Mark Mulcahy

(May 2005)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Inspiration has taken Mark Mulcahy down some unlikely avenues.  His first major band, Miracle Legion, blossomed in college radio at a time when R.E.M. reigned supreme.  In Polaris, he led the house band for Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete & Pete.  More recently, he has composed two well-received multimedia operas with cartoonist Ben Katchor.  Somewhere along the way, he even enchanted Thom Yorke (“the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard,” Yorke said). 

Now, three albums into his solo career, Mulcahy may have pulled out his best album yet.  In Pursuit Of Your Happiness is full of subtle, trademark gems.  Checking in from Massachusetts, Mulcahy talks about the record, his time in the opera, and the dangers of explanation.   

I wanted to talk about the genesis of this album.  The press sheet says that you had been “anxiously contemplating” how to make this record.  Had it been in the works for a while, then, and you were struggling to find the right entry point?

Well, yeah, partly because of technology and partly because I was doing these operas and I was away from the mental process of doing a record.  When I got into the mental process, I wasn’t sure how and where I was going to do it.  I kind of wanted to do it at home, but then I did it with this guy Myles, who has a really nice studio that’s also really close by.  That was a nice compromise.

Had you originally thought about doing something lo-fi, maybe just by yourself again?

No, I didn’t think about making it by myself.  My first record was 100 percent by myself, my second record was close to that.  I didn’t really want to do that this time.  I wanted to play with some other people, and I had these songs and wasn’t sure about how to do them.  These recordings were done very democratically.  I haven’t done that… at any point (laughs). 

How was that?

It was great.  It was really great to accept other people’s ideas and to record freely like that.  Good things happen that way.  Bad things happen, too, but hopefully you get rid of the bad things and do something else.

You’d written everything beforehand, though.

Yeah, almost all of them completely.  A couple of them were just music tracks and I didn’t necessarily know what the words would be.  But most of them didn’t end up sounding how I would have played them by myself.  I was trying to avoid being disappointed by expectations for the songs and not achieving them.  That happens a lot—or it happens to me a lot, anyway.  I have this idea of how it should be or how it should go, then when I finish recording it, it doesn’t quite turn out that way and it feels like a disappointment.  This one, I cleared my hand a little bit.  A lot of it had to do with the drummer.  We listened to the demo and then went and recorded, and he sort of set the tone for it.  I trust him a lot—except for those times when he didn’t get it right (laughs). 

The tempting angle to take with the album—and I’ve seen it taken in by some writers—is that you had the album was kickstarted by your experience in the opera.  It doesn’t sound like that’s true, though.

No, I wouldn’t say that—only that it made me want to make an album.  Whether it sounds that way to anyone else, in my mind I have really distinct compartments for the different types of things I do.  Miracle Legion is one thing to me, I am one thing to me, Polaris is one thing to me, and the operas are one thing to me.  They don’t seem to mix in my head; maybe they should, maybe they don’t sound as distinct as I think they are. 

Do fans tend to be into one of the compartments, or do they tend to get into all of it?

I think there are definitely only Miracle Legion fans and only Polaris fans and I guess only Mark Mulcahy fans.

I guess that would be a testament to the compartments being distinct.

It is.  I think it’s great when somebody will come into it from one entry point and then be interested to check out the other things and find that they like them as well.  That’s great.  I’m always the singer, and except for the operas, it’s always my point of view.  So, having said what I said about how separate they are, it is the same person.  I think it’s a little strange to be totally into one thing and not into the other, but I understand that you can discover something and maybe you can’t understand the rest.

I wanted to talk about you playing that role as the singer.  You’d said that the nice thing about this album, working with collaborators, is that it let you really focus on vocals, which is where you’re most comfortable.  But you started as a drummer?  What led you to step out from behind the kit?

A giant ego, maybe.  (laughs)  Not really.  I was in a band with Ray and this other guy who ended up being in Dumptruck.  He was the singer and Ray and I were just the side guys.  He decided to fold it up, and it was like the third time that had happened, so we decided we would be better off trying to write our own songs and trying to present our own band.  We didn’t have any expectations.  We wrote songs on guitar and drums, which became eighty percent of the formula for how we wrote songs.  We got some good response right off the bat, which gave us a lot of encouragement.  I was still drumming and singing, but one day I had to make the choice.  I was in Miracle Legion and I was actually in Dumptruck as the drummer.  They said, “Look, we live in Boston and you live in New Haven – what are you going to do?”  And I didn’t know what to do.  A little time went by and they got a drummer, and that was it.  I was out of the drummer game.

A number of your songs have a narrative feel to them—“He Vanished” being the most obvious example on the new record—but they never tip their hand too much.  Is that something you’re conscious of when you’re writing?

I suppose I watch myself a little bit, there’s a little bit of a governor on it.  But that also comes from not wanting to be too obvious from a poetic sense.  To me, some of the things probably seem more obvious than they are.  It’s good for people to use some of their own imagination and make it their own.  I’m happy with what I’ve said so far about what the songs are about, but I think it’s good that people participate in making their own understanding.  I don’t want somebody to tell me what it’s about. 

You never do the VH1 Storytellers thing in concert?

You know, people are on those shows talking about the songs too much.  Even the greatest writers talk about the song like it’s some precious commodity.  It’s three minutes, you know, it’s not life and death.

Once you’ve let listeners build their own story, it can really be disappointing if you get up and tell a story that’s contrary to whatever is in their head.

It’s a letdown, unless you really have a great secret.  There’s this whole thing about one line in one of the Polaris songs that some amount of people want to know what it is, but at this point it would probably be disappointing for them to know what it is.  At this point, I’m probably better off not telling anybody.

Music videos can do that same thing for me, as far as dictating meaning.  Sometimes I’ll catch something and think, “Oh, I wish I’d never seen that.”

Or maybe you think, “I wish I’d never met that person I really admire.”

Exactly.  Now jumping back to the opera—is this traditional opera, is this rock opera like Tommy?

They are musicals, really.  There’s no talking, so that defines it as an opera.  English operas—not that I know a lot about opera—always feel more like musicals.  I did them with this guy Ben Katchor, who’s a really great cartoonist.  We’ve written two so far; one has acting and movement and blocking and costumes and all of that, and one is almost more like a lecture, where the performers are just at music stands.  They’re all done to projected cartoons.  The scenes are projections—sometimes they’re animated and sometimes they’re not.  It’s multimedia, for lack of a better word, but it’s very straightforward.  The stories are pretty unusual.

You hashed out the stories together?

Ben writes the story, and I set it to music.  I was in both of them.  That’s a little unusual, for the composer to be in it as well, but that’s how we started.  It was going to be like a one-man show thing, where I was going to sing to Ben’s pictures, but there were so many characters that nobody would have known who anybody was, and it would have been too confusing.

You were talking earlier about the parallel of it always being you as the singer, but this is a case of singing from another perspective, then.

Yeah, for me, writing the words is fifty percent of what I’m do in music, basically.  Not writing the words was a nice holiday from the usual approach.  I find myself getting just as involved in my mind, though.  Singing still feels the same.  Ben is a great writer, so it’s not hard to find a lot of feeling, even though they’re not particularly serious.

Are these over and done?  Are they going be restaged?

It’s a very tricky and difficult thing to try to get 10-15 people off the ground with a theatre.  We were pretty lucky with the first two because one was commissioned by a museum and the other was kind of funded through different grants.  That’s how that whole game works.  It’s a different thing than I’m used to, and I didn’t have much to do with making them happen.  I know Ben wants to do it, and I do, too, so once I get done with this round of promoting this record, we’ll probably try to get it off the ground again.

That would be going back one that was already performed or writing a new one?

I want to write a third one.  Both of the other ones are in various stages of being recorded.  My end result is always to try to make a record.  I’m trying to figure out a way to finish the recordings and then get them out.

One of the most intriguing tidbits from your press kit was that you met J Mascis when you played together in an Allman Brothers tribute band.  I assume that this, alas, was a one-night-only gig?

Well, yeah, we did two gigs; one was as the Allman Brothers and one was as The Beatles doing The White Album.  We were better as the Allman Brothers.  The Beatles thing was a little sketchy.

Do you ever get the itch to be a record mogul and start putting out albums by other bands on your label, despite all the logistical nightmares?

I don’t know how to define the itch, but I’d say that I’d like to put out records on this label that I’m not on.  But I don’t have much to offer any band, particularly.  There’s not a lot of record label here.  There are a lot of good intentions, but it’s a very small operation.  We have a pretty good system to put out my records because I know what I’m going to do and I know I’m going to try to tour.  With some other band, I don’t know.  I almost put out a record by a band called Butterflies of Love, but I was the drummer in that, so it still didn’t really satisfy me not being on it.  At the end of the day, I just couldn’t figure out how to do it.

How about the Miracle Legion back catalog?  I noticed that Portrait of a Damaged Family was going for sixty bucks used on Amazon a while back.

Is that right?  Wow, I had no idea.  Well, that’s a record that I can put out.  I know we’ve promised it a few times, and didn’t quite get it, but I know that I could almost do it.  It’s always nice to have your records in print, and some of those have been out of print for a very long time.  It would have to have different artwork and I added four songs from the same session to it that weren’t on the original.

The other records are wrapped up in legal hell?

Yeah, the other ones all have their little legal problems.  I never know if those are going to get solved.  We were on a label that went bankrupt, so that was complicated, then we went on a label that you kind of wished went bankrupt.  Nobody ever goes bankrupt at the right time. 

There’s a board game that comes with the album – have you ever played?

Yeah.  We tested it a few times.  I don’t know if it makes sense to anybody; that’s why it says that the rules should be updated.  If anybody has any complaints, send them to the label and we’ll try to clear them out.  It’s a tricky game, man.  If you play with the wrong person, you get into trouble.