The Shins' wheel of good fortune

The indie band's label has high hopes for new CD. But will the big-shipment gamble pay off?

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, January 23, 2007

On Jan. 13, the popular indie rockers the Shins performed on "Saturday Night Live." For their first song, the Portland-based band played "Phantom Limb," the single from their new album "Wincing the Night Away."

It's a tuneful slice of guitar pop, complete with sing-along hooks and singer/songwriter James Mercer's almost British-sounding everyguy voice lilting over the music. It sounded good and fans were looking forward to hearing what the second song would be, seeing as how "Wincing," a sharp, complicated pop album that arrives in stores today, is easily one of the year's most anticipated albums. (About 241,000 copies were shipped to stores, by far the biggest placement SubPop has ever done and something of a roll of the dice for SubPop. According to label officials, you'll be able to find this album in Starbucks and Whole Foods, both firsts for the Seattle-based label that gave us Nirvana and Mudhoney.)

So the Shins' second song on "SNL" was . . . "New Slang," the tune that everyone knows from a McDonald's ad to radio play to a critical soundtrack moment in the sensitive-young-person cult smash movie "Garden State." It's the Shins song that your mom probably recognizes. Yeah, that one.

A few days later, Mercer sighs a little when he discusses the "SNL" experience. "For the most part, it went very well," he says. "We rehearse during the week, then we play the songs in front of a full audience during the dress rehearsal, then they get a new audience in and we do it for real. But you do it so many times that the live version doesn't feel all that different from any other time. They create a very relaxed atmosphere, which is a little different from the nightly shows like 'Letterman' and 'Conan.' Those are produced so fast that it's like, 'OK, get out there and do your song.' "

(The Shins play "The Late Show With David Letterman" tonight. As on "SNL," they'll be joined on backing vocals by Portland pal Anita Robinson, guitarist and singer for indie rock fellow travellers Viva Voce.)

" 'SNL' really wanted us to play 'New Slang,' which is a seven-year-old song." Mercer continues. "We were like, 'Is there any way we can play something else from the new album?' Nope."

The band couldn't have been that surprised. The popularity of "New Slang" — and the band's resultant success — is emblematic of the new realities for independent rock bands. Gone are the days when the fortunes of such acts rose and fell on the whims of college radio, fanzine buzz, namechecks from bigger bands and a willingness to tour endlessly.

These days, there are an infinite number of outlets through which a band can be heard or discussed. While mainstream commercial radio is still a wildly expensive nut for indie labels to try to crack, Internet buzz and enthusiastic bloggers can spread the word on a band quite literally overnight. Where movie studios, producers of television shows and ad agencies were once mostly disinterested in independent rock bands, now soundtracks are often built with underknown acts. (Death Cab for Cutie, indie stalwarts now on a major label, gained an incalculable amount of exposure from repeated songs on "The O.C.")

Licensing a song for an ad no longer carries the social stigma it once bore. TV shows such as "Gilmore Girls" (on which the Shins have appeared) and "Veronica Mars" (on which Spoon songwriter Britt Daniel appeared) are aimed squarely at the right demographic.

Ten years ago, when indie guitar bands were reeling from the collapse of the alternative rock boom, nobody could have predicted a band such as the Shins — which barely existed at the time — would be in this position. They sold more than 500,000 copies of their 2003 album "Chutes Too Narrow," and are about as successful as you can be under these new realities.

But is this the only way an indie band can get famous? Is it all buzz, soundtrack appearances and McDonald's ads? Or in the end, does the record still have to be, you know, good?

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Mercer has been in this game a long time. He's 36, came up with the name Shins in '96 and began recording Shins songs as a side project to his main band Flake Music a year later. Flake Music broke up, and Mercer and some of his bandmates became full-time Shins. They signed with SubPop in 2000.

Mercer's wife, writer Marisa Kula, is expecting their first child and he doesn't have the gimlet-eyed attitude about his profession possessed by many indie bands.

"I've always had a more pragmatic sort of approach," Mercer says. "I never had these fantasies of being a rock star. Never."

It became clear fairly early on in the Shins' career that their ornate keyboard and guitar pop could appeal to a larger audience than the indie rock faithful. In 2002, "New Slang," from the band's 2001 debut "Oh, Inverted World," appeared in a McDonald's ad. Some fans were not real thrilled.

"Maybe the type of people you're exposed to in that situation are not the type you might think of as indie rock fans," Mercer says. "But, and maybe this just means I wasn't as sophisticated as other music fans, I just never subscribed to those sort of ideas about 'selling out.' Growing up in New Mexico, you're just not exposed to the whole inner workings of the music business. We had friends of friends of friends that were signed and I heard they had done an ad and gotten thousands of dollars from it. That was amazing to me. And it's not like we openly solicited this sort of thing. These folks came to us."

The tune "Know Your Onion" showed up on the second season of "Gilmore Girls," and Mercer wrote some music for a Gap ad. "Frankly, licensing has put our music in front of more people than making CDs," Mercer says.

Jen Czeisler handles licensing issues for SubPop and has seen the growth in indie rock licensing first hand.

"In the past couple of years, it's become much easier to put independent music on soundtracks," she says. "It used to be that I would talk to major studios and they'd say, 'I'm a huge fan of (one-time SubPop band) Sebadoh, but I can't put Sebadoh on this album because I need someone who's already sold millions of albums.' "

It wasn't until the 2004 movie "Garden State," in which Natalie Portman told Zach Braff that the Shins, and "New Slang" in particular, would "change your life," that things exploded for the Shins. "Chutes Too Narrow" was released in '03 and the band was coming off the road from promoting that album when it became clear that Portman's character was acting as the Shins' publicist.

"I had intended not touring anymore on 'Chutes,' " Mercer says. "But we started getting these offers that you couldn't pass up and getting these chances to meet these new fans." So they went back on the road, which halted any potential work on the new album.

Phil Waldorf, former manager for the Austin-based independent rock label Misra, agrees that the Shins' success is largely due to licensing their songs, but he thinks this is an exception rather than a rule.

"The Shins are a pop band," Waldorf says. "They make very likable music that's catchy and smart. I think for bands like that, licensing can work out well. But if bands are out there thinking they're going to be the next Shins through ads and soundtracks, it's unlikely to work."

Waldorf is a fan of old-school hard work: putting out a good record, touring and doing it again. "Misra has one band which didn't do a lot of touring but received a good deal of national press for their newest record," Waldorf says. "Evangelicals, a new band whose national print press appearances I can literally count on the fingers of one hand, have toured constantly, and SoundScanned only 100 fewer albums than the veteran band that didn't tour much."

Gerard Cosloy, the Austin based co-owner of the New York-based veteran independent label Matador Records, thinks context is key for all of these issues.

"It's important to remember that the Shins reference came in a pivotal moment in the film," he says. "Being name-checked is very different from a snippet coming out of a car parked in the side of the road."

Cosloy's unconvinced that licensing and placement have wholly replaced earlier models of long-term success. "Things like word of mouth, making a record that doesn't stink, are still very important. It becomes difficult to unpack: Does a band get great visibility from Hollywood or does Hollywood come calling because the band was good? It's no different than the age-old question about press. Does press sell records? Well, in the Internet age, what counts as press? What counts as radio? These questions have become much more complicated and fragmented."

The Shins have taken a stand: We'll do it all. Now they'll see how those 241,000 copies do.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926