Hot Fuzz
The Shins' James Mercer wants to oblique you all over.
June 4, 2007
Rock 'n' roll frontmen don't get much more unassuming than the Shins' James Mercer. Polite, well-spoken and humble, he is everything the Rolling Stones warned you about. Nonetheless, the Shins are one of the great indie-rock success stories of the past few years, with a number-two debut for their latest album, Wincing the Night Away, and sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. Like their previous albums, the superlative Chutes Too Narrow and Oh, Inverted World, Wincing is a deeply melodic alternate reality, full of singalong choruses and inscrutable lyrics. As a songwriter, Mercer throws in enough five-dollar words to pay for an Ivy League education, but he proves you don't have to understand a song to love it. "The Shins will change your life," Natalie Portman infamously said in Garden State. And though that divine power may still be under investigation, one thing is for sure: that scene changed life for the Shins. — Sarah Hepola
Wincing the Night Away hit number two on the Billboard chart. Modest Mouse's album debuted at number one, and the Arcade Fire's debuted at number two. What's going on in the music industry?
I think it's a number of things. Part of it is a desire for authenticity. I relate it to people are buying older homes and fixing them up. There's this new aesthetic, and then there's also the internet, which has made it difficult for the old infrastructure that forced you to listen to certain things.
Are your songs even played on radio?
"Phantom Limb" did pretty well. But that stuff is controlled by people who have really bad taste. Or maybe they just don't use their taste. They have a preconceived notion of what kids like. It has to be really fucking slick. People have to look fucking gorgeous, and it has to have this shitty edge. I figure now the kids are back in control of what they're listening to.
Have you ever thought about sexing up your image?
[laughs] No, I never thought of it. It's a good idea. I don't know why I never thought of it. Madonna seemed to come into the industry with an understanding that sex would be part of the business for her.
Maybe you're just a bad businessman?
[laughs] Yes, that's probably it.
You put on a pretty straight-ahead live show. Have you ever been tempted to pull out some Flaming Lips-style gimmicks?
We've talked about trying to dress things up a little bit. Right now it feels like it's been done so much that we'd have to have to do something super fucking cool. I've seen it enough that I would feel kind of silly. But we have a backdrop that has graphic designs from the record. We feel comfortable being like an old fashioned R&B band and just playing the fucking music. I saw the Arcade Fire recently, and they do a similar thing.
Pretty much every publication that writes about you guys call you nerds. Does that bother you?
I know it kind of bothers Dave [Hernandez, guitarist]. But it's true. Unfortunately. What is a nerd? It's somebody who spends more time making their friends laugh and cracking up than scamming on girls. Marty [Crandall, keyboardist] plays video games than more any human being ever. But we didn't aspire to be nerds. We wanted to be cool. I guess we have that reputation. Is it true of the Arcade Fire, or Modest Mouse? If you were to interview Modest Mouse, I don't think you'd come away thinking they're nerds.
I never read much about your personal life. Are you married?
I am. For one year and — what's the date? — and eleven days. I was in Amsterdam on our anniversary. I had flowers delivered, and I called. I guess that's not terribly special. I call her all the time.
Let's talk about your lyrics. I've never liked a band more in which I understood the songs so little. For instance, one of my favorite songs on the album is "Australia."
Well that song isn't about Australia, first of all. That's from my memories of working in offices. I've had a hundred different jobs, and there is a special kind of sickness doing a job in an office. I was a bookkeeper and a secretary, and there is something so horribly boring and defeating about it. That song is also about this woman from Texas who was just awful, a racist and a miserable person. I felt sorry for her. In Australia, she's Himmler. So it's partly me wondering, "Is this what humans are meant to be doing?" You're in this fucking cage and there's people you can see through the window and you see the gardener and you're so fucking jealous.
Why are your lyrics so opaque?
I don't feel comfortable when it's not like that. I've been asked that before, but I'm not sure. David Bowie has some pretty strange lyrics. Often they're more straightforward than mine.
I assume you're not comfortable with writing about personal information.
Sure, that's part of it. It's a way that you can express yourself, wholeheartedly knowing and feeling the lyrics, but you're the only one who understands them.
I've noticed something else about your songs. Even if I listen to them a hundred times, I often don't know the song names.
I guess most often a song title is part of the chorus. And I tend to title songs the way an author titles a book.
You get called bookish a lot. Are you?
I wouldn't say I'm well-read, but I'm usually reading things. Right now I'm reading two things. I've started Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. And Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis.
Some of your songs seem short story-esque. "Phantom Limb," for instance, is about two lesbians in a small town.
I don't know why that melody reminded me of high school. It had this melancholy to it, a romance to it. There's this angst. I started writing a song about kids in high school, and I was kind of picturing that movie Elephant. At some point, I just pictured this love affair and wondered, why are they sad? It's because they're in love with each other, and there's this taboo. I placed the whole thing in Albuquerque, where I went to school for one year.
How was high school for you?
Better than middle school. It wasn't awful. I found some really cool friends after eighth grade. I went to an American-style high school in England. My dad was assigned over there. But I guess one of the things that was an issue for me was I was small for my age. That made things difficult, because I had the same hormones as the other guys. But high school was fine. I found skateboarding.
I suspect that's been the savior of many a small kid in high school.
Totally. You can't run as fast as a six-foot tall football player, but you can ollie off of anything you're brave enough to try.
I've heard Albuquerque is a tough place to grow up.
It is. It's no shit. You can just look at the figures. It's a smallish town, but it's in the top five for murder rates and violent crimes.
Why is that?
It's right in the middle of two freeways. There's a freeway, I-25, which runs to Mexico. There's another, I-40, that runs from North Carolina to California. So everyone who's trying to avoid the law goes through Albuquerque. It's a great place to start a gang. It's a great place to be a murderer.
How sick are you of talking about Garden State?
It's like anything. You talk about it a lot. It was a big deal. It exposed us to hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn't have known us otherwise.
Have you ever had any regrets about letting your songs be used in that movie?
Quite the opposite. It's been huge for us. It allowed us to sort of expose our music to people that otherwise it would take a major label. We lucked out. We actually got paid to have that song in that movie. We probably owe them.
©2007 Sarah Hepola and hooksexup.com