Jonathan Donahue has been on the frontline of the indie rock scene since the early 80s. Hailing from upstate New York, the artist worked as a guitar technician and concert promoter, where he booked bands like Butthole Surfers and Flaming Lips. The latter he joined for their albums In A Priest Driven Ambulance and Hit to Death in the Future Head. Eventually, Donahue co-founded cult-classic rock group Mercury Rev after jamming with friends Grasshopper, David Baker, Suzanne Thorpe, Dave Fridmann, and Jimy Chambers at the University of Buffalo.
Mercury Rev has been acclaimed for noisy, chaotic, and psychedelic sound, while later infusing more avant-pop and jazz into their music. Their albums Yerself is Steam and Boces have been acclaimed for their experimentation and creative approaches from critics and indieheads alike, solidifying themselves as one of the most important cult classic bands of the past 25 years. Now, after an almost six year hiatus, the band returned for their most recent album Born Horses.
Note: this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity
You cited your influences as simplicity and beat poets like Tony Conrad and Robert Creeley. What about simplicity and minimalism led inspired this album? Do you think it’s a departure from some of your noisier work?
It’s more the process of being a human. When you hit those adolescent years, you begin to accumulate, not only money or possessions or records, but you accumulate identities and icons around you. [Things] you want to sort of paste on the back of your jean jacket, like being part of a tribe, or at least a movement. Later in life, after your middle years, you find yourself intuitively and usually successfully abandoning a lot of these possessions. Not just in terms of old sofas, cars, and relationships, but also in terms of the identities you’ve crafted, molded, and glued together from those early years. This is not just in the world of music, it’s in life as a whole. If that’s the life movement you have in later years, then it would be logical that your expression would lean on somewhat more of a distilled, boiled-down, alchemical you. Certainly in music, and you can see this in literature. You really lean into the essence of what’s flowing through you, rather than trying to please everyone with a little bit of spice from every nation. You find yourself only salting to your own taste.
I also read that, specifically, Robert Creeley’s beat poetry was influential. Does beatnik poetry affect the songwriting on this album?
I wouldn’t say beat poetry, but I did study with Robert Creeley for a few years while in Buffalo, New York in the early 80’s. Robert Creeley’s minimalism is also an echo of the Delta Blues, where a few words say a lot more than a giant paragraph. I’ve always been enamored with this. I’ve always preferred that style of both writing and music as opposed to the very long eight paragraphs that some artists choose to inject into a four minute song. It wasn’t so much the beat poets or even the minimalist approach. It was more that I found myself enjoying the puzzle of saying a lot with just a few words. It takes a lot of patience to boil off what you write. You always write a lot. You feel, “My God, this is so brilliant. I’ve got a whole page and a half for a song.” Then you realize that the song doesn’t want a page and a half, it wants just a few moments lyrically or musically that can open up the listener or the reader, and allow that person space to move inside that song or that book, right?
Would you say you approach lyrics with the intention to be minimal? Are you purposefully restrictive, or is it more free form?
I don’t know if it’s purposely restrictive, but I do apply a lot of heat and pressure along the way to boil off what isn’t true to the essence of what’s flowing through me, or what seems to be just based on thought. I try to boil off the thought part of it and just allow the movement of the song itself. Maybe in the same way you, and all of us try to leave room in any new relationship we enter into with another partner or a job. You don’t want to clutter up the first date with all the past. You want to leave some open space for not only yourself to grow, but for the listener to expand into whatever movement of art you choose.
When you talk about leaving space, did you write with a certain theme for Born Horses, or any other album? Or is it more open for interpretation?
I’ve enjoyed the allegories that I see in nature. I live in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. It comes through me to use the allegory of what I see happening in nature around me as a compass for what’s going on inside me. I feel that that’s something that anyone can relate to. You don’t have to live on the top of a mountain or in the middle of a desert. You could live in New York City, and it’s still the same. Your environment is such an expression, even unconsciously, of what’s going on inside you. And that’s something I cherish.
Would you say this is similar for your bandmates? Do you all have a similar approach to making music? I feel Mercury Rev is such a multi-faceted band. You guys have different musical styles, interests, backgrounds; how do you balance that?
Probably the same way you balance your own relationships. If it’s a long term relationship like myself and Grasshopper [Sean Mackowiak], you have to leave space for each other, especially as you both grow. If your own partner sees you walking in the door every day as the same person you first met years ago, there won’t be any growth. They’ll just hold on to an image of the first date, and the more you deviate or expand from that, the more frustrated they’ll get. The Grasshopper that I write and perform with today is very different from the Grasshopper of 40 years ago, and I expect the same of myself. Like many of the duos in music history, there has to be a lot of patience, forgiveness and space. Without that, we see bands usually contract to the point of being a black hole, and they find that each other’s gravity is too great to escape.
Was Born Horses a long process? An arduous one?
It was uncertain, especially with the vocal delivery on Born Horses. There was a lot of uncertainty and self doubt that creeps in anytime you’re doing the right work. There has to be uncertainty. If you ever feel certain of what you’re doing or certain of the results, I think you’ll find yourself quite disappointed years down the line. It’s that uncertainty as artists that we all love, and yet ironically, it’s the certainty of the audience that we have to work with too. When people put on a Led Zeppelin album, [audiences] want to know that there’s something there from the last album. These two devils play on each side. The artist is always looking for uncertainty in his new work, and the audience is always looking for some sense of an anchor to the past.
I read that you and your collaborators originally started with film scoring. Did scoring films and approaching music from a compositional or classical standpoint affect the way that you make music today?
The way some of the early members began making music: we would turn on a nature program on the TV late at night, something like a platypus trying to make it across the stream and not get eaten by some reptile. It wasn’t so much that we were scoring it like a film. We were scoring it like a movement. It gave us something to focus on, rather than saying, “Let’s write a three minute pop song with hooks and choruses.” We didn’t have any of that early on in our career. We came to that very late. What we began with is what you hear on Born Horses where there’s a theatrical arc to it. No need for the result of a hook line or something that someone would hum while vacuuming their living room. It was more something inner, and that’s always been with us. Strangely enough, most bands experiment with the soundtrack style, but they stick to a pop format. With us, pop songs were always the experiment.
I like the phrase you used, “theatrical arc.” Can you summarize the “theatrical arc” or story of Born Horses? I was going to ask, if born horses was a film, what would it be? And it doesn’t have to be a specific one, but maybe a genre of film?
I think [Born Horses] might be more of an inner reflection. Whether that’s a film or just the way someone might walk through the Louvre, and pause at a painting they’ve never seen before. After a while, you realize you’re not so much admiring the painting, you’re admiring your own reflection in that work. Whether it’s a film or a great book you like, or even one of [your] own pages in a diary, you’re looking at your own reflection. For Born Horses, it’s not just my reflection, it’s the self reflection we all have that’s always changing. Even if we feel our own face in the mirror isn’t changing much, the background is always changing.
Mercury Rev has been touring and is coming back to New York in April. Are you excited? I read that you got booted from Lollapalooza one year because of noise problems. Is that the craziest performance you’ve ever given? Do you have any favorite experiences you can share with readers?
Well, it was true. They cut the power on us at Lollapalooza in Denver. We were playing the small second stage outside the football stadium, and apparently our set was louder than the main stage. Through a crazy set of circumstances, they cut the power. I don’t think it was anything we did. It wasn’t premeditated. We were just performing the way we perform with a very… let’s say it was of the time. There were still six people in the band, and it was a complete experience. They didn’t cut us because of what we were playing. They cut us off because of the volume of what we were playing. And sometimes that’s just relative to what you feel you want to project, and what the mayor of Denver feels is necessary.
Before we wrap up, is there anything you would like to share with STATIC readers?
When people say, “Hey, what do you recommend if you want to be a musician, or how would you give advice for someone who’s just starting out?”
It’s quite simple: you’re already unique. You don’t have to search in the back of record stores to find some obscure record to imitate. You’re already unique the moment you open your mouth. It’s all the other parts of identity that you have to boil off to go back to that uniqueness. That’s part of youth. You do accumulate all these other things that you feel are necessary to project into some artistic ideology, but in essence, just open your mouth. Just sing. Just sit at the piano. Just write a book. You’re already unique. If someone would have told me that early, I probably would have saved myself an awful lot of frustration, and an awful lot of time trying to glue other parts of other art into myself, instead of just allowing what was already there to glow.