Jonathan Donahue: “Growing up in America in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s every Sunday evening there was The Walt Disney Hour on TV and before they played whatever Walt Disney movie or animation that was on, they would always begin with ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’ This was probably the first embedding of music into your DNA outside of something that your parents might listen to on the radio, this was something that was wholly your own, because this was children’s music.

“Your parents would plop you down in front of the television set on a Sunday night and this was your hour of music basically, so for myself, Grasshopper and a number of other people this otherworldly song was really the first music that informed you. Whatever music was to come in your life, this was the first information that was literally downloaded into your bloodstream.

“Early on in Mercury Rev we were using feedback and Grasshopper was using guitar elements, because we’d yet to learn how to score orchestrally ourselves, we were just too young. Yerself is Steam was our early attempt at orchestrating but we were using feedback and noise and basically any note we could grab on the fretboard or the piano, because we weren’t really accomplished rock musicians. Like everyone, when you begin you sort of fumble around.

“The idea of the layering and the dynamics that are in some of those very early Disney movies, such as Fantasia or Pinocchio was definitely in our consciousness. It was definitely one of the few things we could lean on as teenagers.”

Jonathan Donahue: “Continuing the otherworldly theme, as we’re looking chronologically at our lives and youth, this is the next song that hit me as a young person, at the age of seven or eight. The reason it hit me so hard, so young, was because it was one of the first songs that I understood was about death.

“I grew up in the Catskill Mountains and Grasshopper grew up in Lake Erie, so we were well away from New York, punk rock or anything that was happening in the ‘70s, we were out in the hinterland. All that I could listen to was AM radio and ‘Seasons in the Sun’ was a massive hit, but lyrically its dealing with death, ‘Goodbye to you my trusted friend.’ He’s dying and I’m a young kid thinking ‘Why’s this guy dying on the radio? What’s he dying from?’ It was so much more than the syrupy, ‘I’ve got love in my tummy’ stuff that had come out of the ‘60s.

“And this mystery, I was old enough to know what dying meant, but too young to understand that you could sing about it. Yet here was Terry Jacks singing this very sad, almost suicidal song and it hit me like a ton of bricks. now I started not only having to process music that I was deeply in love with, but also processing lyrics at seven or eight. The idea of the mystery within the song, that there were not only unanswered questions, but the biggest question, death. That’s what rang my bell, it was existentialism in a three-and-a-half-minute pop song.

“I didn’t have all the tools to process it artistically at my young age but I knew it was deep, it was important and it was really, really sad. It was almost like a traumatic moment in early childhood that you didn’t experience directly, but indirectly it shook your bones, like the death of a relative you’ve barely met. You can tell everyone around you is ringing like a brass bell from it and that was something I got from that song.”

Jonathan Donahue: “I’m going to take us from otherworldly right back into the world itself, to my teenage years. I guess you could say this about nearly all of these songs, but this one in particular got me for the same reason that The Catcher in the Rye gets people, the idea of ‘us versus them’, the real, sincere people pitted against the phonies of the world.

“As a teenager I could have written The Catcher in the Rye, nearly any teenager could. At some point you feel yourself isolated against this outside world and The Chameleons were a band, lyrically and musically, that kept ringing this same set of isolated chimes of the individual pitted against this hostile world. Heading into my teenage years I was like everyone, looking for someone that can say something better than you can until you can say it better than they can, and for a while The Chameleons could say it better in song than I could speak it myself.

“With ‘Second Skin’ they had the lexicon and the guitars that I loved. It was a sort of musical version of The Catcher in the Rye, of someone trying to make sense of a very perplexing, and at times hostile world that I think all teenagers find themselves in and I was no exception. For some people it was punk rock and for others it was other elements of entertainment, but for me it had a lot to do with music and in The Chameleons I found a direct way of saying it and not in the blunt, abject anger that punk rock sometimes wielded. I didn’t feel it like that, mine was much more of a pointed knife than a blunt nightstick.

“It’s even something that people say to us, that they grew up listening to Mercury Rev or Deserter’s Songs. When you’re writing, it’s coming out of you but sometimes you forget that for people who are listening to it when they’re thirteen or fourteen, it’s their lexicon, it’s a newly learned vocabulary. That’s where sometimes as an artist you forget the importance of what you do, because music is what carried you to the point of doing it later in life.

“Everyone has one song or a band that seem to take the words out of your young, teenage mouth before you could form them and for The Chameleons were one of those bands.”

Jonathan Donahue: “With The Chameleons I was in my mid-teens, but now we’re rolling right ahead and I’m twenty.

“Me, Grasshopper and Suzie, our original flute player, all went to see Amjad Ali Khan, a master Sarod player. Ram Narayan is a master Sarangi player, I’m talking about the Amjad Ali Khan concert we went to, but either one works. The Sarangi is my favourite instrument, it’s a violin-style stringed instrument and the Sarod is banjo like, but behind both is always the tamboura.

“It was the first time I’d seen Indian music in person and from the first notes of the tamboura drone it had me. It was like I was completely born for this music, it seemed to go right into a brainwave pattern that overtook every other brainwave I’d ever had in my life. It almost completely erased all the music I’ve been talking to you about before that, it was that strong.

“I dived into Indian music really heavily following that performance. I didn’t know where to look at first, I sort of stumbled through Ravi Shankar, Sarangi records and Sarod’s, but it was the idea of how that tamboura and the drone music worked. It was in La Monte Young and some of the early minimalists, but it was the first time I’d heard it at a bare bones performance level from Indian artists.

“I think the reason it was so important was that I wasn’t coming into it with any preconceptions. I didn’t speak Hindi, I didn’t know the lineage, so I was a blank slate and this was the closest I could actually get to listening to my own brain outside of myself. I think everybody has that drone, it doesn’t have to be a musical instrument, it can be the ocean, or your wife or child’s voice. It just stopped me in my tracks and made me almost forget, in a good way, everything I’d learned and made me that musical child all over again at the age of twenty.

“Ever since then it’s at the heart of the beginning of nearly all the songs I write. Grasshopper begins in his own way, but I nearly always begin with a tamboura drone and compose whatever I can on top of that.”

Grasshopper: “Lady in Satin pulled at the heartstrings, her voice was so vulnerable. Tony Conrad taught me at university that you can have a physical attraction to someone, but what clinches it is their voice.

“A voice is like a mating call; everybody’s voice is special and rings out in a different way. When you hear a voice and you connect with it, it pulls at the heartstrings, you may fall in love or just connect with that voice. I think that’s true, a voice like this does something to you that you can’t explain and you’re very drawn to it.”

Jonathan Donahue:: “Grasshopper gave me Lady in Satin for my 30th birthday. People were startled by the quality of Billie’s voice on this, her final album before she died, you can hear the years of her life in her voice. As a singer you’re always doing everything you can to imagine your voice being clear, non-crackly and not having any cobwebs, you’re doing everything you can to sing perfectly.

“Yet here was someone singing imperfectly, but with all the vulnerability of a life well and certainly intensely lived. That changed everything for me, hearing the crackle in her voice, the years making their way out of her windpipe, almost by clawing their way out.

“I’d read that Ray Ellis, who conducted and produced the album, cried when she first sang these songs, because he knew her as someone whose voice had a very full, rich-sounding tonal quality. Yet on this album you can hear the cobwebs, the lisping gasps of air between words. He cried because he thought this shouldn’t be Billie Holiday on record. It was only later that he thought it was her masterpiece.

“It was the first time I began to see the connection between the singer, their voice and the listener, that it had nothing to do with the pureness of tone, being perfectly in tune or singing as loud as could be. It was all about the emotions that came out via the breath and the notes together that made the connection.

“It changed everything, not only about my singing, but the way I began to understand what people appreciated in a singers’ voice. I could really understand and take some of the pressure off trying to be what I thought was a perfect singer, I know I’m not, but you always have it in mind that you’ve to belt it out and sing perfectly.

“I finally began to accept that what comes out of me is my voice and no one else’s, this song and the album as a whole finally released that anxiety in me. The next record we made was Deserter’s Songs.”

Mercury Rev play The Barbican 14 July with Royal Northern Sinfonia as part of Bella Union’s 20th anniversary celebrations