James Mercer Quotes
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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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Meeting Perry Farrel was kind of cool. He's such an icon, and I was such a fan of Jane's Addiction.
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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.
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The thing that inspires me most is empathizing with people's flaws and seeing how they deal with them. That sort of connection you feel with someone when you realize that maybe even the negative things that they've said or done are because of insecurities or injuries they've endured.
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There's not a lot of thinking that I need to do away from the studio on Broken Bells stuff.
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I really [enjoy] working with new people and just sort of the freshness of it. ... I [want] to have those new conversations, musically and otherwise.
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I was really shy as a kid.
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I kinda learned to sing singing to Echo and the Bunnymen songs and Smiths songs: Morrissey would be a big favorite.
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I have the soundtrack for 'A Clockwork Orange,' which is kind of cool. I guess I don't really end up buying a lot of modern soundtracks. Another soundtrack I love is from a French movie called 'Betty Blue.' it has some really melancholy piano work.
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One thing that I've struggled with has been a certain amount of animosity toward the whole human race.
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For some reason, it seems like pop writers, it's like they just get worse or something over time. And then you're really jealous of movie directors whose careers seem to grow and they'll be 70 years old and still doing these incredible jobs. I'm going to reverse that, I hope.
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We played a festival in Ireland once, and in the middle of 'New Slang,' the Scissor Sisters kicked in across the field on this mega stage. It was a little distracting. It was hard to keep track of what I was supposed to sing.
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I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.
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I tend to [have] a lot of ideas but then just leave them in that infant form and kind of move on.
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The way I was brought up, there was a little bit of prodding to do something more practical, and I wasted a lot of time trying to be a practical person.
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Maybe it's just parenthood that puts you in a situation where you just have to develop a new attitude, I guess, about things.
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I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.
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There is pressure that comes with everything being a big deal. I remember thinking, 'I need to survive the Shins. I don't know what I'm going to do to make a living otherwise, but I really don't want to do the Shins right now.'
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So happy that Broken Bells is a thing in my life and really cool in so many ways. Not only, like, as something to sell records and be a band and whatnot, but just to give me an outlet and give me a fresh approach on things.
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I'm not really excited about the idea of committing to anything permanently.
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The part of modern pop music I don't know much about is hip hop.
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I've never been one to think it was cheating to sample this or to loop the drum part there - I've always done that. Even using four-track cassette recorders, I was always doing whatever I could to make it as good as I could.
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I tend to write a pretty half and half split of, like, slow, morose things and then sort of more upbeat stuff.
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There's something artistic about skating. A psychologist could tell you exactly why that is, but I think there's something much more expressive that gives you a lot of room for unique and individual expression. Whatever you're interested in can become something you kind of own in your group of skater friends.