STACK March 2017 Issue 149

66 / 97

The recent evolution of The Shins has
encouraged puristic/heretical discussion
about what makes a band. Who gets to
carry the title mantle, especially when
we're talking new music, not just a reunion
tour? After shedding several bandmates
James Mercer is creating new music under
The Shins moniker. But the truth is it was
always his own. “In the late ‘90s there
were certain bands that weren’t really
bands, it was just a guy in his bedroom,”
Mercer explains. “There was just a
revolving cast of characters and then the
main dude. I guess I felt there was licence
there for me to just create a band, and it
would be a recording project. It’s funny
because it became really difficult to let
those guys go – the perception was that we
were The Shins, and in reality it was actually that
I was The Shins. You can’t fight perception, you
know.”
When the dynamism of these songs seems
to hint at other participants (or alter-egos, at
least) it is hard to shake the perception, as a
listener. On Heartworms’ stand-out Rubber Ballz
there’s a background voice that shouts mock-
authoritatively at the end of phrases, kind of like
the hollers in Yellow Submarine (“Sky of blue!
Sea of green!”). “I remember when I first met
my wife, she said she thought that there was a
bunch of singers in the band,” Mercer smiles.
feelings like this: “I think that, looking
back [on myself] as a young man, there’s
a certain – what is the word? – enmity,
that you feel towards the opposite sex.
You get really frustrated, and it’s always
such a problem in life. The culture out there
is feeding you all this bullsh-t. So I think
men can very easily slip into this sort of
misogyny and they don’t realise it. They
think of themselves as somebody who’s
maybe open-minded and so on. I mean, I’ve
seen it in myself. I think it’s really revealing
when you actually recognise it in yourself.
That’s when you get sh-t done, I think.”
Track two is the Beck-esque Painting
A Hole, which really begins Heartworms'
kooky sonic journey. “That is a Korg
synthesiser from the ‘70s and it’s called
the Micro Preset, and the setting I put it to
was something that sounded kind of like
an oboe," Mercer says of the mysterious
woodwind melody that entwines slow
syncopated beats and a bass synth
zooming low to high. "I wanted to have
this weird, exotic – I don’t even remember
what. I remember the moment of doing it,
and I remember I could hear it in my head.
It was sort of like a snake charmer sound. I
don’t know. That’s that type of stuff at three
in the morning, when you’re half-lit," he
chuckles.
Levity is never far away, and nor is the fam. It
comes up again when we talk about the brilliant
clip for Dead Alive – this cyclical, goofy, creepy
‘mare which features weird black landscapes
with rippling lo-fi effects, the protagonist
shrinking to a pea and growing to a monster in
size, and lots of skeletons. In a scene where
Giant-Mercer’s Vans sneaker steps on Mini-
Mercer’s head and splits it clean open, the
musician reveals the goop effects are courtesy
of his wife’s green thumb. “We have a big
garden and my wife cans the strawberries,” he
smiles. “I put a whole lot in my mouth and we
went for it.”
The musician’s family – and more specifically,
his two daughters – were the inspiration for one
of the new album's cuts in particular. It’s not So
NowWhat , the single written for Zach Braff’s
similarly-themed film Wish I Was Here (arguably
though unofficially the sequel to the filmmaker's
2004 effort Garden State, whose soundtrack
pushed The Shins into mainstream renown). It's
the empowering and ever so sweetly delivered
Name For You, which really is an anthem of
reassurance and support for all girls and young
women. Mercer doesn’t think he’s in a special
position of understanding sexism having had
daughters instead of sons, but explains his
INTERVIEW
continued
FACTOID: The Shins were formed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Other notable Burqueños include Neil Patrick Harris, Marc Maron, Demi Lovato, Coco Austin and Holly Holm.
JARVIS COCKER &
CHILLY GONZALES
After spending time at Sunset Boulevard’s famous Chateau
Marmont hotel, Pulp frontman and radio host Jarvis Cocker
found himself curious about his suite’s possible previous
inhabitants – their stories, fantasies, lonelinesses, and how they
were connected to the golden age of Hollywood. In a three-year
musical odyssey, Cocker collaborated with classically-trained,
genre-eclectic and incredibly dynamic pianist and composer
Chilly Gonzales, to create Room 29 – a 21st century song cycle (a
Romantic tradition in which a collection of songs are intended to
be experienced as a set) which summons the ghosts of glamour
past and imagines their tales.
Room 29
by Jarvis Cocker
and Chilly
Gonzales is
out March 17
via Deutsche
Grammophon/
Universal.
04 MARCH 2017
visit MUSIC NEWS
THE SHINS
JAMES MERCER
© Alexandre Izard
Heartworms
by The Shins is out
March 10 via Sony.