James Mercer Quotes
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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.
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The Shins is, in a way, a recording project that turned into a live band. So I don't really keep myself beholden to any rules when I'm in the studio for Shins. I just gotta get it done as best I can.
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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.
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My attempt at really doing classic sort of songwriting is Shins stuff.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As a child, I lived in Germany at the Ramstein air force base, where my dad sang at a nightclub in Kaiserslautern. My parents couldn't afford a babysitter, so when I was, like, ten or 11, I would go with them to the bar until two in the morning.
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The love you have for your kids is so overwhelmingly powerful that it alters your perspective. The dark things going on in the world become very poignant and vivid.
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I think perfect dates involve walking a lot, and not a bunch of driving around in cars. Ideally, you can walk together and go to a restaurant, and then walk from there to another nice place - this is, I guess, because of really great dates that I've had with my wife here in Portland.
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I really know so little about recording, and I'm learning as I go.
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I'm real happy. I've been lucky in love, and I've got a wonderful kid now, and things have been going well.
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My hope is that one day I'll be able to work and have a quieter life, but still a creative life.
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My whole goal is to make good records and keep myself inspired and able to accomplish what I need to accomplish.
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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.
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Until having kids, I had never really thought about mortality so much.
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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.
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The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.
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I was a regular dork. I was a kid who was scrawny and all that, and probably kind of dumb or something. I wasn't unordinary; I wasn't extraordinary.
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If you're 14 and you're skinny, you can't be on the football team, basically. It's just not even really possible. But skating is something that you can do that gets that athletic urge satisfied, but you get to do it on your own terms. You can be as ballsy as you want to be. It was perfect for me.
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Lyrically, I think I'm frustrated with this whole process of trying to figure out what I believe about the world and life. I don't like to adopt a sort of guiding philosophy.
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I have no ethics when it comes to art. You just do what you can to make it as beautiful as you can.
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Life is sad. People, you know, are going to pass, and you know that you will one day.
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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.