As Mercury Rev began recording their eighth studio album in autumn 2013, when asked what people could expect, co-pilot Grasshopper responded, “Steel Resonator Mandolin. Timpani. Sleigh Bells. All sorts of electric guitars....Link Wray ghost tone.” He subsequently added, “It is the best stuff we have done in a long, long time. Gonna be big sounding!”
Two years on, The Light In You more than lives up to its billing. The record is filled with wondrous and voluminous kaleidoscopic detail, but also intimate moments of calm, and altogether stands up to the very best that this notable band of maverick explorers has ever created. Its ecstatic highs and shivery comedowns also reflect a particularly turbulent era in the lives of Grasshopper and fellow co-founder Jonathan Donahue, of calamities both personal and physical, but also rebirths and real births (Grasshopper became a father for the first time in 2014). There’s a reason for the seven-year gap since the band’s last album, Snowflake Midnight.
“It was one of those otherworldly life sequences, when everything you think is solid turns molten,” explains Jonathan. “But also, when something is worth saying, it can take a long time to say it, rather than just blurt it out.”
As well as The Light In You being the first Mercury Rev album with Bella Union, it’s also the first with only Jonathan and Grasshopper at the controls, as scheduling conflicts and travel between the Catskills and Dave Fridmann's Tarbox studio became too great to overcome. On The Light In You, Jonathan and Grasshopper decided they were best served being based at home in the Catskills for once. Surrounded by longtime friends such as engineer Scott Petito and bassist Anthony Molina, Jonathan and Grasshopper quickly found their stride recording themselves in their own ramshackle basement studio as well as venturing out into the daylight to record tracks at some of their old haunts like NRS and White Light Studios. The two even found time to arrange backing vocal harmonies and record with Ken Stringfellow at his studio Son du Blé studios in Paris. As momentum and intensity grew in the fall of 2015, Jonathan and Grasshopper began reaching out to new friends for some finishing brush strokes on the new LP.
Woodstock, NY native Jesse Chandler arrived just time for some beautiful piano and flute parts while New Jersey's own Nicole Atkins made the journey up the coast to sing an incredible duet with Grasshopper on Moth Light.
Yet from its title on down, the album clearly reflects the core relationship between Jonathan and Grasshopper, best friends since they were teenagers, who accompanied each other through the musical changes, band fractures, nervous breakdowns and exulted breakthroughs that has marked Mercury Rev’s career arc since they emerged with the extraordinary debut Yerself In Steam in 1992.
“You can go as deep as you want with the title, on a metaphorical, spiritual level, or just poetic license,” Jonathan suggests. “It’s the beacon that shines and allows us to see ourselves – and then there’s the music between Grasshopper and I, which is how we reflect each other. The arc of the album, lyrically, is someone who’s gone through an incredible period of turbulence, sadness and uncertainty, and as the album progresses, a light appears on the water.”
“The sadness and loneliness works itself out in the triumph of the will,” Grasshopper adds. “There’s this quote I read by the Dalai Lama, that in order to be happy, you have to suffer a bit, which for me sums up a lot of the album.”
The album’s track listing follows a similar trajectory, from the opening slow-build cascade of ‘The Queen Of Swans’, through the epic lonely beauty of ‘Central Park East’ and the album’s half-way peak between ‘Emotional Freefall’ and ‘Are You Ready’ before the closing sequence, with the exhilarating pop beacons of ‘Sunflower’ and ‘Rainy Day Record’ sandwiching the more tranquil ‘Moth Light’. The light is reflected both by the album’s brilliantine colours and imagery drawn largely from the elements and the seasons, creating a world as only Mercury Rev know how. “It’s like taking a drug, but not actually taking a drug,” Grasshopper reckons. “Just sit back and enter and immerse yourself.”
But as Jonathan knows well, nature isn‘t always benevolent: “It’s not a great golden god bestowing fortune upon me, it’s working in other ways,” he reflects. In August of 2011, Hurricane Irene caused the creek by his house in Woodstock to flood, sending five feet of gushing water into his home, carrying away much of its contents and condemning it unfit to live (Grasshopper, in the centre of town, wasn’t affected). “Autumn’s In The Air” particularly addresses the disaster (“Autumn's in the air, as parts of me erase / one by one they disappear / like bicycles left chained”), but there is recovery in the air too: “much to my surprise, a world I thought was black and white turns to watercolor sky”). The silver lining is present in Jonathan’s new home, up on Overlook Mountain above the town of Woodstock, which might explain The Light In You’s energy levels.
In describing Overlook , Jonathan relates, "the mountain, especially in wintertime, glistens like this 3500 foot tall diamond chandelier. There's the strangest sensation of living on the surface of a great beaded fabric, sewn together with these incredible rippling magnetic threads and channelling immense matrices of crystal beneath the surface. The electricity up here bristles through you as if you're stepping on bare wire. Silly as it all sounds, there's a reason why the Tibetan Buddhists in North America chose Overlook's peak as their home. A very sacred place to the native Americans too… That having been said, if you're not careful, if you're not grounded well, then say goodbye to sanity. It will eventually fry every circuit in you.“
Once in the studio, Jonathan and Grasshopper were able to focus their shared vision, “without friction,” as Grasshopper puts it. “We have such a strong karmic history, most of which is left unspoken,” Jonathan adds. “We rarely have to explain our thought stuff to one another, which can be a real undoing of creativity. The less we seem to say, the better the music seems to sound. And after 30 years, maybe it’s the same with our friendship too. We really do depend on one another in ways far more silent and subtle than anything a Neuman U47 microphone could pick up. If it wasn't for Grasshopper grounding me all these years, i don't know what would have become of our music. Likely very little. It's that old fine line between brimming with self-confidence and being paralysed with self-doubt. I struggle with it. I don't know why, I can't explain it but it's there. At times during this album, I grew really disheartened with my songwriting and my own voice and just wanted to leap from the cliff, and fall into someone else. It's hard to even talk about. You wanna tell people that this time you had it all figured out from the very beginning, you know, to project strength. But I didn't. We didn't. So many songs, maybe even the whole album might not have seen the light of day if Grasshopper hadn't pulled me back from that edge. Our engineer Scott Petito used to tease me about it during the latest recordings. Once a week he would ask me if I'd decided to scrap the album and if I'd begun writing a new one. Now I can laugh about it but for awhile it wasn't funny, it was way too close to truth.”
Since Snowflake Midnight, Jonathan and Grasshopper have stayed productive, for example with their improvised collective, Mercury Rev's Cinematic Sound Teox BrainWave Concerto Experiment at John Zorn's club in NYC, releasing two live albums, creating live soundtracks to favourite films at various junctures across Europe (most recently in London as part of Swans’ Mouth To Mouth festival in 2014). There were occasional festival shows as Mercury Rev, such as headlining 2011’s Green Man festival to celebrate the deluxe version of 1998 opus Deserter’s Songs.
After the band’s original noisier/freakier incarnation (documented by their first two albums) burned out, a shattered Jonathan and Grasshopper fronted a new line-up, yet they recorded Deserter’s Songs in the spirit of a last-gasp farewell to fans. Yet it became an album of the year for many, including MOJO and NME, and a big new beginning for the band that has set the tone for everything that’s followed.
“Playing tracks again from Deserter’s Songs helped us look at where we’ve been, and where we were going,” says Grasshopper. “Though by no means did we want to make Deserter’s Songs Two, we did feel we had some loose ends to tie up.”
As Grasshopper once commented about Deserter’s Songs, “It’s special because that was the one that brought us back from the brink.” The Light In You is special for that very same reason. For Mercury Rev, there is a light that never goes out.