JOHNNY FAY
Mercury Sea
Out Now!
Stream Online
Diving Into Mercury Sea with Johnny Fay
From an Interview by Lindsay Pereira
It’s funny how things work when it comes to art and the lives of artists. Consider, for example, how the death of a Polish kayaker in February 2021 prompted Johnny Fay to do a bit of soul-searching at home in Toronto. It happened because of an old habit of picking up The New York Times and turning to the obituaries, but what he didn’t expect was how the demise of Aleksander Doba would affect him over the weeks following the explorer’s passing. Doba died at 74 after spending much of his life voyaging across the world’s oceans. Even his death was far from prosaic, coming just minutes after he reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.
“His journeys across the Atlantic influenced me a lot,” says Fay when asked to elaborate on why a man he had never met ended up moving and inspiring him in equal measure. “I loved that he was afraid of nothing. It’s easy to say but very hard to do. I wondered what he thought about, not just while going from point A to B, but about what was underneath him. Did he consider how it was constantly changing? I also thought of things that aren’t supposed to be in the sea: abandoned fishing nets, plastic, or chemicals from the illegal mining of gold that I was reading about at the time. That is where the idea of mercury in the sea came from. It was also a title I had kicked around for a while and seemed like a perfect fit for the music I began to make.”
Those meandering thoughts gave birth to the Mercury Sea EP. It is an unusual collection because a couple of things about it stand out almost immediately. The first is an absence of lyrics; the second is how muted the percussive voice is, given that this comes from the drummer of The Tragically Hip. Fay responds to the first observation with a question: “How could I find words, or a lyricist, who would come close to Gord Downie? For me, there is no one else because I have already worked with the best.” As for the music, he says he didn’t want drums to be at the center or focus of everything. “I wanted to make them less the heart and more the bloodstream. I think that being a drummer, people assume you want that to be the omnipresent part. On this recording, I played mostly keyboards or sampled ideas that I stitched together or manipulated using an Akai DR4 track recorder.”
Music, like all art, does not exist in a vacuum. While Fay acknowledges specific triggers for some tracks, he also mentions collecting “threads of ideas” to build on later after letting them percolate and the presence of other issues on his mind. “I had a family crisis, and after so many years of touring and making music in a band, it seemed to fall away after our final show. My focus changed. When you have other things going on, your creative brain goes out the window and is the first thing to get sucked dry. So, when I had inspired moments that coincided with free time, I made the most of it. That’s why it seemed to take so long, but it also gave me time to reflect on what I was recording.”
The Mercury Sea EP may confound long-time fans of The Hip, although, on some level, it makes perfect sense for musicians and their listeners to evolve. Fay does this with a little help from some incredible collaborators, like Hugh Marsh. An acclaimed violinist and Juno Award nominee, Marsh drenches the EP with strings that, as Fay puts it, “don’t necessarily sound like strings. He was able to capture eerie moments that sound as if they came from the bottom of the ocean.” He also cites specific musical touchpoints. “The first is Outside by David Bowie,” he says. “I lived in New York for a while and liked how when I played that album, particularly in the city, it came to life with extraneous noises: fire trucks, car horns, people, construction, and the subway. Another was a recording given to me by my first drum teacher, Chris McCann, before my first trip to India. It was the album Music Sangam by jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and tabla player Latif Khan. Peter Gabriel is another influence because he is one of the greatest rhythmic minds. He takes different rhythms and folds them on top of each other, giving them depth and creating a landscape. These people helped create a path for me to go down.”
Among the earliest of the new songs was Glow State, which came to life on an OP1: a mighty little Swedish machine that is a keyboard, drum machine and recorder all in one. Fay says he could hear things take shape in his head: the flow, arrangement, and sequence, along with a beginning, middle, and ending. He could hear the parts and instances where they should happen. He also saw Mercury Sea as an EP from the start and thought about how it could be interpreted live, with images as a backdrop.
Another intriguing shadow that falls upon the EP comes from Fay’s past. He speaks about high school and playing one gig with The Hip at a pub in Queens University. None of the band members had any idea of where they would go. On the heels of that gig, Fay’s father was invited to a conference in Bombay and asked his son if he wanted to come along. “It was as much of a musical journey as being in the band for three decades,” says Fay. “I kept visiting India every 10 years from that point on, taking in its incredible rhythms and moving time signatures.”
As the last song fades, Fay is asked how he knows when a song is finished. He responds by mentioning his father again. “He was a surgeon lieutenant in the British navy, and an inspiration because of his great love of the ocean. He traveled the world on the HMS St Austell Bay and told me that when the Navy commissions a ship, it needs a kill or release date, or one may never stop building the ship! This kind of project can go on forever. In fact, my first recordings were made on a D88 digital 8-track tape machine around 15 years ago. I would put on a song and let my ear determine if it needed something added or taken away. That’s when I knew I was finished.”
The act of describing Mercury Sea soon starts to feel superfluous. How, after all, does one write about music inspired by the oceans and a fearless explorer, the illegal extraction of gold, and the sounds that populate big cities? It becomes easier to simply let it all wash over a listener and ebb into the ether, leaving more questions than answers in its wake. “I thought of my little boys,” says Fay. “I thought about things that aren’t supposed to be in the sea and how they will affect them in years to come. These thoughts also cross the paths of most parents: what is left for your children when you’re gone?”
