James Mercer Ready to Handle Shins Success

Posted on Jun 30th 2010 12:00PM by Steve Baltin
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Since the Shins' last album, 'Wincing the Night Away,' was released in January 2007, frontman James Mercer has teamed with Danger Mouse for Broken Bells and collaborated with friend Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock and Mason Jennings for the '180° South' soundtrack. But even with Broken Bells continuing to tour this year and the duo having already promised there will be a second album, Mercer says the Shins are still getting back to work in 2010.

"September, I have some time to work on Shins stuff," he tells Spinner. The absence, according to Mercer, was less about the Shins and more about Mercer learning to handle the band's success. "The Shins have slowly been having more and more people come into it and all of this has just been a process for me of getting more comfortable as an artist and just as a person."

For him, Broken Bells was a part of that. "Doing this Broken Bells thing was another one of those steps where it's opening up and standing on my own," Mercer says, noting he's also enjoyed working with different musicians. "It is really fun and there is an amount of inspiration that comes from working with other people. Being around somebody who has a very different musical sense, it's really cool."

The collaboration with Brock has also been a boon to Mercer. "Isaac lives down the street from me and the stuff Emmett [Malloy] was telling me he'd like for the movie was stuff that I felt that Isaac was better-suited doing," Mercer says. " I knew Isaac would be into the project, so I brought up the idea of using Isaac. It was really kind of a great thing to have him there because he did a lot of really cool stuff. Logistically, it worked really well."