Bruised Shins

Crandall, 31, and Sandoval, 32, high school buddies at the time, met Mercer through other local musicians and were immediately impressed. "He was in college and he could buy beer and we couldn't," Sandoval tells me over sushi a couple of days later in Seattle, where the band is set to play at a radio festival put on by local alt-rock station the End. Adds Crandall, "It was really intimidating. James was just way cooler than us. He had lived in different cities -- in Europe! He was already worldly and he'd also already dated a hot chick. He expressed himself musically to a level where I was blown away. Instantly, I was like, 'James Mercer is the coolest musician in Albuquerque.' "

Crandall and Sandoval joined Flake, and the band released an EP. But as the Nineties drew to a close, Mercer found new inspiration in the pristine, Beatlesque pop of bands such as the Apples in Stereo and the Olivia Tremor Control. "I was so sick of trying to pretend to be punk rock," says the singer. "I started recording Oh, Inverted World by myself, with Jesse on drums, and then we were offered a tour with Modest Mouse, so I had to put a band together. We re-formed as the Shins, and I got to be the control freak that I always wanted to be."

The dank, concrete basement of Mercer's Portland home doesn't look like anything special, but it's the room he's proudest to show off. "Right there," he says, gesturing toward a space underneath the stairs. "This is where he would record songs on his four-track." The "he" in question is the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. Smith resided in this same house while he was a fixture of Portland's indie scene in the mid-Nineties. Mercer only moved here from Albuquerque five years ago, and he mournfully notes that he never did get to meet the musician, yet he's proud to have written Wincing in the same spot where Smith once composed.

"Writing these songs, I would sit in the living room in front of the TV with the volume down," he says. "I'd have a notepad and a beer and the guitar and my recorder in front of me." We're driving from Portland to Seattle for the radio gig, and Mercer's wife, Marisa, whom he met when she was writing an online piece about the band, is behind the wheel. They wed last spring after a two-year courtship that overlapped with the tail end of a painful breakup for Mercer. Marisa is four months pregnant.

"Songwriting is really a weird process for me," he says. "It's almost as though you start fishing out into nothingness and there's these beautiful things out there that have yet to be realized. And it has to do with the math of the relationship between the actual notes and the harmonies and the chords. It's like you're putting your hand in a blind hole and feeling around, and once in a while you can grab onto something and keep it."

For Wincing, the tiny fraction of ideas he kept fit a somber mood that's since lifted. "There's a theme of melancholy on this record that's more prevalent than the other two," he notes. "It's a little bit lower, a little darker emotionally, to me. I was going through some stressful stuff."

In addition to breaking up with his last girlfriend when he started on the songs, Mercer was still living in his previous Portland home, next door to a crack house. "Hip-hop offers this whole glamorized, Gucci version of that kind of lifestyle," he says. "But in real life, it's really disturbing to see a pimp kicking the shit out of a toothless whore."

But now he's living, whore-free, in a house he loves, with a pregnant wife he adores and a new album that's being lavished with praise. "If bands start to suck because they become too content, at least I can try to be conscious of that and avoid it," he says. "I think you just have to artistically stay curious. I am happier now than I've ever been, and if I lose some of the inspiration I drew from discontent, well, the teenager in me will be pissed, but the forty-year-old that will exist won't give a shit anyway."