“Catching Mice,” off The Possum in the Driveway — Mark Mulcahy’s latest solo project, out now — starts with five thumps, a low note and a percussive hit in unison. But those five hits aren’t in the pristine vacuum of a studio. There’s ambient noise in the background, a whisper of air, like it was recorded outside. Maybe it’s just air moving through trees. Maybe it’s the sound of distant traffic. Whatever it is, it’s a signal. It’s music that’s out in the world, existing in time.
So when the drums and organ come in, propelled by a bubbling bass line, it already feels lived in. And it all supports Mulcahy when he enters with a lyric as knotty as it is emotional.
“I knew it well,” he sings. “I’ve been around the mental ward a million times. / I’ve seen the way they look at you. / But you live to tell / I would have thought they would have shot you full of something no one can pronounce that makes you sleepy all the time.”
Then a chorus of voices responds: “Is the good advice you paid for worth the waste of time you prayed for?”
The balance of the simple and complicated, the polished and the raw, works together to deliver the message. It sounds like music made from and pulled from experience, both in making music and in living. It’s all earned.
Which makes sense, given that The Possum in the Driveway is a record that took about a decade to make.
“Most of what I want to do is a solo project,” Mulcahy said, in between dates as the reunited Miracle Legion — which he co-founded in New Haven in 1983 and fronted throughout its history — was winding down what was rumored to be its final dates in April.
He and musician and producer Scott Amore began recording the first takes of the songs on Possum back in 2006 at Amore’s studio in Hamden. “That studio burned down,” Mulcahy said. Amore built another studio in North Branford, and recording picked up again in 2008.
But in September of that year, Mulcahy’s wife Melissa passed away unexpectedly, leaving Mulcahy to care for his twin daughters, 3 years old at the time. Musicians from Thom Yorke and Frank Black to Michael Stipe and The National banded together to make a tribute album to Mulcahy to help support him. Mulcahy returned in 2013 with a new solo record, Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You. Then Polaris, the Mulcahy-helmed project that had begun its existence writing music for the Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete in the ‘90s, went on tour in 2015. Miracle Legion reunited for a tour in 2016.
All that time, Amore was making mixes of what he and Mulcahy had recorded for Possum in 2006 and 2008 — “mix after mix,” Amore said. “It was my recreational time.” In 2012, Amore recalled that Mulcahy said they probably had a record on their hands. By that time, Amore estimated that he’d made from three to five different mixes for the 11 songs on the album.
The mixes featured multi-instrumentalist Ken Maiuri, “who played maybe 80 percent of the instruments on the record,” Amore said. David Trenholm, another multi-instrumentalist, had lent a hand. So had “a lot of local heroes,” said Amore, such as bassist Rick Omonte from the Mountain Movers and trumpeter John Panos from Mates of State.
“There was plenty of time for people to invent parts,” Mulcahy said. “People would come in with pretty elaborate ideas about what to do. Everybody was kind of writing. It’s interesting to have someone show up and say, ‘I have this thing that I want to do on your record.’”
There was also time for experimentation. “It wasn’t like some Steely Dan thing, where everyone’s trying to get some perfect moment,” Mulcahy said. “I don’t know how to do that that well. I’m smart with my way of doing things, or at least I hope I am.”
The percussion at the end of “Catching Mice,” Amore revealed, was a recording of Mulcahy, Miracle Legion guitarist Ray Neal, and fellow musician Richie D’Albis “banging on the springs of my garage door with sticks.”
And the song “Hollywood Never Forgives” took a bit of a trip. The first recording of it “was kind of this jaunty thing — really like a Queen song, like a patio song,” Mulcahy said. But it wasn’t working. So Maiuri and Mulcahy switched instruments; Mulcahy played drums and he played guitar “And it became a totally different take on the song,” Mulcahy said. That’s the one the stuck.
Listening back to what they’d done over the past several years, Mulcahy and Amore agreed that “there were holes” to fill in the record. They decamped to the Northampton, Mass. home studio of J Mascis (of Dinosaur Jr.), where Dennis Crommett and Peyton Pinkerton added guitar parts. That was in 2012 — just in time for the solo record that lapped Possum in getting made, and for the Polaris and Miracle Legion tours that followed.
And there was more mulling to do. Possum, Mulcahy said, “went through a lot of people and technology” to get to its final form. “Even to actually finish it was a couple days of figuring out how it worked.”
Looking back on making The Possum in the Driveway, Mulcahy and Amore both have a sense of the way the passage of years affected how they put it together, for worse, and for better.
“I don’t think taking forever to make a record is a smart move — I’d rather make ten records than one,” Mulcahy said. “But sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.”
“I don’t want to leave anybody with the impression that it’s some grand, over-the-top thing — it isn’t — but the way it happened was all organic,” Mulcahy added. “It was a little like a maze, and nobody knew how to get out of it, and then we got out of it.”
Amore described the speed at which Possum was made as “glacial.” But it also gave him the time to create a sound for the record that both he and Mulcahy were happy with. “I always set out to make a record that I still want to listen to 20 years from now,” he said.
How is Possum holding up so far for him?
“I just listened to it twice,” Amore said.
Mulcahy is forming plans to go out and play The Possum in the Driveway just as it is — thinking of the songs and the entire album more as a composition, in keeping with the thoughtfulness with which it was made.
“I’m far from where I started on that record, so now I can look at it. I’ve been living with it for such a long time that I’m super-comfortable with it,” Mulcahy said. “In a lot of ways I’m happy that it took this long, because I’m glad I know what I know now.”
New Haven may get its chance to hear those songs performed live. Until then, the album itself, and the care and living that went into it, should more than suffice.