Mercury Mine album notes by Dave Mortenson of Happy Stars:

we start with x, a hardboiled story, kind of mean, sung very nicely with clever harmonies. so shiny on the outside and rough on the inside. very clever tho, it doesn't cross the line, and you get the idea that the girl is not very nice at all, so the tone is justified. you know what kind of album this is gonna be now, right?

hence, put the song about hat making here, mercury mine. mining poison to make things smooth. the ideas are directly related structurally. and this of course is mining for a liquid.

hence the appropriateness of the dicussion of a dry oasis. searching for metallic liquid underground in hostile environs--searching for water in the desert. and now you've brought up songwriting as a point, and the modern state of things, so the album is adding themes to itself nicely.

ok, lifeboat comes in since the search for liquid/lack of liquid theme is made clear by the drowning metaphor. i find this song also wants to subtly talk about the music scene in a way you most likely didn't intend--if you put it after oasis, which of course was not explicitly about seattle whatsoever, silicon sands makes that clear, but seattle was a musical oasis (or so folks thought) for a moment there, so now we also have the theme of city surrounded by water as oasis, and an oasis is of course just the opposite--search thru barren sands for water, which is something like harmonic resonance, but thematically or structurally as the individual ideas coalesce in listening. all of this has been sharp, short, arranged, full, clever. the writing voice of each song is in tune with the writing voice of the others, and the resonance is developing. the phony harpsichord/tack piano vibe of the solo on lifeboat is historically appropriate to the northwest, as there were a lot of garage jangle baroque pseudo-beatles/lefte banke solos like this in 65/66/67, to say nothing of daily flash "french girl" which is legit and brilliant harpsichord, and buffalo springfield (think burned, 1st album stuff) with the tack piano becoming almost garage/psych. you managed to take on all of this in a few moments with a very raw 60's feel, like "HURRY UP AND PLAY THAT SOLO! YOU HAVE ONE MORE TAKE OR I WON'T MIX THIS FUCKING SONG!" and you just blasted out as much music at once as you could, then it leaves that open breathing spot before the vox, another thing i always like. straightforward, slightly sloppy, pounding but pretty, rough but produced. hey that sounds like something made in seattle or tacoma or something! so dont fuck with it!

ok, so now you reverse track one's voice with marie. it gets at romantic pain in a more conventional way than the last tunes, it makes it clear that you intend for the listener to hear the character voice of the songs, it implies that this is an honest voice of a clever, smart songwriter. interestingly, you sang it with the most open throated, honest sounding vocal i've heard from you. very nicely sung. and while the tune is very natural sounding the horn is fake, which indicates that this could be honest, or another character voice. the tension continues. the song is about letting someone go, so reversing that makes sense structurally with union station. the shell of the writer from the tone at the top of the side cracks here, you see that the writer writes to some extent in character (like newman, nillson etc) and one of those characters --or is it his "real" voice?--sings this song from a different writing voice. your point in putting it after lifeboat seems to me to be obvious, that you can communicate emotions thru puns (underwhelmed and overtaken) or more straight descriptions. both are atmospheres, they compliment each other.

which of course gets us linked to the other 3/4 tune earlier (mercury mine), also a little symphonic, and there's our wet/dry theme again and we've added travel: she leaves/songwriter leaves as another theme. i know you intend union station in t town, it also reads in a very spooky way if you accidentally envision seatown's union station, which was closed, giving it a haunted feel. you also introduce the kiss or a curse theme of a bunch of the rest of the lp.

you start swearing (the curse bit, as pun on what you meant by curse in the last song) all over gato negro, bringing tension to the sexuality not explicitly spoken in x, but in the name of getting at the end of a relationship with where do we go from here ideas, which while not related to oasis in any way still creates the structure no water at the oasis, so where to go--this didn't work, where to go now. and i dont believe you had actually sworn yet in any of the songs, so you puncture the structure with this song in another way, that suggests how clever x is for what it doesnt say, and you use cuss words in a liberating way.

so the who'd you go and hit of jeanine fits with the overall structure here. in that it could be said that gato negro essentially does violence to the structure of the album by swearing--and this song starts with someone hitting someone else, not like anyone would notice, but it IS structurally possible to read it that way. my opinion is our minds synthesize a lot of ideas inherent in what we take in that we don't even consciously catch while reading, listening, etc.

it seems like the jettlagged idea reinforces the travel themes that have now filled the album, searching for water, minerals, leaving a girl or she leaves you, so this makes sense. it is interesting that this darker vibe now rapidly fades in jetlagged and bud, which resolves a lot of the tension created by the overall structure, inasmuch as they are more positive outlooks in a way. having a more hopeful song like bud here makes sense.

henry's birthday is like a side note, like a 60's lp would have, and it also makes the writer's voice more clear--that it is a voice, and you're very carefully layering different character voices together to see the album as a whole. also, given that the only swearing is on "side two" it is a reversal to have a song about a kid near the end, which subtly re-tensions the structure. it's not dissonant, but it lessens the feeling of the closed nature of a set of songs, because it is in contradiction to have a song for a kid on the side with the words shit and fuck. but where else COULD you put the song for a kid? perfect.

after all is a good spot to end, it has a cool vibe. rather robyn hitchcock like use of infected as theme. interestingly while it's about love, it has a rather caustic tone in its theme, so the voice has fairly returned to the top of the lp in a way.

anyway, there's me 2 cents worth, with about 30 bucks extra nonsense.

dave