James Mercer Quotes

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  • Guitarist
  • born 1970
  • 61 quotes

James Mercer, a guitarist (born 1970), is quoted 61 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Humans, Thinking, Intimacy and Ideas.

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Humans are social creatures that really crave intimacy.

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

I really know so little about recording, and I'm learning as I go.

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

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

I'm not really excited about the idea of committing to anything permanently.

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

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

There's not a lot of thinking that I need to do away from the studio on Broken Bells stuff.

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

I tend to [have] a lot of ideas but then just leave them in that infant form and kind of move on.

Meeting Perry Farrel was kind of cool. He's such an icon, and I was such a fan of Jane's Addiction.

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

One thing that I've struggled with has been a certain amount of animosity toward the whole human race.

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

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

I tend to write a pretty half and half split of, like, slow, morose things and then sort of more upbeat stuff.

Horrible dates are when you're with people who are immature and can't really be comfortable in their own skin.

My whole goal is to make good records and keep myself inspired and able to accomplish what I need to accomplish.

I kinda learned to sing singing to Echo and the Bunnymen songs and Smiths songs: Morrissey would be a big favorite.

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

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.

My dad and I get into it all the time. He loves to discuss politics much more than I do and we have pretty heated conversations.

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.

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 fact that I'm often pushing my voice as hard as I can is from playing in nightclubs in Albuquerque where you don't have a good sound system.

I suppose, if someone was into baseball for an extended period of time during their formative years, they're always going to be interested in it.

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.

I really [enjoy] working with new people and just sort of the freshness of it. ... I [want] to have those new conversations, musically and otherwise.

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.

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.

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.

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've never gone through an audition process or anything. In most of my decisions like that, I just kind of feel it out: You know, do I feel comfortable with this person?

I don't like the idea of a singer-songwriter record. I don't picture myself that way, and it's not my favorite sort of look, I guess. It's really just an aesthetic thing.

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.

I do like talking with friends about big concepts, you know, the stuff that will ruin a party. To me, the party hasn't begun until we're talking about the nonexistence of God.

There's no real reason for me to be so obsessed with trying to understand the true nature of things. You can live a perfectly happy life being utterly confused and not knowing.

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.

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.

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'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.

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've never been one to think it was cheating to sample this or to loop the drum part there - I've always done that. Even using four-track cassette recorders, I was always doing whatever I could to make it as good as I could.

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.

There is pressure that comes with everything being a big deal. I remember thinking, 'I need to survive the Shins. I don't know what I'm going to do to make a living otherwise, but I really don't want to do the Shins right now.'

I think that what's funny is that I seem to be taking up the roles that I remember my dad having - for some reason, I'm the one who makes the coffee, and my dad was always that guy. It's kind of shocking how closely I compare to my dad.

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.

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.

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.

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