James Mercer Quotes
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The Shins is, in a way, a recording project that turned into a live band. So I don't really keep myself beholden to any rules when I'm in the studio for Shins. I just gotta get it done as best I can.
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The fact that I'm often pushing my voice as hard as I can is from playing in nightclubs in Albuquerque where you don't have a good sound system.
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When I started The Shins, it really was just me, alone, but it was still The Shins. I was totally recording stuff and writing songs as The Shins and all of that. So the beginning inception of the whole thing was some sort of a lie, I guess.
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Honestly, humans are social creatures that really crave intimacy, and I think that the friends I have who are trying to somehow go it alone are suffering for it.
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As a child, I lived in Germany at the Ramstein air force base, where my dad sang at a nightclub in Kaiserslautern. My parents couldn't afford a babysitter, so when I was, like, ten or 11, I would go with them to the bar until two in the morning.
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I know that there are a lot of sort of silly things that one thinks as a music listener about bands. I am a fan of many bands.
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My attempt at really doing classic sort of songwriting is Shins stuff.
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I really know so little about recording, and I'm learning as I go.
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I don't like the idea of a singer-songwriter record. I don't picture myself that way, and it's not my favorite sort of look, I guess. It's really just an aesthetic thing.
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I'm real happy. I've been lucky in love, and I've got a wonderful kid now, and things have been going well.
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I think perfect dates involve walking a lot, and not a bunch of driving around in cars. Ideally, you can walk together and go to a restaurant, and then walk from there to another nice place - this is, I guess, because of really great dates that I've had with my wife here in Portland.
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The love you have for your kids is so overwhelmingly powerful that it alters your perspective. The dark things going on in the world become very poignant and vivid.
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Until having kids, I had never really thought about mortality so much.
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My whole goal is to make good records and keep myself inspired and able to accomplish what I need to accomplish.
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I was a regular dork. I was a kid who was scrawny and all that, and probably kind of dumb or something. I wasn't unordinary; I wasn't extraordinary.
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Collaboration is something I missed at one point in The Shins. I really wanted to have that experience again, you know, not having everything rely on me. I wanted to have a partner.
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Lyrically, I think I'm frustrated with this whole process of trying to figure out what I believe about the world and life. I don't like to adopt a sort of guiding philosophy.
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Life is sad. People, you know, are going to pass, and you know that you will one day.
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You have to keep the recording process open. If you make too many decisions before you go in, you can lose out on those serendipitous moments that can really make a record, that I think are always required in the making of a really good record.
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I most enjoy sitting down with the acoustic guitar and just fiddling around and trying to come up with something like a hook or some sort of melodic line. That's something that I do habitually.
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I have no ethics when it comes to art. You just do what you can to make it as beautiful as you can.
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The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.
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For the longest time, I didn't even want to admit I was serious about music. Before the Shins, I would tell myself, 'Oh, I'm going to figure something out someday.' I had this romantic vision of being this old dude maybe making guitars or something.
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My dad was a Navy munitions officer, and by the end of his career, he was a specialist in nuclear weapons.