Story #2 "The dark is rising" - Mercury Rev

"And now the dark is rising And a brand new moon is born"

Mercury Rev were one of those bands who were always on my periphery, but a band that I didn't really get into until I'd been working in advertising for a few years.

The thing about music is there's too much of it. For every band whose career I followed from their very first release, there were others I wished I discovered years or even a decade or so earlier when they were first starting.

Mercury Rev was just such a band. I've never seen them live, although I did see Grasshopper play with Dean Whareham and Britta Phillips in the Catskills on a random rainy afternoon. I'd never been to the Catskills before then. Something about the silent mountains that loom so incredibly close lend an ethereal quality to the area. It was the perfect setting. The only thing that sucked--it was raining and they felt bad and stopped the show a bit early because they were under a roof and we were not.

The thing about the song "The Dark Is Rising," is that the symphonic sound rises and falls with epic grandeur that puts me in a very specific emotional place called loss. The lyrics only seek to underline this. Its setting is pastoral. A song to a lover who is gone. "I always dreamed I'd love you, I never dreamed I'd lose you, in my dreams I'm always strong." To me, "The dark is rising," can mean the fall of night as much as it can that sinking darkness of depression that makes you not want to get out of bed.

I don't know if it's true with most writers or not, but I always try to use a different voice with each story. With "The Dark is Rising," the voice is much more formal, even old-fashioned. It seemed to match the setting of an old farm, in the old country, in a more distant time.

In college I took a course on Russian folk tales. The majority of them seemed like a way for parents to make sure their kids didn't go in the forest and get eaten by bears, or teach them other life lessons about strangers. Baba Yaga might be a horrible witch who eats you, but she might help you. Either way, you'd better not wander in there to find out.

I liked the idea of using the forest as a setting for a different kind of fairy tale. Still ominous, but with a bit more ambiguity to it.

A-Sides and B-Sides is available on iBook as well as Amazon and also Kobo and Nook. You can preview a nice chunk of it, too. Hope you'll consider buying if you like what you see. Here's what the cover looks like.

My favorite part of this song is the first time the solo piano accompanies Jonathan Donahue's voice.