If you haven't heard the song "Mercy", then you should brace yourself. It's thirteen and a half minutes long. Now, I've written long songs in my life, but this song never succumbed to the problem that many long songs succumb to: they're boring or repetitive. It's a bit weird having one of your best songs be so long. There weren't a lot of ideal opportunities for playing the song live. Which is too bad, because it's not only one of my best songs, it may be one of the best songs period. Yeah, I said it.
First, let me make a recommendation. At the end of your day, instead of watching Netflix, put on your headphones. Clear your head for a few minutes and meditate on the silence, then press play. I promise that you won't be disappointed. Go do that before you read any further.
See? I wasn't lying. Okay, so the first thing I want you to know is that the four of us did that live in the studio without vocals. We just had to remember where we were in the song as we played through the entire thirteen and a half minutes.
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So I wrote "Mercy" when I was 20 years old. I had finished my second year of college, and I would not be going back any time soon. I had a lot to process, and I don't need to go into details (that's another album entirely), but I left school feeling like a villain. At Kenyon, we lived a pretty sequestered life, but occasionally images would filter in from the outside world. One of the enduring images was that of the compound in Waco, Texas burning down as it took the lives of the Branch Davidians inside. I can't say that I had been following the story closely, but when I watched the footage in April, it felt quite surreal.
The song "Mercy" was about a standoff. It was also about a group of people who were cornered, but while there was some inspiration from real life, it wasn't exactly about Waco. "Mercy" was more of a Western. The song is about what happens when you can't run any further. If you want to know peace, you have to stop running on and on.
Musically the song has a lot of influences. Fugazi, sure. And a little bit of Slint, but frankly, the song is better than Slint. Yeah, I said it. I'm going to have my Louisville underground license taken away for good, which is fine, because they never really liked me anyway.
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So we managed to record the song with the band playing the song live, but the song was far from over. First, Andrew Lee and Brian thought that the middle part needed some rhythmic glue. It wasn't really clear until we had started trying to mix it. We had run out of tracks, though, so they had to trigger the percussion track live every time we tried to mix it.
Another problem was the vocals. I was having a hard time hitting the notes, because I had gotten the flu while we were recording. One solution was to sneak in a flute solo that was playing the melody that I was singing, which added another layer of complication to mix-down, because Brian played the flute solo live everytime we mixed it down. And of course the song was 13 and half minutes long, so if we messed anything up, we had to start over. At one point, we felt we had gotten the mix we wanted, but we were listening back and we had to go through the whole process again.
Fast forward thirty years. I had always been unhappy with how my vocals sounded. As we began remastering the songs, I decided to add some backing vocals- which I had been singing along with for decades. I was fortunate enough to be able to bounce the idea off of Andrew Lee, who approved, and so we went ahead and added vocals to a song that I had recorded when I was 21.
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