{"id":1038,"date":"2010-06-03T10:33:06","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T16:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=1038"},"modified":"2010-06-03T10:33:06","modified_gmt":"2010-06-03T16:33:06","slug":"frog-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2010\/06\/03\/frog-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"Frog Eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"

by David Nowacki
\n<\/strong>
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Carey Mercer is a personal hero of mine and he could be yours, too. He is the owner of an idiosyncratic wail and writer of equally unique songs. You might be listening to a Carey Mercer song if you find yourself wondering how a trombone learned how to sing and also how it got so angry, or if you find a palpable feeling of dirt and despair emanating from the words. You can easily pick him out of any musical project he\u2019s ever been involved with. Even in the formative days of his first group Blue Pine, the aural aesthetic distinctly attributable to Carey Mercer has been evident. And since Frog Eyes\u2019 first album, The Bloody Hand<\/em>, he has taken that sound and with every album honed it and grown and explored the boundaries of what he could do with it\u2014which, in practice, has proved to be fantastic and interesting and weirdly beautiful. Frog Eyes\u2019 latest album, Paul\u2019s Tomb: A Triumph<\/em>, marks a more majestic, epic sound and a further step forward in the oeuvre of Mercer. He also (very occasionally) blogs, and writes opinion pieces such as one lambasting a gag clause in the contracts of the musicians who played the Olympic closing ceremonies. I tried to contain my fanboyishness as much as possible as I telephoned him in the faraway land of British Columbia.<\/p>\n

Stylus: I\u2019ve been noticing the more recent albums, Paul\u2019s Tomb<\/em><\/strong> and Tears of the Valedictorian<\/em>, you\u2019ve been tending towards longer songs. Why do you think this is?
\nCarey Mercer: <\/strong>That\u2019s not something that we set out to do, but I think it\u2019s an after-effect of a general move to explore space a little bit more. So it\u2019s maybe it\u2019s good to think of, like, songs almost like the super-slow movement of an accordion. So on The Folded Palm<\/em>, or The Golden River<\/em> or The Bloody Hand<\/em>, it\u2019s the same songs, they\u2019re just really condensed. It\u2019s like, if we were to take some of those songs and stretch them out and build up the instrumental parts, which is what we\u2019re doing now, you probably actually would end up with nine-minute songs. Maybe even more. There might be actually a lot more ideas in those early songs, I don\u2019t know. [Laughs.]<\/p>\n

Stylus: Do you think of your music a whole, continuing, ongoing piece, or is each album its own insular little world?
\nCM: <\/strong>I would say that each album is its own insular little world. But when I\u2019m done an album, that\u2019s it with that record, and those songs forever live on that record. And it\u2019s kind of weird sometimes to pluck them out of a record. Say, in a live set, you\u2019ll take a song from The Folded Palm<\/em> and chuck it in to the middle of all these other songs. I don\u2019t know, there\u2019s something kind of odd\u2014it\u2019s not so odd that we don\u2019t do it, but I always have to re-orient myself once the song is done. That\u2019s the nice thing, also, about playing with different people, is that the song changes so much anyways because someone else is playing the bass line, or someone else has taken the piano line and put it up onto electric guitar.<\/p>\n

Stylus: Being a Canadian musician\u2014and it doesn\u2019t really matter if you feel terribly connected to the country itself\u2014you\u2019re going to be sort of labeled as a Canadian Musician, in articles and reviews and that sort of thing- do you actually feel any sort of connection to the country you live in? Do you feel like you are a Canadian Artist?
\nCM: <\/strong>It\u2019s such a complex question. I was watching the Olympics close, and I just couldn\u2019t understand, I just don\u2019t get it. I don\u2019t even understand what Canada is, you know? Is it health care? Is it Stephen Harper? Is it the sheer geography of the place? But then, it\u2019s so massive. How do you condense that into a single emotion? And this is why I find that kind of like, herd instinct displays of pomp really actually troubling, because it\u2019s this massive outpouring of really, really intense, heartfelt emotion towards essentially meaningless symbols, and when that happens people are put in a place where they can be easily manipulated because they\u2019re feeling so hard, but they don\u2019t even really know what they\u2019re feeling. I feel incredibly connected, in my own life, to where I live. I love it. I love the region that I live in. I mean, Vancouver Island is bigger than Switzerland. So, if you\u2019re from Switzerland, you\u2019re Swiss, and I think in your mind it\u2019s quite easy to sum up what that means. Just as it would be easier for me to say, to talk about Vancouver Island, or you could talk about the Red River area, right? I don\u2019t know anyone who\u2019s from Moncton or Saint John, and I don\u2019t know why if I see someone from Moncton or Saint John or Halifax walking down the street I should put my arm around them, start weeping [laughs], and start singing \u201cO Canada,\u201d you know? It\u2019s a lie. Nationalism is the most pervasive lie, and it\u2019s the one unifying aspect of history. There seems to be at the heart of all of the totalitarian regimes too, Great Mother Russia. Actually, the only thing that really unites Canadian musicians might be something like FACTOR, or SOCAN. That small fact that we are all able to apply on some kind of equal status for some funds. At least there\u2019s that.<\/p>\n


\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stylus: The Internet: good thing\/bad thing? From a musician\u2019s standpoint.
\nCM: <\/strong>Good and bad. It\u2019s like saying Planet Earth: good or bad?<\/p>\n


\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stylus: But for you personally, I mean, I know you\u2019ve gotten into the internet culture a bit, you\u2019ve got your blog, which, albeit, isn\u2019t updated too often, but there is that involvement. Has it benefitted you as a musician, do you think? A lot of artists find detriment in the fact that anyone can get their album for free.
\nCM: <\/strong>I can\u2019t answer that question. Truthfully answering it would necessitate being able to see what the world would be like without the Internet. And actually, when I think about it, probably the most rewarding things that we\u2019ve done with Frog Eyes has been, you know, like we went to Tel Aviv, we went to Moscow, and when we played, kids totally knew our music, and there\u2019s no way that they would have known it without the internet. So, in that sense, it\u2019s good. But in the other sense, it\u2019s really too early to break out the party hats. We need to figure out an economic model that works for the Internet.<\/p>\n

Stylus: Do you have any statements about the record you\u2019d like to make?
\nCM: <\/strong>No. [laughs] Not really. Just, in general, I don\u2019t really like talking about music too much.
\nStylus: Your own music, or just music in general?
\nCM:<\/strong> Music in general. Its beauty is in its mystery. You just can\u2019t. You just lose every time you try to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by David Nowacki Carey Mercer is a personal hero of mine and he could be yours, too. He is the owner of an idiosyncratic wail and writer of equally unique songs. You might be listening to a Carey Mercer song if you find yourself wondering how a trombone learned how to sing and also how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}