Shins, Not Assholes
Fans, fame and french fries. The Shins struggle with becoming a serious band.
by Chad Draizin
Gradually, over the last two years or so, members of The Shins have been trickling into our fair city. The band stared out in Albuquerque as a different band, Flake Music, back before anyone can remember, and released their first single in 1993. Their music was all over the map. Their only full-length album, 1997’s When you Land Here Its Time To Go Home, encompassed visceral indie-rock, psychedelic pop, and soft-yet-powerful acoustic songs.
James Mercer, the singer/songwriter, and I feel it’s safe to say driving force behind the band began to work on some softer songs on his own, under the moniker The Shins. Naturally, James had his Flake band-mates help him out in the studio. In 2001 Oh Inverted World was released. The album took off. It was on every critic’s top five list that year and was a most-welcome surprise from this seemingly unknown band, The Shins.
It is a beautiful album. Its timeless sound is often compared to British pop from the mid-sixties and to the lonely, cathartic studio experimentation of Beach Boy, Brian Wilson. It’s splendid to close your eyes and get lost to.
The Shins received a modicum of crap when the album’s most memorable track, New Slang, a wistful sing-along, was used in a McDonald’s commercial. Another bit of a song, just a bit of finger picking really, was what you heard when you saw that cute Gap ad where Aston Kutcher rides his bicycle in the street.
Well now they’re here; they’re your neighbors. The Shins have just finished recording their new album for Sub Pop, Chutes Too Narrow, which will be released on Oct 21st in the caverns beneath their secret Portland compound. The band has had a busy schedule of late, playing the second to last show at the Blackbird, an evening at Bumbershoot, and a three-week US tour.
I met with them before their show at The Modern Zoo, in a spartan room backstage. There was only an Oscar-the-Grouch-green couch and a coffee table. I sat on the hardwood floor. The Shins in their current lineup are: James Mercer, guitar and vocals; Dave Hernandez, bass; Marty Crandall, keyboards, and a general goofball; Jesse Sandoval, Drums.
Half of you live in Portland right?
Band: Yeah.
Marty: Overrated!
Why do you want to stay in Albuquerque?
Marty: Albuquerque, I don’t know. I’ve been thinking actually lately of moving up here. For me I’ve been able to function thus far in Albuquerque just traveling back and forth.
James: We all have family out there.
Marty: I’ve got a girlfriend out there. Well that’s the main thing that keeps me out there. Things are starting to change and move around. It’s quite possible that for like four or five months out of the year I could live here in Portland. I’ll be spending a lot more time here, that’s for sure so it will be like a second home. Or it could quite possibly become a first home and Albuquerque become a second home.
James: We’re going to have to start charging him rent now.
I guess that begs the question of why the rest of you moved to Portland.
James: Well you were the first to move here.
Dave: Out of all of us yeah. I was here for a couple years and then I moved to Seattle. I moved because Albuquerque was starting to fizzle out and die. For a while it was vital about five -
James: It probably still is considered vital and great to the younger kids whose bands sort of replaced ours.
Dave: Also you just need a change of scenery once in a while. Everyone else was moving to Portland so we sort of just followed them.
Marty: Like good little sheep.
Everybody that lives here has been here a year or so. It’s crazy. How do you feel that the scene has affected your music here?
James: It has. It has. I’ve seen more good bands up here.
Anybody in particular that…
James: Helio Sequence
Dave: Trauma kids
?: Yeah there’s a bunch of bands: The Standard. We love them. The thermals; The Minders are up here.
Do you feel like you’re a part of the Portland scene? I realize you guys are touring so much and working on—
Dave: I feel like we’d like to become a part of the Portland scene but I don’t know if we feel comfortable saying we are.
Jesse: I feel like we’re still meeting a lot of people, you know. A lot of local bands we’re just kind of meeting for the first time, so I don’t feel like we’re like brothers—like we are the local scene.
How long have you guys been out here?
Jesse: I’ve been here two years.
James: I’ve been here a year and a half.
Dave: I lived in Seattle for three years before I moved here. I was here for two years. I still don’t know why I left Portland for Seattle. Honestly. I mean things worked out really nicely and I like it now, but I love Portland and I’ll always miss Portland. I worked at the Montage for a while. I knew this place inside and out. I love Portland I really really do. I love it. So much music.
Has your success with the last album changed the way you went into recording the new record?
James: It let us buy some better equipment.
Dave: The sound is better.
James: The sound is a lot better.
Marty: It let us have a lot of studio time. The finishing up of the final recording. There was a lot of pressure to make it sound a little bit more professional in certain areas.
James: I like the sound of the old record too, now. I hated it for the first two years or so but now I’m like “yeah it sounds pretty good.”
It’s been a while since that first record.
James: Yeah, two years
People have been pretty anxious for you to come out with something new. Are you guys sick of all the critical, everybody comparing Oh Inverted World to the Beach Boys and sixties British psychedelic pop stuff?
James: I dunno. I think maybe that stuff is in there. I can see it in there. The Beach Boys thing I wasn’t quite expecting but I love the Beach Boys so whatever.
I have to say I can really hear it but it’s not in the sound. It’s more in the approach to it.
James: The fact that it’s all overdubbed and stuff.
Do you guys listen to that sort of music?
James: I don’t really know the last time I listened to the beach boys really, but we like lots of stuff so...
Dave: Yeah I like The Zombies. That sixties stuff. The Beatles too. I’ve listened to The Beatles longer than The Beach Boys.
James: And I’ve listened to The Beatles forever so… I dunno. I listen to about what everybody else does.
Dave: Have the Shins gotten the Zombies comparison ever?
Jesse: Sometimes.
James: Sometimes. Its better than the Beach Boys.
Marty: It does get old though just the Brian Wilson thing. People just say that. They say “Brian Wilson”
Like you’re some lunatic in the basement.
Marty: I think its kinda cool. Are you saying I’m crazy? I like that! I’m on drugs right now. Does that freak you out?
I know a few people who have taken your music very personally and very seriously. I know that “New Slang” in particular is a song that a lot of people identify with and everybody kind of catches on with it in a different way. Have you run into that?
Dave: Kevin at the fuckin’ Bowery. -in a Jersey accent- Yeah he’s a real jersey fuckin’ guy at the Bowery Ballroom, man. He fuckin’ loved that stuff! He’d taken the lyrics and he’d put them in a copy machine and he’d blow them up. He’d enlarged them because: “He couldn’t read them, they’re too small!”
James: A girl was talking on a cell phone during New Slang, and we have witnesses to confirm this, he fucking grabbed it out of her hand and fucking smashed it and then he gave it to us! He gave it to us and I was going to keep it. He came at the end of the night and he was like “She’s really pissed and I’m going to get fired. I need to get it back.” So I gave it to him.
James: Which is crazy. It’s funny because you write these songs and you perform these songs and stuff. And we don’t take them that seriously at all. At all. Not even nearly. I think that when you realize that somebody else does, and I know that I have songs that I personally connect to, just fucking pop songs that fucking make you feel like you maybe shouldn’t jump off a fucking cliff. It makes me feel like I should maybe have a little more respect for my own stuff.
Jesse: It doesn’t seem like too many people really have the chance to share that kind of thing with you though, if it’s that personal. We know they’re out there.
People don’t come up after shows and say ‘that song changed my life?’
?: No, Not really.
Marty: Every once in a while. They say, “Good set,” all the time and then they’ll look you in the eye and say, “No seriously, I love your band. I love you.”
Dave: I told you what that guy told me. “Me and my old lady, we love to light some candles and we put on Oh Inverted World and we have sex.” He’s this really hairy hippie dude and he’s a close talker and breathing on you, all cross-eyed because he’s so close. “And we just hold each other and look at one another.” *laughter* All of a sudden I realize he’s touching me. Maybe that was his way of saying it touched him.
James: That’s pretty cool. I mean Jesus Christ.
When you write music, you can’t expect that to happen, but does it mean a lot to you when you’re writing it?
James: Yeah, at the time it does. I don’t really know how to just come up with shit out of the air. So it’s always something that I’ve been thinking about a lot or have gone through.
James: But you know at the same time a lot of bands have the ability to just sort of fucking say “I’m gonna write a song about this old cowboy who just goes out into the woods…” To just write about these hypothetical situations and come up with stuff that just kills you, that’s a gift. Probably the more talented songwriter can do that.
So Flake Music is done I take it?
Dave: Yeah it was done a while ago.
What marked the distinction between the two bands?
James: I don’t know, to tell you the truth. When was it that we just decided not to do flake anymore?
Jesse: Did it just end one night? Is that what we decided?
James: I was just kinda like, “Well we just can’t do it anymore”
Dave: Well, Neil had been out of town for a while and we really stopped playing.
James: That’s right. Neil was always gone.
Marty: The previous member, Neil, who used to be in the band, he was a professional hot air balloon pilot.
How do you declare yourself a professional hot air balloon pilot?
Marty: He got contracted by someone to fly. It was the AOL balloon. So then you can consider yourself a professional hot air balloon pilot. He toured around and we hadn’t been playing much before then, and that’s when you started working on your own stuff. *to James*
Alright. McDonalds and the Gap.
James: Yeah
Yes
James: All right. Yeah. Well I think partly my argument with the McDonalds thing was that, well I mean number one, we didn’t know we’d be a fucking serious band.
Whose idea was it? And did they approach you or…
James: Somebody who loved the Shins who was working at an ad agency. A young guy at an ad agency in Chicago who was like, “Here is this obscure band who might benefit from the money of this and who it might not ruin them.” And that’s sort of where we were.
Have a lot of people given you shit about that?
James: Yeah we got a lot of shit. But then again not a lot of people who were actually in bands though. Unless they have really strong political beliefs about that sort of thing, which I don’t - Have any strong political beliefs – about anything. Because I feel that these issues are extremely complex. Actually the issues are not what’s complex, it’s whether or not you should give a flying fuck about the human race that is a complex issue. So if you start arguing about what a company like McDonalds has done, and coming from a nihilist background you’d have a hard time really being able to commit to certain things. I should just say that it worked out okay for us. The one thing is that it keeps coming up. It always comes up because it is an interesting thing that we did, but sometimes I wish it didn’t keep coming up.
And then what about the Gap? That was later than the McDonalds one?
James: Yeah that was later. They came to me; just to me and I had a bunch of stuff that I didn’t really want to use for the band. I picked a couple things and sent it to them and they told me, “We don’t like any of this,” and then a month later they were like, “Actually we like one of them.” So they used it.
It’s a good commercial for what its worth.
James: Whatever. It’s a fucking commercial, you know? That’s the thing too. I have a hard time feeling that commercials are so affective, and then caring about the people they are affective on, if they are affective. I have a certain amount of apathy for someone who watches a McDonald’s commercial and then kills themselves eating McDonalds. Unfortunately that’s true. I submit to the call of apathy sometimes.
Dave: Heartless fuck.
James: I am a heartless fuck sometimes, its true.
Dave: I wonder if there’s an equal moral dilemma, being money hungry or apathetic? I don’t give a fuck about either one, but what’s the worst quandary: just doing it for the money or just not giving a rat’s ass about the people that it affected?
James: Well, definitely the money is something that is a factor. It’s a lot of money there. You balance out a lot of shit. You think about how is this going to make the band look, which is a weird, superficial, ridiculous thing to think about. Its just as superficial and ridiculous as thinking about… Actually less superficial and ridiculous… I’m sorry, sorry, more superficial than thinking about the money that you’re going to get. Because with money you can live. You can eat, and all that.
Marty: You can support the band, and exist for years and years and years.
James: And I don’t think I’d believe in the least anyone who would say that if they chose not to do something when they were going to be given a lot of money that they did it completely, solely because they believed whole heartedly in whatever agenda they subscribe to, and they never thought about their image, and they never thought about the way they’d look in front of the kids. Its just… whatever. I don’t know. You can go back and forth forever. And obviously I’ve thought about this stuff. It means a lot to me and the way I’m perceived means a lot to me. The way we’re perceived means a lot to me. It does, as superficial as that sounds.
Marty: We don’t want to be perceived as assholes.
James: You don’t want to be perceived as assholes. I think also over the last year I’ve really come to understand that people don’t just feel like our songs are silly, stupid, boring or whatever. I would have hated it if, oh God, if any fucking beautiful Smiths song that I loved would have been in a fucking McDonald’s commercial. But I never ever would think of our band as something as valid and huge as The Smiths. So I have a hard time taking it that seriously.