The return of Mercury Rev. A playlist primer.

Snapshots of a great New York band with a radiant new LP, plus a 5 hour cribsheet streaming playlist.

Photo by Will Hermes

If Wilco are America’s Radiohead, as someone once wrote, Mercury Rev are something like America’s Pink Floyd — except that their two main songwriters have remained partners, and have kept making good records. Their latest drops a week from today, and it’s very good indeed. It’s called Born Horses, which sounds to me like a mash-up of Born To Run and Horses by Patti Smith. And it has things in common with both those records (unsurprising, perhaps, as they all came up on New York/New Jersey artistic turf), while existing squarely in Mercury Rev’s own unique solar system.

Earlier this summer I spent time with Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper for a story that’s in the latest print issue of Uncut, on better newsstands and bookstore shelves now. I took the picture above at Opus 40, the amazing sculpture park-turned-concert venue in Saugerties, New York, near Woodstock in the Catskills, the region we all call home. FYI, Jonathan acquired that black 1986 Suzuki in Norman, Oklahoma, back when he was a member of the Flaming Lips, and was dividing his time between OK and the Catskills.

Over the course of a couple of days, we drove around the region, and they gave me a tour of it through their eyes. I heard tales of their studying with the great American poet Robert Creeley and filmmaker/musician/Velvet Underground colleague Tony Conrad at the University of Buffalo back in the day. I heard stories about their work with local legend Peter Walker, as well as with Garth Hudson and Levon Helm (and his daughter Amy) of The Band, who appear on Mercury Rev’s stone-classic 1998 LP Deserter’s Songs — which, yes, features a magnificent song titled “Opus 40.” We visited the studio where they recorded with Garth and Levon, which is still helmed, pardon the pun, by Professor Louie, aka: Aaron L. Hurwitz, a man with some incredible stories. It was like stepping into a time machine.

FYI: Opus 40 is the lifetime work of one Harvey Fite, a sculptor and art professor who made his home on the site, and chose the name because he’d envisioned it taking 40 years to complete the sculpture garden he’d envisioned. He soon realized his sculpture garden was becoming a monumental sculptural work itself. So he doubled down on the M.C. Escher-esque array of ramps and platforms set along the quarry’s rim, crowning the work with a vertical stone suggesting a Stonehenge offspring, or an analog to the opening-scene obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fite died 37 years into the project, in an accidental fall while laboring on it. But by then, his family and other admirers reasoned, the deep-woods, pagan-abstract Sagrada Família was as finished as it was ever going to be. Now, it’s also a very cool music + performance venue that recently-ramped up its seasonal programming; this summer included shows by the Sun Ra Arkestra (led by 100-year-old sax swami Marshall Allen), Dry Cleaning, and Arooj Aftab. It’s a must-visit if you’re ever in the area.

I also got to chat with new band member Marion Genser for the story, who shared insights on these brothers-from-different-mothers, along with some of her marvelous paintings, which struck me as being of like spirit with Mercury Rev’s cosmic vibe. (Check out her Instagram for more of her work.)