▼ Music Before It Was Cool The Shins’ James Mercer looks back 18 years after Garden State. BY KELLY DEARMORE I f you can believe it, it’s been 18 years since Natalie Portman’s character, Sam, im- plored Zach Braff’s Andrew to don a gi- ant set of headphones and listen to a song that would change his life in the 2004 in- die film Garden State. It might be even harder to believe that the song in question, “New Slang” by the Shins, is now not only old enough to vote, but to buy beer. Although the New Mexico-born group led by James Mercer had released a pair of folk-rock inflected, criti- cally acclaimed albums by the time the movie famously promoted the band, it’s safe to say the film and its Grammy-winning soundtrack truly put the group on the map. “You don’t want to be a one-hit wonder, or have that label attached to your name, I suppose,” Mercer says over the phone dur- ing a recent tour stop. “There’s a worry that maybe you’re somehow missing the mark of being able to reproduce your early success. But back then, when the movie came out, I was excited, and now I’m just in the space where I’m thankful that it happened.” Understandably, the Shins frontman has recently been in “looking back” mode. In- spired by advice from his friend and Broken Bells bandmate Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, Mercer released a remastered ver- sion of the album that includes “New Slang,” Oh, Inverted World, in 2021 for its 20th anni- versary. And currently, Mercer is leading the latest lineup for the Shins on a 21st anniver- sary tour, playing the album from start to finish. The Shins will be in Dallas on Tues- day, Aug. 2, to perform at the Factory in Deep Ellum. As technical a process as re- mastering audio recordings can be, for Mer- cer, it was also an emotional one. “Brian Burton felt like the original record was a little quiet compared to the modern stuff that was on the radio around the same time as Oh, Inverted World,” Mercer says. “But I have to admit, when I sat down and listened to some of these songs there were plenty of mo- ments where I felt very sentimental. It’s been such a big part of my life, and in the life of my friends, my bandmates back then.” Concerts that celebrate a specific album by featuring all its songs live have been en vogue for a number of years now, but this is the first time Mercer has gone with such an approach. He says there were songs from that record he had to reacquaint himself with. Two of his cur- rent bandmates, who were not a part of cutting the record over 20 years ago, were key in help- ing Mercer reconnect with a couple of deep tracks with which he’d lost touch. “The song I was most worried about was ‘Your Algebra,’” he says. “Luckily, our drum- mer, John Sortland, came up with this cool beat, so now it’s one of my favorite tracks. And ‘The Celibate Life,’ which we really never played live except for very early on, is THURS OCT. 27 DICKIES ARENA, FORT WORTH Hipster fandom was a mixed blessing for The Shins, says frontman James Mercer. Frank Ockenfels difficult to do live because it has an intricate guitar solo and a strong rhythm deal where shifting between the two was difficult. But now we have Mark Watrous on guitar, so we can pull off anything. Now I really look for- ward to playing that song, too.” Thinking back to when Garden State sent the band into a bigger realm of popularity also makes Mercer remember some of the downsides to greater fame. When the band’s third album, Wincing the Night Away, which was the first Shins al- bum following the movie, de- buted at No. 2 on the Bill- board 200 chart, selling a whopping 118,000 copies “WHEN YOU GET BIG EARLY IN YOUR CAREER, THE HIPSTERS WHO LIKED YOU BEFORE ALL THAT DON’T LIKE YOU ANYMORE” – JAMES MERCER in its first week, there was a shift, and it wasn’t all necessarily positive. Mercer imme- diately knew some early band adopters were fleeing the ship, even as many others were jumping on. “When you get big early in your career, the hipsters who liked you before all that don’t like you anymore,” Mercer says. “They think you’ve jumped the shark. It’s a strange feeling because you feel like you’ve lost a certain part of the audience that was critical to your success before. We were successful, but we weren’t getting the buzz kind of talk anymore, and we were too big for the hip- sters. It’s a funny situation.” In a way, it’s al- most refreshing to hear an acclaimed artist as accomplished as Mercer admit to things such as caring about finicky music snobs. It’s all too easy for A-list festival headliners to come off as unbothered by the public or unmindful of the opinions of others. Per- haps it shouldn’t be surprising that an in- sightful songwriter of Mercer’s caliber would have any qualms over admitting vul- nerability. “For me, there’s a personal fragility that’s never gone away,” Mercer says. “Just be- cause you’ve sold a certain number of re- cords, people have a tendency to think of you as something impervious.” Just as any discussion of Oh, Inverted World must include Garden State and the band’s critical breakthrough with “New Slang,” so too must that discussion include Mercer’s reality as barely an aspiring musi- cian leading up to that point. He admits that he regrets how Warner Brothers kept the re- cord from being released in Japan for some reason he’s still not sure about. But beyond that, Mercer acknowledges that 22 years ago, even talking about traveling to Japan, let alone selling records there, is “farther afield from where I was and what I was thinking back then when I wrote those songs.” Just before The Shins changed Mercer’s life in a major way, he’d made a deal with his parents that he would give himself one more year to make something big happen with his music. It was in that year that “New Slang” would come to life, and his vision for the fu- ture began to take on new forms. Looking back on that time, he doesn’t sound like a man who escaped a depressing alternate ending as much as one who can look back and know he traded in one pleasant exis- tence for another type of enviable path. “I definitely wondered about my definition of success back then before ‘New Slang,’ be- cause I was in my late 20s,” he says. “I had nothing else going on, and I remember think- ing I would probably end up living in Taos, New Mexico, playing and recording music on some small scale. I pictured a very modest sort of life and I remember being happy with that.” WIN TICKETS! A PAIR OF DALLASOBSERVER.COM/ FREE/CHRISSTAPLETON 115 dallasobserver.com dallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUTZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 AUGUST 4 - 10, 2022
