James Mercer
James Mercer
James Russell Merceris an American guitarist and musician. He is the founder, vocalist, lead singer-songwriter, and sole remaining original member of the indie rock group The Shins. In 2009, Mercer and producer Danger Mouse formed the side project Broken Bells, for which they released a self-titled album in March 2010, followed by After the Disco in 2014. Mercer has also acted, appearing in Matt McCormick's feature film Some Days Are Better Than Others, which premiered in 2010...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth26 December 1970
CityHonolulu, HI
CountryUnited States of America
I remember being in high school, and you had to draw those lines and define yourself. I don't think when I was in high school I would have been willing to admit that I liked the Shins. I was into TSOL and Black Flag. I probably would have listened to the Shins secretly in my bedroom.
I kissed my first girl when I was 15, and then I lost my virginity when I was 17. So that's pretty good. It was just that when you're in high school, you're sort of forced into the normal world, where you're competing with the football players, just kind of in that world where somebody like me didn't quite fit in.
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.
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 kinda learned to sing singing to Echo and the Bunnymen songs and Smiths songs: Morrissey would be a big favorite.
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'm trying to avoid having regrets about missing opportunities. That would be the worst thing. Like having an audience waiting, and not working hard enough, and coming out with a record that disappointed them.
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.
Until having kids, I had never really thought about mortality so much.
You have to keep the recording process open. If you make too many decisions before you go in, you can lose out on those serendipitous moments that can really make a record, that I think are always required in the making of a really good record.
There's not a lot of thinking that I need to do away from the studio on Broken Bells stuff.
I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.
The way I was brought up, there was a little bit of prodding to do something more practical, and I wasted a lot of time trying to be a practical person.
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.