If the United States of America had a Minister of Arts & Culture, he or she could have easily declared January 2007 to be National Shins Month. In the days surrounding the January 23 release of their third Sub Pop album, Wincing The Night Away, the band was everywhere you turned: on “Saturday Night Live”, “David Letterman”, the highly influential KCRW radio show “Morning Becomes Eclectic”. Three days after the album hit stores, the band performed at Amoeba Records in Hollywood; the fire department showed up, and hundreds of fans were turned away.
“There is a lot of giggling,” says multi-instrumentalist Eric Johnson. Network TV green rooms are still unfamiliar territory for the band. “It is slightly surreal. Actually, more than a little surreal.”
Crowning all the hoopla, the disc sold 118,000 copies in its first week of release, entering the Billboard Top 200 album sales chart in the #2 position. (Previously, the Shins had reached no higher than #86.) Not quite Beatlemania, but similarly seismic by the more modest standards of indie rock.
Countless groups dream of this kind of excitement. The Shins, however, did not. When their debut album, Oh! Inverted World, was issued in 2001, they had nary a notion of what lay ahead.
“I can confidently say that [back then], the Shins had no idea that things would get to this point,” says bassist Dave Hernandez, who had actually stepped away the band temporarily when that first record was made. “We were all from Albuquerque, and our vision was, maybe we can put out a record and play around town.” Save some dough, buy a van, do some cross-country touring. Nothing big. “Just be a working band.”
Sharing the small screen with an Oscar nominee? Not part of the plan. But now James Mercer, the Shins’ singer, songwriter, guitarist and leader, finds himself bumping into Brokeback Mountain star Jake Gyllenhaal even when an SNL appearance it isn’t on his itinerary. “I had a dream last night that my sister burst into my room, and she was 12 years old again; she’s really only a couple years younger than me,” says Mercer, 36. “Anyway, she came in, yelling, ‘Jake Gyllenhaal is here to see you!’ And there he was, pulling up in the driveway in his car.”
Put it another way: The Shins may well be the first No Depression cover act your adolescent niece in the suburbs has heard of and cares about. As well she should.
On Wincing The Night Away, Mercer and his cohorts — Hernandez, drummer Jesse Sandoval, and keyboard player Marty Crandall — marry the experimental leanings of their 2001 debut with the immediacy of its 2003 follow-up, Chutes Too Narrow. The album eschews obvious pop gestures, yet proves inarguably catchy regardless, primarily because of the attention to detail lavished on each song, in the inventive melodies, arrangements and performances.
The first track, “Sleeping Lessons”, opens with just Mercer’s spectral singing and a rippling keyboard arpeggio, blossoming ever so gradually into a robust rock anthem. On the exquisite miniature “Red Rabbits”, pedal steel (courtesy Chris Funk of the Decemberists) and swooning strings dance a seductive pas de deux.
Elsewhere, crisp drums and two-note bass figures punctuate “Spilt Needles”, while “Sea Legs” tacks down a bittersweet vocal with a woozy hip-hop beat. It’s easy to appreciate why fans bond so powerfully with the Shins; at their best, these compositions sound as though they have been waiting for ages to be discovered, treasured, shared.
In truth, while the creation of Wincing didn’t last a lifetime, it did stretch out longer than intended. Originally penciled in for summer 2006, it was postponed repeatedly, in order to ensure it was completed to its authors’ specifications, and timed for arrival at an opportune moment in the marketplace (i.e. not during the year-end holiday crush).
But before the record was ready for even a tentative release date, there had been delays. Following the success of Chutes Too Narrow, which sold roughly 400,000 copies, Mercer’s life took on the twists of a soap-opera storyline. There was a bad breakup. Denizens in the crack house next door to his Portland, Oregon, home decided he had called the police on them, and began threatening his life. Burglars busted in, ransacked his place, and made off with precious master tapes.
Though the band was in constant communication, there were periods when Mercer remained relatively secluded. The others could only assume he was writing a new record. “There are definitely those stretches,” admits Hernandez. “But there are also ones where we know he’s working hard.” Over the years, they have grown accustomed to Mercer’s methods. Besides, adds the bassist, even when the frontman thinks he isn’t cultivating new ideas, he is.
“There are tons of bands that write material on the road,” Hernandez observes. “I know James believes he can’t do that. And that is kind of true…but half of the riffs on Wincing The Night Away were composed during tours. Not full songs, but the riffs. They just came up while we were hanging out, and we’d try them out during soundcheck. So it’s not like James is completely divorced from that creative process, even on the road.”
