Conquering Stage Fright Through Giving Much Less Of A Shit Than He Used To

Life seems to be rolling along pretty nicely for The Shins frontman and creative mainstay James Mercer of late.

Touring for the band's fifth album Heartworms - which came out earlier this year - is progressing nicely, the current incarnation of The Shins is gelling into a tight and cohesive unit, and on the personal front Mercer is loving fatherhood and relishing family life with his wife and three young daughters.

When The Music catches up with the singer-songwriter, he's happily ensconced in the home studio he built recently in an old carriage house out the back of his Portland abode - where the bulk of Heartworms was conceived and laid down - and he seems genuinely psyched about the sonic possibilities this new set-up affords him moving forward.

"It's kind of my little play box or whatever, it's just cool," Mercer smiles. "It's nicely appointed. I think I will [do a lot of work here moving forward], it worked really well for this record and the subsequent recordings we've done out here were really fun; there was nothing wanting I don't think.

"We ended up doing a bunch of recording with the new band, just because I was really enjoying working with them, so we got together and rerecorded the whole record in as different a way as we could on each song: we just did it as the opposite production for each one. So we've definitely put the hours in out here already."

Sorry, did you just say that you re-recorded the album again? Differently? "Yep," Mercer beams. "So after Heartworms was completed with me producing it, I had a conversation with my wife and she said that she really thought it would be cool if I recorded an acoustic version of the record, and then we could do whatever with it: release it as B-sides or put it out as a whole separate piece for collectors and fans, I guess.

"Then I started going about the process of doing that - because I thought it was a great idea - and then I realised, 'Well some of the songs are already acoustic, so what do I do with those? Well, let's do them in the opposite way!' So if it's a rock song it might be recorded in an electronic way or whatever, and we're going to put it out on Columbia and it's going to be called 'The Worm's Heart'. It'll be interesting for fans of the record - they're very different versions, so that's what's kind of cool."

Heartworms itself was a slightly different beast in tone to its predecessor albums by The Shins - diverting away from the band's signature indie-folk sound, while retaining the core characteristics - and Mercer believes that shift has everything to do with him taking back control in the studio for the album.

"I think it's sort of something that happened because of my amateur-ish production abilities," he chuckles. "I've got better equipment now, but I've still got this sort of collage aesthetic where things end up piling up and then I have to sort of get in and delete things. And it's also, I think, because of [The Shins' bassist] Yuuki Matthews' mixing techniques: he takes my piles of ideas and he did a terrific job sort of sorting them out.

"Interestingly, he also mixed the whole record down to cassette - the Heartworms album is a cassette tape that was then mastered for vinyl; that gives it a certain sound, for sure. We tried doing it straight in the traditional way and both of us preferred the cassette version."

Mercer admits that "it was nice" having the production reins back again having partially ceded creative control for the band's last album (2012's Port Of Morrow), but concedes that recent forays with side-project Broken Bells also played a part. "I had done Port Of Morrow with [co-producer] Greg Kurstin and it was a great success for us - maybe the best record we'd done - but except for working with Brian [Burton, aka Danger Mouse], he's the producer on the Broken Bells stuff, it had been a while," he allows. "I did the first [2010 self-titled] Broken Bells record with Brian producing, then I did The Shins record with Greg producing and then we did another Broken Bells record [2014's After The Disco] with Brian producing so, yeah! It was a while since I'd been at the reins, really, and it was fun.

"It's a whole different thing: there's a lot more pressure involved, honestly. I think when I hired Greg it was really to get out from under some of that pressure, and he did carry the load and it was nice. But you've got to have the time, too — for someone like me who's really an amateur at engineering and recording. So I needed to sit and I needed to learn, and I needed to read all the manuals and all that stuff again.

"I think that working with Brian I gained a new respect for percussion, and the modern kinda way that Brian and Kennie [Takahashi - engineer] do things - it's really effective. I think I gained that understanding from working with Brian, for sure. There's probably more I could have learned from working with Brian and Kennie, but that was the main thing: clarity, sonic clarity. That's still something I struggle with."

With your own studio, is there a tendency to sit there indeterminately and go mad in the quest for that perfect sound? "Oh, yeah," Mercer admits, "and that's something that I've got to stay on top of [laughs]. We'll be in the middle of final mixing and I'll be, like, 'Oh, I need to rerecord those vocal parts' - eventually you just have to call it. Brian even gets frustrated with me about that!"

Sonics aside, does Mercer feel that Heartworms is a strong batch of songs, which has parlayed into them being fun to play on stage? "Oh yeah," he enthuses, "and I'm happy with the sound, too; the sound of it is something that appeals to me. I don't want to sound like I'm dissing the sound quality, because I do love it and I'm very proud of it," he continues. "But, yeah, I'm still really stoked on the songs and I'm still having a great time performing them. We've been out there doing it live for a while this year and we're all having a great time.

"I'm having more fun on the road than I have in the past. Maybe that's partly due to my kids getting a little older, and having a more manageable hold on that relationship with my family; I don't know why. I think maybe I give a shit less than I used to in a certain way? I'm less self-conscious on stage, and that's been a real breath of fresh air to me to not always get up there and have this kinda intense stage fright."

Has becoming a father perhaps changed his life priorities a bit? "Probably, although I think I'm maybe the worst person at self-analysing my psychology," he ponders. "I have attitudes and opinions or feelings about things and I just kind of go with them. Lately, I would say that it certainly has something to do with time, but maybe my priorities are shifting and I'm not really feeling as vulnerable to the social whims of society because I've got other concerns."

The Shins' line-up has changed considerably over the years — Mercer being the only remaining member from their 2001 debut Oh, Inverted World, and with only Matthews remaining from the far-more-recent Port Of Morrow — but Mercer seems delighted with the current version of the band. "Yeah, totally," he agrees, without reservation. "The other day I had to jump on a plane and go to Reno, Nevada because Jon [Sortland], our drummer, and I were going to work on some video stuff, and two days later the rest of the band showed up - the other four members - and it was like we'd totally missed each other! We'd been out on tour for months and we still missed each other, it was great to catch up!

"It's really funny, we have such a great time. We wake up in the morning and it's, like, 'Ok, where are we going to go for breakfast?' and all six of us go; it's kind of ridiculous, but it's great. We're just having a good time, and everybody's on the same wavelength as far as the amount of partying we want to do and the amount of activities we want to get involved in, and also the amount of rest we want to have. At some point that becomes a consideration. Just getting along is so important in this scenario, and we're getting along great."

Given how content Mercer seems with his lot, it seems hard to reconcile his current state of mind with Heartworms' pivotal closing track The Fear - a song that Mercer has been trying to finish for nearly a decade, partially chronicling his formerly rampant anxieties - but Mercer says that confronting his demons in slightly fabricated form works wonders for both the song and his psyche.

"You know, I think I've been writing songs - or trying - since about 1989, probably, but in my late 20s I figured out a little trick that works for me: if I'm honest about something I'm able to express the thought far better than if I'm just trying to make something up," he reveals. "It's almost like a trick that I learned, and that song has almost a combination of both in admitting that I'm sometimes afraid... of life in general, of people, of the future, of my own mortality, my kids' mortality - all of that.

"Then a bit of it is a character that I'm thinking of, this person who has allowed the fear to really mess up their life and they've ended up with regrets because of it. So it's a combination of both - something hypothetical and something real - and that's what makes it so powerful, but also so liberating."