Alise Marie
Mercury Rev will look back fondly on their Deserter’s Songs album via a European acoustic tour in the spring.
“By the time we began to surface following the destruction of the mid 90’s there was no longer anyone of the band ‘in the band’,” Jonathan Donahue remembers as the album’s 20th anniversary approaches. “It felt as though Grasshopper and I were just these two see-through phantoms banging around at night in my attic, bumping into a melody here and there, strumming on the last of my guitars not in hock, pressing pray and record on the old 8 Track reel to reel.”
“We had no management, no label, no money and to be completely honest, no one clamoring for a new Rev album anywhere in the world. In fact, on the 2″ tapes during the late recordings Dave Fridmann didn’t write Mercury Rev and instead he used the name Harmony Rockets, a recent experimental side project of ours. The way we saw it, Deserter’s wasn’t going to be our next album…it was going to be our last. And likely only released on cassette to our friends…In fact, the only copy I’ve kept of Deserter’s Songs from that time is on cassette.”
The tour will start at Genk’s Little Waves Festival on April 14th, with the UK and Ireland following before final dates in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo.
“If anything, these upcoming live shows are by far the closest in spirit and nature to the original writing of that time,” Donahue concludes.
“Near silent, apprehensive, fragile to the point of ‘touch it and it turns to dust’. So full of self-doubt. The melancholy many hear on the album went in to album from the start, maybe long before it. Like from a mother to her unborn child, sadness and bewilderment just poured out us and into the album like an open cup.”
Tour dates:
April
14 – Genk, Little Waves Festival
16,17 – Bangor, Wesley Centenary Church
18 – Limerick, Dolans Warehouse
19 – Waterford, Theatre Royal
20 – Cork, Live at St Luke’s
21 – Galway, Roisin Dubh
22 – Dublin, Whelans
24 – Stirling, The Tolbooth
25 – Edinburgh, The Caves
26 – Aberdeen, Tunnels
27 – Glasgow, CCA
29 – Copenhagen, Hotel Cecil
May
1 – Stockholm, Fasching
2 – Oslo, John Dee