Spiritually, literally, psycho-geographically: where else does Mercury Rev’s ninth  album Born Horses spring from? This cascade of gleaming, glistening psych-jazz folk-baroque-ambient quest that searches its soul but can never truly know the  answer? A sound and vision linked to their exalted past whilst quite unlike  anything they have created before?  

The answer is somewhere between the homes of founder members Jonathan  Donahue (the hamlet of Mt Tremper) and Grasshopper (the town of Kingston), in  their veins and brains of their now-legendary tapping of musical cosmology, and  the vital presence of new permanent member Marion Genser (keys), plus long term ally Jesse Chandler (keys) and guests Jeff Lipstein (drums), Martin Keith  (double bass) and Jim Burgess (trumpet). A place that feeds off the levitating  mood of their last album, 2019’s expansive tribute Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta  Sweete Revisited, and the instrumental psych explorations under the names of  Harmony Rockets and Mercury Rev’s Clear Light Ensemble, and the spiritual  guidance of avant-garde artist Tony Conrad and Beat poet Robert Creeley, to  whom Born Horses is dedicated.  

The record began with skeletal chords and a surge of self-reflection, from where  we are vulnerable alive to the notions and motions of time and reality.  

Jonathan:  

“I recited the words along the banks of the Hudson, into my phone – that’s why  you can hear steamships and seagulls… I’d return to the studio and align the  vocals to the music. It just happened that way. Sometimes you try to take a few  steps back from yourself, to separate yourself from fire. The voice has a certain  cadence that’s quite unsure of itself. It’s like stepping on to a frozen lake. If you  take the next step, will you fall in? Something tells me that that is where I prefer  to be, rather than going down the same highway again.”  

Grasshopper:  

“When Jonathan and I first met, one thing we bonded over was Blade Runner,  both Ridley Scott’s film and Vangelis’ soundtrack: that feel of the past and the  future, the haunting noir mood and the romance…Born Horses taps into some of  that. Looking back to childhood, to Broadway tunes, Chet Baker, Miles Davis’  Sketches Of Spain, records that our parents listened to, but we put a twist into  the future. From the beginning, Mercury Rev were on a cusp, between analogue  and digital, hi-fi and lo-fi at the same time. It was like Brecht or Weill, the words  suggesting visuals, and the visuals suggesting moods. We also thought a lot  about the desert on this record, and the urban desert.”  

Born Horses opens with ‘Mood Swings’. A trumpet, evoking mariachi and the  windswept terrain of the desert prairie, opens up to a dynamic panorama of

sound, wandering through and enveloping Jonathan’s intimate recitation,  conflating memories and confessions of feelings trapped and unwrapped: “My  mood swings come and go as they like / rebellious fickle teenagers, unable to  decide.” It establishes Born Horses’ tone of vulnerability and awe, and a little  frisson of fear, testifying to the frailty of human experience, buffeted by the  currents all around us. The flightiness of feelings is further explored by the  metaphor of a bird, most clearly in ‘Bird Of No Address’ and the album’s  pulsating finale ‘There Has Always Been A Bird In Me’.  

Jonathan:  

“When I opened my voice to sing on this record, this was the bird that sang: a  lower, whiskery voice, which surprised me as much as it may others who only  know my upper ranges in the past. I don’t know where the bird came from, but  it’s there now, and I don’t question it. It’s just the bird that wants to sing.”

The album title, named after the majestically rippling sixth track ‘Born Horses’,  was chosen because its words resonate through the entire record, encompassing  the idea of flight (“I dreamed we were born horses waiting for wings”) and the  phrase “You and I” that appears at different junctures on the album. This is not  the concept of two separate people, but two parts of one self.  

Jonathan:  

“It’s that part of ourselves that is breaking up, or in some ways, winding down,  to allow another new part of us to enter. We begin life by adding clay, throwing  more on top, and later in life, you let the desert winds of age blow things away.  The pencil doesn’t realise it’s dwindling down the more you write with it. The  

lead keeps going down, and life keeps sharpening you at the same time. How  much is left in me that is going to write before I run out? These scribbled  smudges are all I can go by. We didn’t make this album by throwing clay on top  of clay; we allowed time to erode what no longer matters, to reveal what was  always there.”  

The concept of Born Horses began pre-pandemic, and then once Mercury Rev  were allowed to tour and record again, Marion Genser moved over from her  native Austria to join Jonathan in the Catskills, and Mercury Rev in full flight. A  classically-trained painter as well as a musician, Marion has become an  invaluable addition to the Rev chemical compound.  

Jonathan:  

“Marion had an incredible out-of-the-blue effect on the music. Her brushstrokes  were like a cosmic microwave background to the songs, which heated the record  alchemically, and boiled off everything that was unnecessary.”  

More inspiration was provided by the spirits of Tony Conrad and Robert Creeley,  acolytes of progressive thought and action who both taught at the University at  Buffalo when Jonathan and Grasshopper were students. Amongst other  credentials, Conrad was an associate of John Cale and The Velvet Underground,  Creeley an associate of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Black Mountain  poets.  

Grasshopper:  

“Tony was a trickster, who loved to shake things up. He knew how to put things  together than might not fit but became something new. Robert – the beauty of

his sparseness with words, but playful too, and a sense of romanticism. For me,  there is some subconscious echo in Born Horses of Patti Smith’s Horses, the  recitations, the poetry…. it’s like a tip of the hat.”  

Jonathan:  

“Tony not only had the history of New York’s Lower East Side, he also had the  minimal approach, that sumo-like stance, to be true to the art. Robert Creeley’s  minimal writing with maximal impact had a blues-like impression on me, almost  like haiku; that less is more, even for a guy who wrote as many words as I did  on this record. Boiling things down or, off, alchemically.  “We want to point people to these two very important men, who were outside of  what is considered the popular culture of that time. If there was a blueprint for  Mercury Rev, it came from them rather than The Beatles, and we’ve done  everything in our power to stay true to them.”