MERCIFUL HEAVENS

So who or what is Merciful Heavens? It’s the sound of someone rediscovering their fire, crafting something bright into our universal, heavy darkness, and putting the endless drone of 2020 to good use. 

“I’d been so traumatized by my first ten years fronting bands that I couldn’t bring myself to start herding all the cats together again. But there was that moment where it hit me, ‘Oh fuck, I actually believe in these tunes. Now I have to put a band together and try to get people to hear them!’” Christian Glakas punctuates his statement with a big grin and a chuckle. Despite his easygoing air, the singer-songwriter / main personality of Merciful Heavens has had anything but a simple time getting the band’s debut album made.

Glakas’ speech is, much like his music, unhurried and thoughtful, drifting between introspection and childlike enthusiasm. In the 10+ years since cutting his teeth in Austin, TX swagger-merchants The Good Looks, writing songs has been the one constant in a life otherwise in a state of flux, augmented by the unrest surrounding the 2016 US Presidential Election. “I had some personal stuff go down around the time Trump got elected. A bunch of my friends had passed away, for one reason or another, and I was feeling really lost. I wrote ‘Voices’ and ‘For Now’ soon after that, and that was really the start of this band.”

Released in 2018 as Merciful Heavens’ first single, “Voices” balances its plaintive chord progression with wry, deadpan lyrics about taking your friends’ ghosts to the movies. Soon after, Glakas put together a lineup and started gigging to positive reception around the local Austin scene. So far, so good.

Eventually, it was time to make a record, but that would prove to be much harder than anticipated.

“The guitar parts I’d been playing live, some of them were cool, but most just sounded… boring, or didn’t fit with the vibe I wanted,” Glakas says, blowing out a huge breath. “I just knew that THIS wasn’t it.”

The frustration was soon compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic. Glakas and his family, like everyone else, found themselves in lockdown, and any musical momentum he’d acquired in the previous year quickly ground to a halt. Yet Glakas, not being the “sit around and mope type” decided to take a different approach to the recording, entirely. 

“I had been emailing back and forth with Matt (Drenik, former Good Looks bandmate, singer/head honcho of Battleme, owner/operator of Get Loud), and he finally convinced me to learn how to record myself. I started trying smaller, cleaner guitar parts, synth parts, delays, and sequencers… then things started to feel right.”

The songs quickly took shape and started to grow their own idiosyncrasies, mixing the loping majesty of The War on Drugs with the measured songcraft of Jackson Browne. Glakas’ new found love of self-recording was opening up a whole new world of possibilities. As the sessions progressed, elements from all across the rock spectrum started to drift in and out of the tracks, be it the Floyd-ish echoey keyboards of “Inside Out” to the smoldering guitar slashes of “Underground.”  

As he began to piece the songs together, Glakas discovered a new passion for mixing. Even now, his eyes light up talking about it. “I sat down and became a dedicated student at YouTube University. I felt like a kid again. All the frustration and joy really started to bleed into the songs.”

As the sessions drew to a close, Glakas finally came to the realization that Merciful Heavens had grown into a true solo project. “I’d always been more comfortable in a band setting. Keeping things inclusive and democratic, but that kinda lets you hide, and I don’t wanna hide anymore. This is me, these are my songs. This is how it felt to go through what I went through.”

So who or what is Merciful Heavens? It’s the sound of someone rediscovering their fire, crafting something bright into our universal, heavy darkness, and putting the endless drone of 2020 to good use. 

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