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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. "

James Mercer

Myself

Time

Music

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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. "

James Mercer

Things

Pretty

" 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. "

" I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording. "

James Mercer

People

Together

" 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. "

" Maybe it's just parenthood that puts you in a situation where you just have to develop a new attitude, I guess, about things. "

" The part of modern pop music I don't know much about is hip hop. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Life is sad. People, you know, are going to pass, and you know that you will one day. "

" 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. "

James Mercer

Alone

Beginning

" My dad was a Navy munitions officer, and by the end of his career, he was a specialist in nuclear weapons. "

James Mercer

Career

Nuclear Weapons

" 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. "

" I was really shy as a kid. "

" I have no ethics when it comes to art. You just do what you can to make it as beautiful as you can. "

" There's not a lot of thinking that I need to do away from the studio on Broken Bells stuff. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

James Mercer

Experience

Collaboration

" My attempt at really doing classic sort of songwriting is Shins stuff. "

" 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. "

" I kinda learned to sing singing to Echo and the Bunnymen songs and Smiths songs: Morrissey would be a big favorite. "

" I've always sort of felt like what the Shins is, I guess, is a vehicle for my writing. "

James Mercer

Always

Vehicle

" 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. "

" I'm real happy. I've been lucky in love, and I've got a wonderful kid now, and things have been going well. "

" 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. "