meaning. This is what I’m creating,’” said the musician, who later in life came to understand that this force emanated not from within but rather existed as “an invisible current beneath the ship” to which he had access. “And that realization happens when everything around you breaks down in some sense, whether it’s your own career, or whether it’s your life, or a midlife crisis, or for some people maybe a tragic trauma. But it’s when all of those edifices you’ve built up … finally crumble and you see you’re part of some greater collective wind, as it were. And that’s when something in you opens up and you find yourself in a greater connectedness.
“And I don’t know that youth is supposed to have that interconnectedness. It almost requires that we build these castle walls up around us that say, ‘I’m me. And this is mine and that’s yours.’ But once those castle walls are breached by experience, I think we find that the surroundings are much more attractive to us than what was inside those walls.”
Donahue said these revelations were accompanied by a new sense of patience – “It’s knowing when to touch the paintbrush to the canvas,” he said – which accounts at least in part for the longer than usual stretch between albums. (Born Horses, from 2024, is Mercury Rev’s first album of original material in nine years.)
Earlier in the band’s career, he said, external forces often dictated the pace, with the musicians “gathering whatever ingredients we have in the fridge, throwing them in a bowl, and lighting it up” whenever the record company extended a deadline. Nowadays, however, the group allows the songs to amass more naturally, Donahue describing an internal pressure that builds to a point of friction. “As you go along in music, you realize one of the greatest hurdles of being an artist is knowing when to step back a bit,” he said. “And if the song needs more time, don’t take it personally. It doesn’t mean you failed as a writer. It doesn’t mean you’re blocked. It doesn’t mean the other people in the band aren’t contributing. It just means the song itself is still going through its seasonal changes. … And what I’ve learned is that if I let the songs sing themselves, then I sleep better at night.”
Donahue’s shifting views of his own role within the creative process have led him to adjust both his sense of expectation and his approach, explaining the importance of remaining in a state of preparedness, which he said allows him to better respond when the muse does reach the point of strike. “And that preparedness is not having a pen and paper around,” he continued, “but instead a willingness to not judge what comes up.”
With Born Horses, this meant accepting the spoken word cadence with which the songs formed in Donahue, who ditched the high, keening rasp deployed on past records in favor of a deeper, more poetic lilt. Even now, Donahue said he’s not sure how or why the songs took that form, and he expressed an awareness the approach could prove temporary, comparing the creative left turn taken on the album with a bird that briefly alights in one’s backyard before again taking off never to be seen again.
It’s a fitting comparison, considering the number of times the musician makes reference to birds on Born Horses, reciting: “I’ve been a bird of no address/Ever since the day you left”; “There’s always been a bird in me”; “Made of … whatever it is in birds that flies.”
“I didn’t even realize it until we were mixing the record, and the engineer turns around and goes, ‘Man, you really like birds,’” Donahue said, and laughed. “I guess the eye doesn’t see itself. But living in the mountains where I do [in upstate New York], it’s probably a natural consequence of seeing things around you, the same way a band like the Velvet Underground perceived things going on around them at that time in New York City and that became their nature for let’s say an album or two.”
The more poetic leanings displayed on Born Horses arrived as a matter of course, with Donahue recalling the time he spent with the late poet Robert Creeley, along with a natural fondness for language that he traced back through childhood.
“And it wasn’t so much that I thought I would be a poet, but that I enjoy that minimalist approach to lyricism or poeticism, whether it’s Son House and the Delta Blues or Robert Creeley, where a few words boiled of all the excess really contain multitudes,” said Donahue, who continues to struggle with labeling himself a songwriter. “I know it’s what I do, but I find it more of an obstacle when I say that, because then I begin to put myself in a drawer with all of these other great songwriters. Let’s just say I’m someone who uses whatever limited vocabulary he has to describe something that’s much larger than what ends up being on the vinyl.”
Andy is the former editor of Columbus Alive and has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin and more.
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