Will the Shins’ new Wincing the Night Away change your life? It just might.
By Mikael Wood

Plenty of hip young rock bands can brag about having movie stars in their audience, but fewer are able to claim movie characters as fans. That’s what the Shins can say, though: When Natalie Portman’s Sam meets Zach Braff’s Andrew in a doctor’s waiting room in 2004’s Garden State, she puts her headphones on his head and announces that a tune by the Portland-based quartet will change his life. And so it does: In no time, Andrew has ditched his retiring, sensitive-guy attitude and taken to running through airports in order to kiss beautiful women. As it happens, Garden State changed more than Braff’s character’s life; it also turned the Shins into one of the most popular indie-rock groups in America. We called front man James Mercer shortly before the release of the band’s third album, Wincing the Night Away, and asked him about the warmth of Hollywood’s embrace.

Was the exposure Garden State gave your band immediately apparent? Was it something you could notice in real time? We certainly noticed that we had a bigger audience. When Garden State came out and became a hit, we saw our record sales increase, and we got invitations to go to colleges and play at their end-of-the-year festivals — things that hadn’t happened before. It changed our whole level.

Did it transform the composition of your ­audience? Something like that opens a door to listeners who don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet or shop at independent record stores, the typical ways indie-rock bands find new fans. Well, we’ve always had a very eclectic mix of people; there are just more of them now. But I suppose there definitely must be new sorts of fans. Maybe they listen to alternative radio but not to podcasts or to college radio — people who aren’t avid indie-rock concertgoers.

Is that a gratifying development? I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. There are those times when good music is appealing to a broad spectrum of personalities. But the idea that we have a broader audience hasn’t changed the way that I write songs. It’s more about people finding a way to learn not only about the Shins but also about the fact that there is this whole other section of the music industry that is thriving. And all it requires is a little bit of attention and curiosity, and you can discover this pop music that’s maybe not quite as slick or as glossed-over as the mainstream stuff.

Wincing the Night Away is surprisingly un-slick. I half expected you guys to capitalize on the Garden State renown and do a really straightforward alt-rock record. But you didn’t; the new stuff is kind of spooky and weird. My intentions, I guess, were to just sort of fully flesh out the songs that I had put together. “Sleeping Lessons,” for instance, is probably one of the stranger songs on the record. The main riff could be a bass line from an old rock-and-roll song, but because of the dissonant note that it hits, it has this modern feel. So I turned it into this keyboard sound and then started trying to figure out what to do with it. And it just led itself down that path, which is the way I always write. Not much of it is really intentional.

Sometimes an accessible song with an ­off-­kilter touch is more compelling than … Something totally crazy? I think so too. Wilco is one of those bands that seem to do that pretty well, where the basic structure of the song is familiar in some way, but then they do crazy production ideas and it’s really effective. I love the Beatles and the masters of pop writing, but I also love the fact that a band like the Beatles was so willing to experiment and do these things that were maybe more cerebrally entertaining.

Is making those two sides mesh something you can improve at with experience? I think so. I think I’ve certainly gotten more intuitive about the whole process. It’s strange, though, because you look at the careers of so many pop artists, and they just seem to dwindle so quickly; 20 years into it, they’re doing such mundane, boring stuff. I suppose they ride such a wave of luxury and of all their wishes coming true that maybe it just makes them lazy. I don’t know — I hope it never happens to me.