When Mew became a band, more than twenty years ago, the rock god was the pinnacle

of musical
achievement and aspiration. It isnt clear what changed: Napster was still years off, and streaming music
wouldnt supplant record sales for half a decade after that, so there would be no leveling of the playing
field. Indie had already taken shape by the time Sonic Youth was calling for J. Mascis to run for president
(the offer still stands, by the way, Mr. Mascis), but irony didnt become exceptional until social media
offered a space for its amplification and expurgation. Clinton had taken office on January 20, 1993, so he
gave himself the anniversary gift of NAFTA and signed a Republican trade agreement into law that
effectively killed nearly a million American jobs. God was dead, or at least his ethos was, and suddenly
capitalism was cool again. Only nineties kids will get this: New Kids on the Block, Spice Girls, the time
one-half of Milli Vanilli attempted to carjack somebody, the song With Arms Wide Open.So the
environment into which Mew released its first two albums was hardly a brave new world, which makes
their perseverance all the more impressive. Mews music is intentionally difficult to place. Its frontman
Jonas Bjerre is soft-spoken, preferring to play down his talents and the bands accomplishments. He
describes their music as indie stadium, a perfectly post-Clinton description of music that brings to mind
Dinosaur Jr. and Nirvana, and references Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine enough in past interviews to
suggest a major shoegazing influence. Weve been compared to a lot of different bands, he explained
over the phone. When we did the Glass Handed Kites album in 2005, people starting calling us a prog
rock band. He doesnt mind the comparison to prog rock, but it isnt particularly accurate. But its cool,
he said. If were described as a lot of different things, then maybe that means we belong in many different
places. That can never be a bad thing, right?
Mews music comes from a place of passion, but also from a place of optimism and hope. Even their darker
records suggest a light at the end of a tunnel. Bjerre wants to envelope you in a universe of his creation,
appearing to shield one in an aural dome from the phantasms of without. How you choose to enter and
leave this world is the exercise of your own subconscious. I always think the music invokes a lot of
pictures, Bjerre said. And obviously you have to be careful you dont take away the images that people
conjure up themselves. You dont want to force images on people.
As an ethos, Bjerre hopes you will be challenged to really find it, because all the lyrics are really kind of
vague. He leaves the music open to interpretation, so occasionally youll find more nebulous lyrics like
Outside / And it occurs to me, weve lost the light / We shared a box in someones dream / Till the ponies
arrive. Musically, too, Mew employs an arsenal of sounds and instruments. Just on the latest record, I
counted a marimba, a vibraphone, a harmonium, and several choirs. Mews world is meant to dazzle and
confound, and they have been making music in this vein since their inception.
I reached Bjerre in Los Angeles, where he is beginning to go on tour to support + (pronounced plusminus), the bands first release since No More Stories, which came out in 2009. No More Stories was
also their first album not to feature Johan Wohlert, the bands bassist, who has been a friend of Bjerres
since childhood and had played on every Mew record prior to 2006. Bjerre described the effect Wohlerts
departure had on Mews sound: Some of the songs dont sound so much like a band playing together and
more like ideas produced in the studio, and then we pick out different ways to play them live. One gets a
sense that Mew had lost its way; Wohlert wasnt even replaced, and Mew continued as a three-piece.
But then, last year, Wohlert came back. And Bjerre says it had a huge impact. They regained their sense of
harmony, developed over the decades theyve played together. He contrasts + to the last album by
describing it as a band record. Mew was whole again, and the resulting work is something like a return to
roots. It sounds like we had everyone in the room playing together, Bjerre said. And it sounded great in
pre-production, and then we went and recorded it. They wanted the music to come from the band instead
of from a competent technician, and were pleased to find that the core of the songs really just worked as
band songs. When Wohlert returned, the songs took on a much more driven approach.
This meant a return to the process thats worked so well all these years, which is to say a slow-burn of ideas
and sounds. We kind of just play together and somebody will come up and move into some piece, Bjerre
said. Its a lazy process because we kind of jam everything out together in the room. The songs grow out
of this collaboration into the dreamscapes that have become Mews repertoire. He described the way he

hopes the music will grow in the consciousness of other people, but it sounded like the music grew out of
a shared consciousness of the band. Theres always a couple songs that start out with an idea, he said.
Maybe some kind of imagery you could put music into, just something you want you try out. Then that
becomes a song.
David Lynch once described his creative process as diving into an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness.
Its where he catches his ideas, which he somewhat inexplicably calls fish. But when you are completely
submerged, Lynch writes, Its bliss. You can vibrate with this bliss. Out of these vibrations come the
sublime psycho-horrors that populate Lynchs films like bad dreams.
Bjerre is a fan of Lynch, and I pointed out the incongruity between their work. Even in their darker records,
Mews music will never terrorize the subconscious in the way Lynchs films do. And yet Bjerre follows
much the same process as the horror director. I wouldnt be able to say precisely what inspires me and
when it did, he said. But its more like it gets processed in your subconscious mind and then it comes out
in a different way. For Mew, this means an upbeat, even hopelessly positive record. Bjerre told me he
always looks forward to the surprise of it. Echoing Lynch, he said, You come up with something and you
have no idea where it came from.
So when Bjerre draws from his nightmares to create a record, he is working from the same paradox as
Lynch. Lynch uses the peacefulness of meditation to encounter nightmares, and Bjerres work also
understands the way that light must necessarily inform darkness. Even though + is a much more positive
record, Bjerre took care to install the dualism of having something underneath. Its there in its spectral
music, or in the lyrical content or just in a weird kind of drone underneath everything else. He is dealing
with forces in opposition to each other, juxtaposed against everything else. I think a lot of what we do has
that juxtaposition, he said.
We always go through this process where we get so caught up in the details, he said, describing the
feeling that goes into each record. Like it gets too much, like you feel like youre going mad, in the
process, and thats why its always so gratifying to come out on the other side, and then present it to be
people and get the response. It really feels like were hidden away from the world a bit, when were making
records. Personally, I want to get out of that cycle, because I dont want to be away from the world for too
long, I like being out singing the songs to people.
So much of Mew is about feeling your way toward the paradoxes at the musics core. Bjerre takes
inspiration from the way a city like Tokyo or New York blends the modern and futuristic with the
traditional and the old-school. What makes these cities so inviting are what he calls little oases, pockets
of tranquility surrounded by the hectic rush of bodies moving through space and time, somehow connected,
and somehow lost, with the music at the center of the collective unconscious permeating all. Its more
about people with a certain sensibility or state of mind, he said. They find beauty in what we do and I
kind of feel like if they do then it must be because we have something in common, some kind of worldview
or a way to deal with emotions.
Its a sentiment he even brought to the bands name, which has a surprisingly synesthetic origin. I just like
the word mew, he said. It has this symmetry, like this imperfect symmetry, and its pointy at the edges
and soft in the middle. Its the small e. When focus-tested, sound board-manufactured pop music is
employed to satisfy some arbitrary tenet of capitalism, how refreshing it is for a band to adhere to an
artistic principle that cant be unambiguously summarized. [Mew] means a lot of different things. It means
to shed your feathers, to build a wall, it means to make a whimpering sound, he said. Its a versatile
word.
Bjerre thought hed first seen it referenced as a quotation from Shakespeare, and over the line, it sounded as
if he were reciting the phrase and the gulls mewed. There is no such phrase in Shakespeare, but I believe
he meant a different one, from Richard III, which reads, More pity that the eagle should be mewd, /
While kites and buzzards prey at liberty.