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When Colin Hay explains the story behind the title of his recent album, "Gathering Mercury," he says it came, in part, from working with his favorite writing buddy, Michael Georgiades, "who is very childlike. He'll write a verse and then want to run off and play with it. I feel like working with him is like trying to gather mercury."
And suddenly, after not understanding Hay's album's name, I remembered having broken a thermometer when I touched it to a light bulb in a feeble attempt to stage a fever and miss school. I recalled vividly trying to chase the evidence down the drain. How elusive and alluring it was at the same time. Dangerous and irresistible.
What he doesn't say is that gathering mercury can aptly be applied to a conversation with him. He teases and baits, falls silent and then takes off with a thought so emotionally rich you can almost taste it, and then falls silent again.
And that's what his music does. It takes one, or a crowd, to someplace familiar, sometimes noticeably, sometimes not. Either way is no matter to Hay. Humbled and appreciative of his fans, he is driven to write whether anyone likes it or not. He's always pleased and miffed when people tell him how one of his tunes affected them, especially when the lyrics end up in wedding invitations.
His song "Waiting for Life To Begin" is on the list of the top 500 alternative wedding songs. "I always think I want to run into them years later and say, 'Did it? Did your life really begin that day?'"
Hay is confident about who encouraged him to write this latest album—his father, who died recently.
"It's a funny thing, but it had been that way when he was alive—it wasn't really a different thing," he said of the feeling that his dad steered his hand through the creation of "Gathering Mercury." "He was artistic but not expressive. He was very encouraging to me, but he wasn't always there. I always felt I had his support. I always felt his presence in his absence. This was just more intense.
"It's the ridiculousness of the universe, isn't it, that the way it is set up, you have to lose someone you love. That one minute they are there and then not. It's the injustice of it."
That thinking gave this album more density for him.
"It doesn't even matter if people feel it, I feel it myself and it's good enough for me," he said. "When I go out and play a song like "Family Man," I do it for selfish reasons. I feel him and I see him and I like that feeling, and so it brings him back to life." Hay's subtle impact is not a new phenomenon. But it was a semi-dramatic departure from his early days as the lead of Men at Work, the Aussie-bred band that had people curious about life in the land "Down Under" and Vegemite sandwiches.
The Scotsman was the son of a music store owner whose decision to move the family to Melbourne when Hay was 14 changed the young musician's destiny. For a time, Men At Work broke records for biggest-ever crowds, "and then, for the lowest ever," Hay has said without a hint of regret.
Breaking out on his own, he moved to California to reinvent himself. He later married Cecilia Noel, a Peruvian singer, dancer and bandleader labeled the "Latin Tina Turner," whose influence of Afro-Caribbean, Latin and soul music called "salsoul" can be heard on "Gathering Mecury's" "Send Somebody."
Asked if a comparison of his music to the often more controversial social commentary of Randy Newman is unfair, Hay said the man today popular for his songs on "Toy Story" soundtracks and once chastised for writing about "Short People" is "deeply inspirational to me. I think he's the best—he's my favorite songwriter, so sublime, so beautiful."
But it's Hay's storytelling skills that make his songs the kind that have you laughing through your tears. A friendship with actor Zach Braff got Hay some guest appearances and songs like "Overkill" on the hip hospital sitcom "Scrubs." Later, Braff included Hay's acoustic heartstring puller "I Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over You" on the soundtrack for the indie hit "Garden State."
Though rumination is said to be the basis of most depressions, Hay insists that his introspective journeys don't bring him down, they just make him live better, truer.
"I have bouts of melancholy, but I feel excited and optimistic about being alive. If this is it, in this particular moment, then I'm just going to try and have as good a time as I can with everything that comes with it. Some things are not pleasant, and I'm always trying to get that balance of dealing with things and keeping moving forward."
And, like a person who would rather be playing than talking, he's polite and then he's gone.
Hay will play at the Sun Valley Opera House on Sunday, Sept. 18, at 7 p.m. Tickets are available through the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. Details: 726-9491.
