Wild Mercy's Philosophy

"Earthlings make such interesting music."

We could claim that Wild Mercy started with a collection of music CDs found in a crashed flying saucer -- mementos from Earth, a little planet known throughout the Western Spiral Arm of the Milky Way as a hotbed of musical influences -- but that would be getting ahead of ourselves.

We could call our music something like "neo-Celtic-powered post-industrial electro-acoustic folk-rock with jazz influences and freeform choral structure" -- and wonder what we meant by that -- but it's always more fun to make music than to label it.

We could disavow all knowledge except for our favorite mystic/maverick influences -- people like Hildegard of Bingen, David Darling, Glen Velez, Bruce Cockburn, and Loreena McKennitt -- but once we take up our instruments, the responsibility for what comes out is all ours.

Suffice to say that anyone on Earth can trace his or her lineage back to a tribal culture somewhere -- often several. And all have left caches of rich psychic nutrients deep in our individual and collective experience. Gifts. Treasures. Supplies for the long hike across the fragile land-bridge of the current era, into the largely unknown lands of a shared human future. For most of us human beings, the indispensable staple is music, in all its tumbling diversity. And people of the twenty-first century have more access to a richer harvest of musical traditions than anyone who has ever lived.

We of Wild Mercy partake carefully but joyfully of this privilege. To us, the multiple musics of Earth are a delight, whether traditional, popular, classical, or improvised. We can't help but sample them eagerly, cook them up in our own stew, and make an offering. We harbor no illusions about being a live jukebox, rock-star wannabes, or close replicas of our ancestors (or anyone else's). All we know is that we honor the originators of this exuberant Earthly music -- and hope they don't mind our borrowing some ingredients to add the savor of endless human possibility to our music.