James Mercer

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.

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.

I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.

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.

The thing that inspires me most is empathizing with people's flaws and seeing how they deal with them. That sort of connection you feel with someone when you realize that maybe even the negative things that they've said or done are because of insecurities or injuries they've endured.

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.

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.

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.

For some reason, it seems like pop writers, it's like they just get worse or something over time. And then you're really jealous of movie directors whose careers seem to grow and they'll be 70 years old and still doing these incredible jobs. I'm going to reverse that, I hope.

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.

I've always sort of felt like what the Shins is, I guess, is a vehicle for my writing.

I was really shy as a kid.

My hope is that one day I'll be able to work and have a quieter life, but still a creative life.

Until having kids, I had never really thought about mortality so much.

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 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.

My attempt at really doing classic sort of songwriting is Shins stuff.

My dad was a Navy munitions officer, and by the end of his career, he was a specialist in nuclear weapons.

I'm real happy. I've been lucky in love, and I've got a wonderful kid now, and things have been going well.

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.