Sleepless With the Shins

It’s 5:38 a.m. in Portland, Ore., and I’m staring into the abyss. I’m lying on my back, eyes wide open, in my bed at the Hotel Lucia. Pretty soon the sounds of a city waking up will penetrate these thin walls and the light of day will filter in through the insufficient blinds until all hope of a restful night’s sleep has vanished.

I stumbled drunk and jet-lagged into this room just three-and-a-half hours ago, but I haven’t been able to sleep for more than 20 minutes at a clip. This level of insomnia is prohibitive but unsurprising. I’m in the middle of an agonizing break-up. After seven years, she just left. I fumble with items on the bedside table and realize that, for the first time in days, I didn’t take any sleeping pills. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Suddenly, the lyrics from “Sleeping Lessons,” the first song on The Shins’ new album, take on new significance (“You’re not obliged to swallow anything you despise”). I’m nearly 3,000 miles from home, attempting to gain some insight into The Shins and to extract communicable meaning from their brand-new album. In my darkened hotel room, probably still drunk, I say the album’s name aloud—Wincing the Night Away—and I no longer need to search for its meaning. I’m living it. I cue up the disc through my laptop, and fall in and out of sleep until it’s time to meet the band.

When singer/guitarist James Mercer picks me up from the hotel in his wife’s silver Volkswagen Golf, he acknowledges his own past struggles for peaceful slumber. Without using the word “insomnia,” he grimaces slightly and recounts restless nights spent tossing and turning with troubled thoughts of daytime events, particularly those that led to the heartache and loneliness that have become a staple in his songs.

Although the band’s third full-length is already in production at Sub Pop, Mercer still agonizes over the details, sweating the small stuff. He wonders if “Australia” is an acceptable title for the second track or if fans will think the melody on “Sea Legs” is a blatant Morrissey rip-off (which, he comes close to admitting, it kind of is: “Listening to him taught me how to sing,” he says). Still a couple months away from the album’s January release, Mercer is already worried about people’s reactions. In bed at night, hindsight is 20/20.

We drive to the Sunnyside neighborhood, where he lives with his wife in a newly purchased house just down the road from Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock. As we park on a quiet residential street and walk around the block to a nickel arcade, Mercer sets aside his anxieties to concentrate on a much more important task—raking up prize tickets so we can leave with as many Tootsie Rolls and lollipop rings as possible. For someone who writes the types of songs that can leave you feeling even more lonely and desperate and broken than before, at the arcade Mercer seems pleased with himself and the immediate world around him. After a few rounds on a vintage aim-and-shoot coin drop and some Skee-Ball, of course, he makes bank with an archaic amusement involving robotic pixies and creepy circus music. Five games—and hence, 25 cents—into it, he has it down. “If it’s just about the tickets, that’s the game [for me],” he says. We cash in, and the Shins frontman grins when he discovers he has enough tickets to cover his top prize—a keychain with a mini #6 billiard ball attached. On the way out he fastens it to a belt loop, and says, “It’s going to be my new hip thing.”

Sporting an untrimmed beard and dressed in dark blue jeans with a retro black tee, Mercer looks like a friendly regular in this stylish part of town. We grab a sidewalk table and order microbrews at Baghdad, one of his preferred spots, and I take out a lyric sheet to the new album, hoping to dig in and deconstruct a little. Though he remains genuinely affable and is almost always a good sport, Mercer can become visibly pained when discussing the meanings of his songs. On more than one occasion, he actually groans. Shins songs can be deceiving. At concerts, you’ll see entire audiences smiling and singing along to the lilting melodies. But these aren’t exactly cheerful songs. They’re about estrangement, disenchantment, heartache and—ultimately—loneliness.

“It made me feel sick while I was writing this one,” he says of album closer, “A Comet Appears.” Just discussing the song cues some of the residual Catholic guilt Mercer has left over from childhood. “It’s about putting people in situations that they can’t get out of and not knowing you’re doing it,” he continues. “[About] demanding things from people that aren’t possible for them to give, but you can’t move on without it, and so it just destroys things.”

He’s written a lot of songs about love, but not many with happy endings. An exception is “Sea Legs,” about falling in love with his wife. Mercer actually smiles as he sings me the line he’s most proud of—“Girl, if you’re a seascape, I’m a listing boat / for the thing carries every hope / I invest in a single life.”

Now that he’s married, and indeed very much in love, he’s beginning to search outside himself to catch up with his muse. “Phantom Limb,” the album’s first single, is about two teenage lesbians and the alienation they feel from their peers at a small-town high school. As we scroll down the lyrics, Mercer admits that much of it is actually about the alienation he felt growing up, just re-contextualized.

“A lot of this stuff was written before I had fallen in love with Marissa, or it was while I was falling in love with her, but I don’t know how to write about that,” he says. “I know how to be melancholy; I don’t know how to be joyous.” He thinks of some topics he’s covered in recent lyrics, such as resentment, regret and even sexuality, and says, “I worry about people knowing that I feel this way. And at the same time, there’s another side of me that doesn’t feel this way all the time. I’m not always so bleak, you know? I’m a happy person.”

Much of this happiness stems from the band’s “new” hometown. Since moving from Albuquerque, N.M., to Portland, The Shins have become an important part of the music scene that’s been percolating in the city lately—a scene that also includes Modest Mouse, The Decemberists and Stephen Malkmus. As we talk, we’re interrupted a few times by passerbys who stop to say hello or ask him what he’s been up to. Not because he’s the lead singer of The Shins but because he’s James—their friend. He chit-chats with them for a while and seems genuinely interested in their affairs. “I love living in Portland,” he says. “It’s all in the details here.”

With the exception of Mercer, an Air Force baby from Hawaii, all the other Shins were born and raised in Albuquerque. As drummer Jesse Sandoval puts it simply, “We’re from Albuquerque but we’re a Portland band.”

Before The Shins started to break through, Mercer and co. went by the name Flake Music, and were a moderately successful indie-rock band in the mid 1990s. In addition to Mercer and Sandoval, this lineup featured Neal Langford on guitar and Marty Crandall on bass.

In 1997, Mercer created The Shins as a side project. Originally it was just himself and Sandoval; then friend Dave Hernandez talked his way into bass duties. Hernandez’s own band—Scared of Chaka—had toured with Flake Music back in the day, and both bands even covered each other’s songs. (Hernandez returned to Scared of Chaka for a while, during which time he was replaced by Flake’s Langford.)

With the addition of Crandall—“I asked him to join the band, by the way,” recalls Mercer—The Shins were three quarters of Flake. So if the name change wasn’t just an elaborate ploy to get rid of Langford, then what was it really about? “Flake Music was a good band, but I started to get frustrated because I wanted to do kooky shit like this, and at the time it was the Pavement era and we were kind of copping that style. Everything had to be raw and hard,” says Mercer, “and I needed a new vehicle for this softer stuff.”

But there was something else Mercer needed that he wasn’t getting in Flake Music—autonomy. Apart from the occasional cover tune, all The Shins’ songs are Mercer creations. He has a very distinct vision for what his music should sound like, and he has very definite ideas as to how it should be played. Flake Music formed as a democracy, so the songwriting duties weren’t exclusive to any one member. In The Shins, all musical decisions revert to Mercer; he has complete creative control. The Shins exist to play James Mercer’s songs.

It’s a popular time for bands to be fronts for singer/songwriters a la Iron & Wine or Bright Eyes, but Mercer insists that The Shins aren’t just his hired guns; they’re a real band. “Something about the whole singer/songwriter thing reminds me too much of James Taylor or something,” says Mercer. “Not that that’s a bad thing or whatever, but it’s not the aesthetic that I’m going for or the image that I’m looking for. I really like bands. I want to be in a band.”