Explore Quotes by James Mercer

I have no ethics when it comes to art. You just do what you can to make it as beautiful as you can.

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

Collaboration is something I missed at one point in The Shins. I really wanted to have that experience again, you know, not having everything rely on me. I wanted to have a partner.

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

I was really shy as a kid.

Maybe it's just parenthood that puts you in a situation where you just have to develop a new attitude, I guess, about things.

We played a festival in Ireland once, and in the middle of 'New Slang,' the Scissor Sisters kicked in across the field on this mega stage. It was a little distracting. It was hard to keep track of what I was supposed to sing.

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.

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.

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.

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 think perfect dates involve walking a lot, and not a bunch of driving around in cars. Ideally, you can walk together and go to a restaurant, and then walk from there to another nice place - this is, I guess, because of really great dates that I've had with my wife here in Portland.

Life is sad. People, you know, are going to pass, and you know that you will one day.

The love you have for your kids is so overwhelmingly powerful that it alters your perspective. The dark things going on in the world become very poignant and vivid.

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

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.

The part of modern pop music I don't know much about is hip hop.

So happy that Broken Bells is a thing in my life and really cool in so many ways. Not only, like, as something to sell records and be a band and whatnot, but just to give me an outlet and give me a fresh approach on things.

I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.

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.