“Look out for the birds!” AN AUDIENCE WITH MERCURY REV
AFTER songs about bees, butterflies, spiders and swans, Mercury Rev’s Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak is seeking his next animal muse. “I’m looking out my door and there’s red cardinals flying by, blue jays… there’s a family of squirrels living in a tree in my backyard. The woods start at the end of my street, so we’ve had bears knock down the fence and go through our garbage.”
“There’s a lot of birds coming up,” says bandmate Jonathan Donahue, who lives even further out into the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains. “I’ll leave it at that: look out for the birds!”
Six years since , a new full-blown Mercury Rev album is almost ready. There’s even the possibility that it might be a double. “I’ve been writing a lot since the pandemic,” says Donahue, “but I really can’t say how it’s different. I feel the best thing I can do as I get older and deeper into this is to detach myself from a feeling that the album has to something, as if
