All things must come to an end. After 17 years, Vancouver indie-rock band Frog Eyes—who started out in Victoria—are calling it quits. Their new album, Violet Psalms, will be the band’s last; guitarist/vocalist Carey Mercer says the circle is complete.
“When we were making it, it felt very much like we were making our first record,” says Mercer, “recording things in our basement, not feeling like there was really much expectation or demand.”
For now, Mercer isn’t thinking much about any post-Frog Eyes plans; in fact, he says he makes a point of not thinking about it.
“It’s really enjoyable to linger in the moment of finality,” he says.
There is a nice feeling of completion now; the world has changed a lot since the band’s inception 17 years ago, says Mercer.
“I didn’t have an email account when we started; I wouldn’t [have been] super familiar with the term ‘climate change,’” he says.
When Mercer looks back on those 17 years, he feels thankful for the people who have played in Frog Eyes.
“Appreciate and respect the time that your bandmates give you,” he says, with a laugh. “Don’t take it for granted. I think when you’re young, everyone just has oodles of time, and so it’s not a huge thing to take some time from someone, to say, ‘Come over. Come over three times a week.’ You start to be very painfully aware of the time people give to you, and then it makes you think, ‘Oh, God, it’s always been like that; it’s always been a pressure.’ Everyone was always busy.”
Mercer says the new album reminds him of being outside, which he says can be wonderful but also very precarious—a vulnerable and exposed experience. But despite this awareness of his own work, Mercer says it’s hard to know the qualities of it.
“There are things I do that, generally, no one else does, and that’s fine. There’s this weird gestation period between the time that it’s done and then the time that it hits the streets,” says Mercer. “I won’t listen to it. I try not to think about it, and then we play the songs live and that totally changes the view.”
Mercer says the band explored a lot with how instruments could be used on Violet Psalms.
“It’s just the four of us kind of hunkering down, trying to use familiar sounds in different ways,” he says, with one example being the process of taking a drum set apart and seeing how it could be rearranged.
Mercer says the band’s decision to stop playing doesn’t have anything to do with the financial strain often felt by musicians in the digital age; he says he was lucky enough to live through a consumerist blip where people were very into spending money on music.
“It was just a massive commodity that coincided with the youth identity… and, being totally into spending money on music, I know that music is still important. On one hand, it seems like no one buys music anymore, but that’s totally not true. It’s just a little bit harder to quantify. Music is still a very vital, powerful force.”
Frog Eyes
8 pm Friday, May 25
$20 ($15 advance), The Copper Owl
copperowl.ca