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A pewter plaque outside the back door of
Shins keyboardist Marty Crandall's Portland, Oregon, home explains
that the two-story residence, known as the Alfred J. Armstrong
House, was built in 1894 and is listed in the National Register of
Historic Places. Inside, the living room appears immaculately
preserved -- gilded molding, an ornate mahogany fireplace, gold
orchids stenciled onto muted green walls. It could double as a
museum exhibit on Queen Anne-style homes if it weren't for the
fifty-inch flat-screen TV flashing the words objective failed:
proof that Crandall has a way to go before mastering his new video
game, Gears of War. "They shoot you with these little arrows, and
if they get you, your whole body explodes," he says before an enemy
combatant blows him to bits.
The band has gathered at Crandall's place to rehearse for a
handful of dates that will kick off its new album, Wincing the
Night Away. Drummer Jesse Sandoval is running late after
suffering from carne asada-induced food poisoning last
night. While they wait, Crandall, frontman James Mercer, bassist
Dave Hernandez, 36, and multi-instrumentalist Eric Johnson, 30,
clumsily jam on the Doobie Brothers' "Long Train Runnin'." Once
Sandoval arrives, pasty and exhausted, Crandall passes out cans of
Miller Lite, and the Shins get down to business.
The five band members stand in a circle, facing one another, yet
there is never any question who's running the show: Mercer, who
formed the band in 1999 while its members still lived in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, directs all the action, advising his
bandmates how many la-la-las to sing or what keyboard sound to use.
He delivers his instructions gently, but clearly even the tiniest
detail matters. A self-described control freak, Mercer, 36, writes
all of the Shins' material, and for Wincing, he recorded a
great deal on his own before bringing in the others.
His obsessiveness paid off: Wincing the Night Away
demonstrates that there's an art to making pop songs that sound at
once off-kilter and precisely manicured. Picking up the threads
from buoyant girl groups, spaghetti-western themes, Eighties
British New Wave and Sixties baroque psychedelia, songs such as
"Turn On Me," "Phantom Limb" and "Australia" offer a
twenty-first-century pastiche that could belong to no one else but
the Shins. The band has combined sales of more than a million
copies for its two previous albums, both released by Seattle indie
label Sub Pop. With Wincing, the Shins are poised to
become the company's best-selling artist since Nirvana released
Bleach eighteen years ago.
"When we got signed, I remember [Sub Pop co-founder] Jonathan
Poneman telling me that he felt very confident that we could
eventually sell 20,000 albums," Mercer told me over brunch at a
spot around the corner from his own hundred-year-old house. "Twenty
thousand albums? That meant we stood to earn $20,000, which would
have been a life-changing thing."
It was good timing for their first big break. Mercer had never
finished his degree in chemistry at the University of New Mexico,
he was about to turn thirty, and he'd quit his job and was living
off his credit cards. "I had a conversation with my parents where I
said, 'Look, I'm going to make this one last push at music,' " he
says. "I told them, 'If this doesn't work, I'll go back to
school.'"
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The Shins' 2001 debut, Oh, Inverted World, established them as critics' darlings, an unassuming lot of hardworking indie rockers whose music might not set the world on fire but at least would make the quietly crackling embers sound like a symphony of sizzle. The follow-up, Chutes Too Narrow, was warmly received, and the band looked to be making slow yet steady progress in growing its fan base. Then, in 2004, came Garden State, whose soundtrack included two songs from Oh, Inverted World -- "Caring Is Creepy" and "New Slang" -- and whose script had Natalie Portman telling Zach Braff that the Shins "will change your life." The soundtrack won a Grammy, the movie -- produced for a mere $2.5 million -- grossed more than $26 million and Oh, Inverted World's sales jumped approximately 400 percent.
"I think indie bands like us and Modest Mouse are becoming popular for the same reason I bought my 1904 house, and for the same reason that downtown neighborhoods are gentrifying," says Mercer. "Growing up in the age of Wal-Mart and 7-Eleven -- which was the landscape of my youth -- I'm craving authenticity. I think everyone is. You know, there is something real out there you can buy, but you just have to scratch the surface to find it. I think people are sick of fakeness."
Over a candlelit dinner in a newly gentrified, formerly industrial waterfront section of Portland, Mercer looks at Crandall and Hernandez and says, "C'mon, you must have some kind of embarrassing story you can tell us." Likely inspired by the whiskey and wine coursing through his veins, Mercer has just shared a doozy -- even better than the one about how he passed gas in front of an elementary-school crush. Last year, he was at a dignified dinner party in Australia, and the guy seated next to him started earnestly recounting how he'd recently had his heart broken. "It's not even about love," the guy had said. Mercer delivered a rejoinder he was sure they'd all recognize from The 40 Year-Old Virgin, which is apparently not as popular in Australia as it is in the States. Just as the noise at the table quieted down, Mercer could be heard loudly proclaiming, "It's not about the shit-stained balls."
The singer says he's got oodles of anecdotes like that -- stories about feeling out of pace with his surroundings. It's hardly surprising, considering that he spent his childhood moving around from city to city, country to country. Mercer's dad, Jim, was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and the family -- James, his mom, Alice, and little sister, Bonnie -- was always somewhere new. Early on, the Mercers lived in a motor home that made temporary stops in Utah, Kansas and Alabama. When James was ten, the family spent a year in Germany, where he would pass his time, alone mostly, exploring the forest behind his house. "I would pretend I was in a Dungeons & Dragons game," he says. "I was a little odd. Plus, I was a pyromaniac at the time. In the forests, there was a 400-mark fine for smoking a cigarette. But I would light huge bonfires with my friends."
When Mercer's father was sent to Greece, the rest of the family came back to the States and settled in Albuquerque for a few years, where James faced serious culture shock. "I didn't fit in," he says. "Kids were drinking and smoking pot and having sex. The social dynamic was much more mature than I was ready for at eleven. I became depressed for months. My dad and mom are both farm people and were not versed in child psychology. I remember that as being the end of my childhood."
After attending high school in England, where he fell in love with British rock acts such as the Smiths and the Cure, Mercer returned to Albuquerque for college, got his first guitar and formed his first band, a freewheeling power-pop group called Flake.
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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."