(The) Harvey Danger Database

Not bad for a “batch of demos,” to borrow the phrase lead singer Sean Nelson uses to describe the album.

“The songs are good, but they are demos,” says Nelson. “They’re not fully fleshed out, sonically or otherwise. But it’s such a spare, concise rendering of the songs that it sort of gets at the true nature of them. It’s a strong little album, but it’s very humble as well.”

— Billboard, August 1998

AMH: It took us about a week to record the last five songs for Merrymakers. At that point, we knew (finally!) that we really were making an honest-to-god full-length album, to be released by Greg Glover’s Arena Rock Recording Company. I vividly remember how very, very tired I was that week. I was pulling espresso at 5:30 a.m., on a bus across town to the studio at noon, recording until the middle of the night, and back home just in time to catch a few hours of sleep and do it all again. Some nights I would actually fall asleep on the couch directly behind Jeff’s amp while he was recording heroically loud guitar tracks.^10A

JJL: Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? still remains my favorite album, though our best songs all lie elsewhere. The sense of joy and lack of self-consciousness captured on these 42 minutes always makes me happy when I listen to it.

It’s an album that we made mostly for ourselves, since there was no expectation that many others would hear it (when it first came out, selling even a couple thousand copies seemed like a huge success).

Listening to it now, there are some good choices, some bad choices, some rookie choices, and some surprisingly mature choices. Of course we were convinced they were all good choices at the time (well, except maybe the guitar solos).^10A

ECS: Can I just say it? This album is obviously a complete mess by a bunch of rank amateurs. Hallelujah! If that’s not a reason to love Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?, I don’t know what is. When I hear this record—when I pull it from the screenprinted sleeve even—I am overwhelmed with the actual factual humanness of the whole thing. To me, it literally sounds like four friends thrilled to be writing songs together; without grime or preciousness or, above all, apathy; this album is one of the least pretentious recordings I’ve ever heard.^10A

SCN: When I listen to that record, I hear our personality coming through. It doesn’t sound like a professional, regular band; it sounds like us, fumbling toward whatever sound we could put together. I really like that about it. We didn’t have our shit together enough to be calculated. We couldn’t write specific types of songs; we could only write what we wrote and play it how we played it. We weren’t a punk band, but what I drew inspiration from in punk rock had more to do with that than singing songs about Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. We played from the heart. Some of the lyrics on the record make me wince, but there’s nothing on it that makes me think, “Oh God, how embarrassing, I can’t believe I said that.” It feels like we came by it honestly, and that’s really the best thing I can say, looking back at the first thing any of us ever did.^ALT

SCN: It’s weird, at the age of 41, to listen back to the stuff you were doing when you were in your very early 20s, which also was the first real try any of us had ever made at an art project that we stuck to. It was the first thing we had ever finished, any of us. Even where there are spots that are not great, they all feel earned. We came by that record honestly. We really, really loved what we were doing, and we desperately loved rock and roll, and we loved being in a band. We were the only ones who knew we were in that band for most of the time we were doing it. It was part of our weird personality as human beings that the minute anybody started paying attention, we started backpedaling.

[laughs] But that’s the folly of youth. The record’s still there, and it’s better than I remember it.

— Consequence of Sound interview, July 2014