Why did the original line-up of The Shins fall apart?
To the head-scratching confusion of fans and associates, The Shins frontman James Mercer decided to sack off the entire founding line-up in 2009 and carry on as the sole original member.
Forged in Albuquerque in the late 1990s, The Shins’ indie rock songcraft would see the band sail to swift acclaim and win a dedicated fanbase, signing to Seattle’s famed Sub Pop label, and thrust into mainstream attention by two of their songs included on 2004’s Garden State soundtrack. It appeared that whatever alchemy was shared between the band was working more than anyone could have expected.
Following 2007’s Wincing the Night Away, an exhaustion had struck Mercer, claiming the years poured into the band had begun to take their toll. Such fatigue had also taken a personal dimension, the creative pressures allegedly compounded by the maintenance of old friendships and internal dynamics within The Shins.
After an artistic spell with Danger Mouse for the Broken Bells project, a renewed approach prompted Mercer to part ways with longtime bandmates Dave Hernandez, Martin Crandall, and Jesse Sandoval, stating such a drastic measure was purely “an aesthetic decision”.
Something was in the air beforehand; however, former drummer Sandoval sensed a major vibe shift when playing some festive radio shows together, the last as the original Shins. “I definitely remember walking offstage and calling my girlfriend and saying, ‘I don’t know why, but I just have a feeling like this is it,” he recalled to Portland Mercury. “’I feel like this is probably my last Shins show.’ And it wasn’t coming from my end, I just had this feeling.”
Sure enough, several weeks later, an email arrived from Mercer detailing a need to explore other ventures and avenues, and coy about the timeframe his ostensible hiatus was going to take. According to Sandoval, both The Shins’ manager and business manager had both hinted at expecting as much as a year and a half off from band duties.
There’s never been an explicit breakdown of Mercer’s motives, but the guesses among fans were a simple, if pretty brutal, need to shake off old ways of playing and former dynamics he felt impeded the creative vim The Shins needed to evolve. It still didn’t make the severance any less painful and confusing for the team.
“I fucking loaded the van and I did all the driving,” Sandoval stressed. “I had a vested interest in this. It seems really petty when I start to do a laundry list of what I’m held accountable for, but in turn, I have a laundry list as well that I want to hold someone else accountable for. So I was really disappointed. All that invested to not make sure that I was famous or a rock star and got a paycheque, but that it ran smoothly.”
It’s become a pivot in The Shins’ oeuvre, their legacy largely split into before and after the break-up. “It was tremendously difficult,” Mercer told Spin. “I don’t like disappointing people, so it was just excruciating, but I felt I needed to do it.”
Whether a comfort to Sandoval and the rest of the bandmates or just an extra layer of bewilderment, Mercer maintained a wish to keep alive the possibility of further collaborations down the line. “I try not to think about it as a firing as much as a new phase in the process,” he concluded. “I’m telling you, there are things those guys can do that no one else can do. If a song needs them, that’s what it’s gotta have, if they’re willing.”
