The Art of Longevity Season 2, Episode 5: Mew
10/07/21 • 41 min
If one of the secrets to longevity in the music industry is simply taking your time, then Danish alternative rock band Mew are grand masters. Formed in 1995, the band took eight years before a major label deal came along, and with it, international success (the superb breakthrough album Frengers). It did not lead to a rush. Some 26 years into the band’s career, Mew has released just seven studio albums - one every four years. That’s not something Spotify would advocate as an operating model for bands these days, is it? It’s rare for a European rock band to breakthrough to an international audience and to have a career of real longevity (count them on one hand), but it is even rarer to be so damned cool about it!
Yet Jonas Bjerre is unfazed by any concept of FOMO - or the creator equivalent ‘FOBF’ - fear of being forgotten. In fact, when the band released their last LP ‘Visuals’ in 2017 just two years after the 2015 album ‘+ -’, Jonas’s overwhelming instinct was that fans were not expecting it.
Visuals plays from beginning to end like a stage musical, something I put to Mew singer Jonas Bjerre on the Art of Longevity. It may well have been the influence of Prefab Sprout and Paddy McAloon. When it comes to influences, Mew are true musical alchemists. While many ‘rock’ (as in guitar rock) bands have eclectic and ‘classic pop’ influences, very few can meld them successfully into their own sound. Perhaps it’s because of the restrictive formulas of rock, or not wanting to upset fans. Not so with Mew. One minute they’re all off-kilter time signatures and dissonant guitar noises, the next, soaring, beautiful and catchy pop - nicely topped off with Jonas’ angelic vocals.
Listen in to hear a truly unique way of working. Jonas and Mew don't rush anything, but the results are often sublime. It is good to hear that the band is talking about another project - even if it is early days and Jonas would also like a break before. Sometimes as a music fan, patience is a virtue and the rewards are all the sweeter.
Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/
If one of the secrets to longevity in the music industry is simply taking your time, then Danish alternative rock band Mew are grand masters. Formed in 1995, the band took eight years before a major label deal came along, and with it, international success (the superb breakthrough album Frengers). It did not lead to a rush. Some 26 years into the band’s career, Mew has released just seven studio albums - one every four years. That’s not something Spotify would advocate as an operating model for bands these days, is it? It’s rare for a European rock band to breakthrough to an international audience and to have a career of real longevity (count them on one hand), but it is even rarer to be so damned cool about it!
Yet Jonas Bjerre is unfazed by any concept of FOMO - or the creator equivalent ‘FOBF’ - fear of being forgotten. In fact, when the band released their last LP ‘Visuals’ in 2017 just two years after the 2015 album ‘+ -’, Jonas’s overwhelming instinct was that fans were not expecting it.
Visuals plays from beginning to end like a stage musical, something I put to Mew singer Jonas Bjerre on the Art of Longevity. It may well have been the influence of Prefab Sprout and Paddy McAloon. When it comes to influences, Mew are true musical alchemists. While many ‘rock’ (as in guitar rock) bands have eclectic and ‘classic pop’ influences, very few can meld them successfully into their own sound. Perhaps it’s because of the restrictive formulas of rock, or not wanting to upset fans. Not so with Mew. One minute they’re all off-kilter time signatures and dissonant guitar noises, the next, soaring, beautiful and catchy pop - nicely topped off with Jonas’ angelic vocals.
Listen in to hear a truly unique way of working. Jonas and Mew don't rush anything, but the results are often sublime. It is good to hear that the band is talking about another project - even if it is early days and Jonas would also like a break before. Sometimes as a music fan, patience is a virtue and the rewards are all the sweeter.
Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/
Previous Episode
The Art of Longevity Season 2, Episode 4: Los Lobos
When I sat down with Steve Berlin, the Los Lobos sax player and de facto spokesperson, I was a little more than intrigued. To most people around the world - outside of North America anyways - Los Lobos remain the La Bamba band. How wrong we are.
There is a very common thread with the artists we’ve had on the show - and with longevity - every one of the artists (except so far, Laura Veirs and Maximo Park) had a very big song: James, Turin Brakes, Gary Numan, KT Tunstall...
But Los Lobos is the most extreme example of a longevity outfit with a big song - the band had no other hits at all. Taking nothing away from La Bamba - a fine record and a justified number one in ten countries back in 1987. But stop right there. Try Googling, as I did, “Los Lobos, greatest American rock band” and there are more than a few articles examining that hypothesis, for good reasons. Built around the soulful songs of drummer Louis Perez and lead vocal and guitar player David Hidalgo (throw in a few rollicking rockers by Cesar Rosas) Los Lobos make solid, classic Americana-rock, but from a Latin point of view - and a deep rooted connection to traditional Mexican music: cumbia, boleros and norteños. Finally, throw the city of LA into the mix and you have the Los Lobos agenda, musically speaking.
It’s not surprising that Los Lobos have made a record of cover versions of seminal LA songs (The Beach Boys, Jackson Browne, War, Percy Mayfield) but what is surprising is how long it took to come up with the idea to do just that.
“We have a sixth sense of when to do stuff, somehow the muse talks to us. It's important for us to have a boundary - an idea - not just another Los Lobos record. The main thing for us is longevity and being able to do what we do and to answer to nobody other than ourselves, we have such gratitude for that. We have no obligation other than to move forward with our music”.
Now that is an agenda for lasting the distance. Yet Steve and I have fun with one idea - for Los Lobos to soundtrack a Netflix (or HBO, or AMC) production of Jaime Hernandez' genius Mexicana soap opera Love & Rockets. What a collaboration that would be.
Somebody get Ted Sarandos on the line...it’s Steve Berlin calling, from Los Lobos...
Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/
Next Episode
The Art of Longevity Season 2, Episode 6: Portico Quartet
Discovering a band all to yourself is the best type of music discovery there is. One day in the mid 2000s as my wife and I wandered along London’s South Bank, we were stopped in our tracks by music the likes of which we’d never heard before - jazzy, rhythmic, with a haunting steel drum but also with an element of ‘indie’. There, were four very young men (then in their late teens) busking with a confident authority - more a private performance than a busk, and with quite an audience too.
That band was Portico Quartet and we were just two of many thousands of early adopter fans from those early South Bank busks outside The National Gallery. We bought a copy of the band's very first, self-pressed four-track CD for £5, one of 10,000 sold I recently discovered. When I spoke with Duncan Bellamy (drums and the hang steel drum) and Jack Wylie (sax) for The Art of Longevity, Jack told me:
"We'd go off to buy big stacks of blank CDs at Maplins, and we bought this burner machine that could do eight at a time. I think we managed to do 200-250 a day. As a student, it meant we could make a living without working in a bar. It was great fun”.
I put it to Duncan and Jack that they would have to achieve 10 million streams to make the equivalent revenues now (20 million if splitting revenues 50:50 with a record label). Who’d have thought that, as part of establishing an early following as an instrumental band, you could create your own perfectly viable business model as well? For the Portico Quartet, those early years of ‘struggle’ were more like an exercise in building a cottage industry.
From those early days, the Portico Quartet’s rise was as meteoric as it gets for an instrumental band. In 2008 came the Mercury Music Prize nomination for their full debut album ‘Knee Deep in the North Sea’ and one year later the band signed to Real World Records, the independent label owned by Peter Gabriel. That came with a huge leap in the maturity of their sound (2009’s Isla) and a full stop to the days of busking. As a fan, observing the band’s musical development has been a truly remarkable experience but don't take my word for it, listen to Duncan and Jack's take on things...
Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/
The Art of Longevity - The Art of Longevity Season 2, Episode 5: Mew
Transcript
Hello and welcome to The Art of longevity. I'm your host, Keith Joplin. Brett Anderson of suede once said, for all successful artists have navigated for career stages. The struggle, the stratospheric rise to the top, crashed to the bottom and the Renaissance or the art of longevity. We talked to artists who spent decades in the music industry and discover what the journey has been like for them, and how they experience each of Brett's four st
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