haven rsquo;t played a show in Albuquerque, their hometown, in four years. Since then, much has changed. On Jan.
13, 2007, The Shins took the stage on ldquo;Saturday Night Live rdquo; to play for more than four million people. Ten days later, their third album, Wincing the Night Away , would debut at No. 2 on the Billboard charts, selling 118,000 copies in the first week, making it the most successful debut in the history of .
The band that changed your life 10 years ago returns home on Tuesday, April 10, to play a show at the . James Mercer talks to the Alibi about humble beginnings, Truman Capote and how The Shins really feel about Albuquerque.
The Shins began as college-rock outfit Flake (later renamed Flake Music), fronted by Mercer and guitarist Neal Langford.
Jesse Sandoval, then a student at La Cueva High School, signed on as Flake rsquo;s drummer and perennial clerk Marty Crandall soon joined as the band rsquo;s keyboardist. Dave Hernandez, formerly of , eventually replaced Langford after he left to pursue other interests.
Sub Pop CEO Jonathan Poneman mdash;who would, on the eve of the release of Wincing the Night Away , call the band ldquo;instrumental to Sub Pop rsquo;s renaissance rdquo; mdash;saw The Shins play with Modest Mouse in San Francisco in 1999 and asked them to contribute a song to the , a now-defunct monthly 7-inch record subscription service that featured unsigned acts.
The success of the single--the now ubiquitous --gained The Shins Sub Pop rsquo;s support in the release of the band rsquo;s first full-length album, Oh, Inverted World.
What did you think about Albuquerque when you first moved here?
I remember moving to Albuquerque and feeling an extreme culture shock.
I moved and went into the sixth grade. I had lived in Germany before that and I was thinking, Oh my god. It was like I was in a rsquo;70s teen movie about doing drugs and having sex at too young of an age.
It was like one of those after-school specials; it was pretty bad. That was . It was pretty fucking heavy metal-ed out.
I went one year to l and then I moved to England.
I moved back to Albuquerque after high school and I went to . I met Neal Langford through my friends.
Neal and I started Flake, basically. We met Marty at a show and eventually asked him to join the band. Typical way that bands form.
I was trying to study chemistry but I was just not willing to put the effort into it that was required and was having too much fun playing in bands. So I dropped out of school and I was working odd jobs. The first job I had in Albuquerque was working at as a ride operator.
What made you decide to disband Flake and reform as The Shins?
I felt like I wanted to do something more pop-based than Flake. I mean, Flake was pretty poppy, but it was very ldquo;of the day.
rdquo; I wanted to do something that was based on the stuff that I really loved, like old rsquo;60s R B. I had just really romanticized this whole thing in my head. And so I started recording, messing around with this four-track, and put together this concept of The Shins.
Jesse played drums and I rsquo;d play all the other instruments. And it rsquo;s that Nature Bears a Vacuum thing that I put out myself.
What was touring like in the early days?
In about rsquo;98 or rsquo;99 rsquo;s Isaac [Brock] called Neal and asked Flake to go play some shows, open up for them in Texas. So we went out and played these shows to, like, 1,500 people a night mdash;it was shocking. We did a combination of Shins songs and Flake songs.
Right about that time Napster was a big deal and so our songs suddenly were all over the college network of kids listening to rock and then we got signed. We were on Sub Pop rsquo;s radar because they had a copy of the CD that somebody had given them and was a way they could gauge your popularity.
There were a lot of good bands. Things were cool, but still, the thing was, you rsquo;d have a situation where Scared of Chaka would go to New York and play in front of 500 people and they rsquo;d play in Albuquerque and 150 people would come out. It was kind of like you could only make money elsewhere.
There wasn rsquo;t a huge audience. There were really great bands, but there wasn rsquo;t so much this huge, vibrant scene. It was a good place to learn.
I wanted to get good at recording and I wanted to make a good record. That was always the goal.
Maybe around rsquo;98 or rsquo;99 I got a computer and my friend got me some black market recording software and I started messing around until finally I had a pretty good melody to record with. And that rsquo;s when
Oh, Inverted World started to take shape. Experimenting with a computer and digital recording made it so much easier. Our first EP is on vinyl and it was recorded on a cassette four track and it just sounds crazy mdash;the fidelity is so bad.
By 2003, all four Shins had moved to Portland, Ore., to be closer to their record label.
Bolstered by the success of
Oh, Inverted World and Chutes Too Narrow (the combined sales of the albums exceed one million copies), The Shins were in demand all over the world. Despite the band rsquo;s fledgling success, however, Mercer was plagued by personal and professional hardships. He bought a home with the royalties he earned from allowing McDonald's to use New Slang in a TV commercial.Thieves, presumably from the crack house next door, broke in and stole the song's master tapes. Mercer and his wife have since moved out and relocated to the house lived in when he recorded
Roman Candle , and where Mercer fleshed out Wincing the Night Away.Many of the lyrical themes on this album deal with loss of control.
Was there a feeling of vulnerability in your life that informed your lyrics?
I definitely was going crazy there for a while. It was a situation I put myself in where I demand to have a say in every role that takes place.
But that means you rsquo;re going to be exhausted. And then you feel frustrated that you rsquo;re in that situation, but you put yourself there.
How does that influence your creative process?
And then you don rsquo;t have to worry about that. I am. I can be.
Not all the time, but it rsquo;s definitely a part of my personality.
If you can turn the way that somebody drinks a soda into something beautiful and poetic mdash;and you can see the beauty in it and bring that out with language mdash;it rsquo;s just so moving. What a wonderful, simple pleasure to have; to be able to see the artful side of reality. I think that rsquo;s why I rsquo;m so moved by that stuff.
ldquo;Phantom Limb rdquo; is about these two girls who fall in love in high school. The whole idea that I had in my head would be a young girl who moves from the Valley up to the Heights, maybe she goes to Eldorado or something.
Yeah, that rsquo;s right! But then [she] finds this love mdash;which makes you feel even more alienated from everyone else. But it doesn rsquo;t matter because it rsquo;s love and it rsquo;s real.
I guess in my head, I rsquo;m like, We only have three records. You rsquo;re just starting. Not only do you only have three records, but you rsquo;re 36.
What have you been
doing? I don rsquo;t know when that point comes. Well, I feel like we rsquo;re doing great.It rsquo;s working. Maybe you start thinking about the next record. It rsquo;s good to not always be so blown away by everything.
I think that rsquo;s something that rsquo;s been developing with us lately. We rsquo;re getting comfortable with our position mdash;we rsquo;re probably still in the process, but it can be really intimidating.
And then we went to the after-party. Marty got drunk really quick and it was pretty hilarious.
They asked us to play ldquo;New Slang. rdquo; I was kind of disappointed that they wanted us to play it. Then I talked to some people who said other bands had put up big stinks and fought them on issues like that and they rsquo;re just not wanted back.
So I was like, well, let rsquo;s be pragmatic about it.
I don rsquo;t pay much attention to it.
I don rsquo;t read the interviews or the reviews. I rsquo;ve read a few, but I generally feel pretty self-conscious after I do. It rsquo;s not a comfortable feeling for me, so I just avoid it.
I wish I hadn rsquo;t read some things. They [my bandmates] read everything. If there rsquo;s something really bad they rsquo;ll tell me.
If that rsquo;s true, then I would hope that they feel some sort of shared experience. I think I make myself pretty vulnerable in my songs lyrically and maybe that rsquo;s it.
Hopefully there rsquo;s something there that people connect with, like, This guy knows what I rsquo;m feeling.
Did you really
want to play here?Yeah, definitely. It rsquo;s always like, ldquo;Oh, come on, we rsquo;ve got to play there.
It rsquo;s our hometown. We rsquo;ve gotta do it. rdquo;
We rsquo;re proud to be from Albuquerque.
The food.
We have an understood rule that you rsquo;re not allowed to start talking about the or because it rsquo;s just too frustrating to hear when you live in the Northwest.
I think that maybe on some intuitive level I have a bit more of a grasp of the size of the whole thing or the complexity of it.
I think that rsquo;s one of the things that moving around all the time as a kid gave me. I always had an understanding that this was just one angle on life.
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