Carey Mercer can write some strange songs. The cracked intensity and oddly affecting lyricism of his work with Frog Eyes offered listeners a chance to journey through Mercer's unique soundscapes, and for many who followed the band through their 2003 release of The Golden River, the trip was worth it. This year finds Mercer releasing his first solo album, Light Flows the Putrid Dawn, and as the title might imply, it's a mass of buzzing guitars and fragmented lyrics sung through Mercer's trademark shrieks and whispers.

Between preparations for a new tour and the release of Frog Eyes' new album, The Folded Palm, Mercer found time for a phone interview from his home near Victoria, British Columbia. From that tranquil setting, Mercer shared his thoughts on the recording process, the Internet, and the perilous myth of rock stardom.

I've been listening to Light Flows the Putrid Dawn, and given where you recorded it geographically, it's not as calm as one might expect.

I think it's not a gentle record, but when I listen to it, there is an element of calmness, or quietness in there. But maybe that's just in the context of the rest of the music I make, which is quite a bit louder. It's not a happy record, if that's what you're saying.

But there are these moments of solace in there, I think.

I feel that too, both with Frog Eyes and with this one. It's also the consonance built on dissonance. I know I really love to bring in a major chord or a major movement out of things that aren't rooted in that kind of feeling. I think that's one of the things I intuitively delight in doing.

Can you tell me a little bit about the recording process? You've got a lot of texture and layered sounds here.

It was really fun, actually. It was the first thing I ever did by myself. You know, I'm interested in the way things sound and I'm usually part of the mixing process. But up till now, I've been sort of watching to see what other people are doing. [With this album] I didn't really take my time either. Most of the songs were recorded in a day. I would keep hammering away at it and I really like to work like that - to not see outside for a couple of weeks. I think it's good.

A lot of my process comes from doing years of drawing, and I learned that you have to sacrifice an hour or two before you get into the mode where you're really thinking about things. You can't just come in with a half an hour here and there. The song themselves, I didn't spend a lot of time writing them, either. I wanted to work towards having an album.

It's definitely a cohesive whole.

It ended up being like that. In that sense, it's a small but sweet victory. That's how I gauge success; if other people respond and see it as a unit. I'm not much of a singles kind of guy. Records as a whole are important to me. You don't just read a chapter out of a book, right? I really enjoy putting an album together and writing songs in correlation with the others songs that have been written. I'm not sure if everyone works like that.

What do you think you can get at doing it this way?

I think you can get at a feeling that as the album progresses, there's not much idea of a narrative, but it's like a journey through sound.

It's also seems like a journey through language.

Yeah, this one I think is a little less like that than Frog Eyes. It takes me a month or a year after the recording is done to have any context for an album, but now when I think about the ones we've made, I can almost see them as, well, "This one feels like a day." And I see the sun as it passes through the sky, or something pretty flaky like that. And this one feels to me like a quiet, stifling night.

It seems introspective in a way, too, as if it's the product of closing the door and just banging it out.

That's a hard question to answer, because that's something you're seeing in there. It's quite possible that's true; that the introspection you're hearing - if it's in there - is a product of the process I used. I played these songs once or twice in front of a live audience, but in Frog Eyes when we go on tour a good portion of our set is new songs we're working on because I think it's valuable to see the way people interact with the songs.

To explore the songs in a live space?

I think it benefits the album. I don't think it detracts too much from the live experience, although people want to hear the old songs, but you throw a few in here and there and I think you can get away with it. I don't know if other bands work differently, like they have their songs in the studio and then when the new album comes out they promote it. I like seeing the songs evolve a bit. The more process that's in there, the better the songs are going to be, the more chances you get to go back and tinker.

So you haven't played these songs much for people?

Yeah, that's the thing about this: the only critical decisions being made are by me.

Since it's just you, it seems like a riskier approach - having less people to bounce the ideas off.

Well, my wife [Melanie Campbell] is the drummer for Frog Eyes, and I bring her in and ask, "What do you think of this?" She's got a really good critical ear. I probably trust her more than I trust myself in some ways. That's an asset for sure.

What's the role of improvisation in your instrumentation? Is it an organic process, or do you come into a song with a structure and work from there?

I don't know the language of music, but what I often do is just try and hear the melody, then sit down on the guitar and think, "Where are those notes?" I recorded this album two years ago, though there are two or three songs I did recently, but most of it is old so it's hard to remember. But what I wanted was the idea of a lot of single notes building a mass, like a writing mass.

They do swarm at times, that's for sure.

In some ways, I think the album falls short [in regards to that], but there are a few points where what I was thinking was achieved. Maybe it's good that it falls short. I like at the end of "Krull Courtship," everything drops out. It becomes quiet, but at the same time there's quite a bit going on, and that builds tension.

What were some other moments you thought really worked?

I like the way the album opens, with a few little guitars. It makes me think of chirping birds. I think some of the sequencing works well. Like I said, it's a little old, but it might help [to talk about it]. The new Frog Eyes [album] is done, and I don't know what to say about it. But there is a real link between the feeling of this record and the next Frog Eyes.

How so?

I think what you're hearing in that suffocating stillness with the occasional glimpses of sunlight is picked up on the new Frog Eyes. I really tried to push those ideas to claw at something more solid.

Would you say this album then had the dual role of letting you explore these textures on your own, and bringing the new discoveries and techniques to the band?

I did this right after Frog Eyes did our first US tour... or maybe not -- no, it was the year before that. But it was after a tour, and it was so loud, and there was so much din, that I really hungered for to just shut myself up in my space and make things a bit quieter.

It must be an energy drain to sustain such an intensity during a tour.

It is, but at the same time, you find yourself strangely inspired, too. Still, at the end of the tour, I'm never really hungry to go write a bunch of loud rock songs. Frog Eyes takes a lot out of me, and touring is really tough.

I saw you with Destroyer recently, and it was really great to see you bringing your intensity to his songs from Your Blues. The songs were so fundamentally transformed. How did that work?

It was fun. Dan [Bejar] would email me the chords, because right away we were like, "This isn't going to work." And the more we came to accept that, the more I got excited to really try and take a dump on his album. So I would just think of different ways to do the songs. Mel and I would work a few things out, and then Dan and Mel and I would get together and we just add a person at a time.

It wasn't easy. There were lots of cul-de-sacs, but I think we got a few real victories out of it. Also, it was a little weird, because I know Destroyer fans - and I especially know now, after being on tour - they're real incredibly annoying [laughs].

How so?

There's a lot of division [among fans] in the directions he goes in his work, but I knew that people would either accept it or find it screeching and unbearable. I think there was a bit of both. It was just annoying in the context of hearing, "Dan is a singular talent and should be up there unaided." That's not the way he wants it to be. It's not like we kidnapped him and said, "We're going to fuck up your songs." It was his choice. But when it came from that particular perspective, it was like, "You should get off the Internet."

That's probably good advice in general.

But most people were quite nice.

And it's not like we had to burn our Destroyer albums afterwards and only accept you and Dan's new invention of his music.

That's what I mean. I guess it's maybe special because he doesn't tour that often, but it's only a show. Though I do see that maybe it was a little loud at times.

There are greater sins than that, I'm sure. Do you think the solo stuff will work its way into the Frog Eyes live shows? Maybe in that same spirit of re-invention?

I don't know. I never really thought about it in that context. I think that Frog Eyes has enough to deal with right now, and I'm working on a new Frog Eyes album right now, too. I really like to make music. I don't know what I'm pushing for. I think it's just the enjoyment of having a catalogue, of having a body of work.

What is it that the catalogue provides for you?

It's a testament, I think, that your time wasn't wasted. That makes me really excited, whether or not it's good [laughs]. But you can't start worrying about that.

Do you find those worries creep in, especially as the catalogue starts to build - a pressure to keep it up to par?

Yeah, you always want to keep getting better. I think there are a few things you have to acknowledge: that you always want to be getting better, and you don't want to become a parody of yourself, of that which is your essential core.

In my songs there is an essential quality, and that brings up the idea of progression. Which is something that people always hoist upon artists, but it's really only in rock. A writer can write the same caliber of book for his or her life, and that can be acknowledged and accepted. That's what I mean by a body of work: the microcosm represents the macrocosm. I would rather personally be doing something that was similar to what I was doing before, but I still feel is vital, rather than being clumsily and heavily-handed pushed into something that is so obviously pandering to the idea that there must be progression. Progression is natural. Most people to some degree are sponges, so whatever they're experiencing throughout their own personal history is going to change and alter them enough to not worry about it.

Like if an album is a snapshot of the time, and your peculiar make-up at that time, then there should no repetition, as long as you're not stuck in a terrible stagnant situation.

Yeah, but even if you are, that to me can be valid and interesting. You just have to work hard at it. I always think of the idea of trying to claw yourself out of the muck of mediocrity. I think that's one of the great fears that lurks for every artist.

There's a myth that gets spread around that once you reach a certain level of success, however you define that, you won't start at the muck anymore.

For sure... and it's not true. It's especially poignant to bring this up in the rock context. Rock is supposed to be, you know, you wake up after a night of pills and partying and write a song? Absolutely not. You really have to make a conscious effort to clear away time for yourself.

Adam Rokhsar
August 11, 2004