KEY POINTS:
There's a challenge when it comes to talking to James Mercer of touring American indie leading lights the Shins.
It's not that Mercer isn't forthcoming - on the phone from the band's adopted home of Portland, Oregon for our allotted 15 minutes, he comes across as a deeply
pleasant guy.
No, the test is to see whether we can go the quarter hour without talking about her*. We're not referring to his wife or his baby daughter, born just a month or two ago and making a bid for his attention in the background.
As it turns out, we pass the test. There are, after all, other matters to discuss about the band in the aftermath of Wincing the Night Away, the group's biggest selling and best album yet.
With the album entering the American album charts at No. 2 and selling more than 100,000 copies on its first week of release, it seems the Shins have gone from underground favourites to something else.
"I think a few people heard this record and it was something that suited their taste better than our other two and at the same time we probably lost a few fans because it was different. I think that we have slowly been building the public knowledge about us out there, and this release I think [record label] SubPop took very seriously, got behind it, did a great job marketing it and it ended up working pretty well."
So how is Mercer coping with the extra attention?
"It's funny. It's one of those things that you worry about - that you are going to get into an area where you are out of your depth or something. I don't know if that has happened. Really, in a lot of ways it doesn't seem that much has changed. Maybe the shows are a little bigger but it's still the same sort of thing - we travel on a bus and get out and play [a] show and go on to the next place. It's not like there [are] a bunch of celebrities hanging out backstage or anything."
The album presented something of a musical departure from its predecessors. It came with more pronounced use of keyboards for the previously largely guitar-powered quartet - now a quintet live - bringing with it comparisons to the sounds of the 80s.
"I've always had that - people have always brought up the 80s every band I have ever been in. Maybe I am just stuck in the 80s - I was a teenager in the late 80s probably when you develop your aesthetic.
"Most of it was probably written the same old way - I just tend to hang out on the couch with my acoustic guitar and work things out. But I have consciously been trying to get away from guitar-driven songs ... trying to strip things away."
Mercer also blames those formative years for his oddball opaque and lyrics of strangely antiquated vocabulary.
"I know I always loved Echo and the Bunnymen and Ian McCulloch's lyrics. There was something really romantic about them, very sort of rich and visual and I think I maybe aspired to do stuff like that. It's funny, as I get familiar with other artists, especially older artists like Neil Young, I'm realising there are a lot of people out there who have used a lot of metaphor, visual metaphors and so I am always attracted to that sort of writing."
And the off-kilter language of the songs might help explain some of the appeal of the Shins too.
"I hope so. That would be cool. It's just an added boost if you have a melodically beautiful song and engaging interesting stuff going on, and then when you realise what the lyrics mean or at least you put your own meaning in there and it works, it's pretty powerful. So that would be a great compliment to me if you did like the lyrics."
Even if one song is called, ahem, Australia ...
It wasn't actually inspired by the West Island.
"No I put together the main part while I was on tour in Australia which rarely happens so the working title was Australia and then for some reason I couldn't figure out a proper title for it so the working title just stuck, which is probably the lamest story about titling a song.
"That's okay. We'll call it New Zealand while we're there."
* Natalie Portman whose character in Zach Braff's 2004 movie Garden State, on which Shins songs featured heavily, proclaimed one of the band's songs would change your life. The band's profile subsequently rose and she has been mentioned in every interview the band have done since. Except this one.
Lowdown
Who: The Shins
Formed: 1997, Albuquerque, New Mexico (now based in Portland, Oregon).
Albums: When You Land Here It's Time To Return (1997); Oh, Inverted World (2001), Chutes Too Narrow (2003), Wincing the Night Away (2007)
Playing: Powerstation, Eden Terrace (all ages show) supported by Ruby Suns, Wednesday August 1
