Late in the process of making The Shins’ 2001 debut, Oh, Inverted World, James Mercer wandered into a thrift store next door to his home in Albuquerque and came across a 25-cent copy of Neil Young’s 1972 breakthrough LP, Harvest. “The cover was all ripped up, but I pulled it out, and the vinyl was in pristine condition,” he tells Apple Music. “I'd heard ‘Heart of Gold,’ but I’d never heard any of those other songs, and I was really blown away. I loved the production because most of it’s so straightforward—well-mic’d and that's it. I was like, ‘Goddamn, that would be ballsy to do that, to just be like, here's the song.’ I wanted to do that. I wanted to flex a little bit.” When the unexpected success of Oh, Inverted World eventually afforded him the opportunity to try, Mercer took what he’d earned and bought a place in what was then a tough neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, with a basement—a former speakeasy—where he could write and record a follow-up. Made almost entirely in that basement, 2003’s Chutes Too Narrow shifts away from the hazy, homespun pop of its predecessor towards territory that, while still plenty strange and baroque, is sharper, clearer, and more guitar-forward—songs with clean lines and crisp silhouettes. Looking back, Mercer remembers a process marked by the pressure of the moment, his needing to satisfy an audience he’d worked so long to find. It’s an anxiety that belies the natural grace of every melody and arrangement. “Anybody can probably crank out a first novel if they just dedicate five years to it, all your best ideas in one bag,” he says. “And a lot of bands do one record, and then you're like, ‘Where the hell did that band go?’ I really felt like I had to keep going, otherwise it was all for nothing. I’d felt like, ‘Oh, I can do something.’ That's great, but can you really?” Here, Mercer takes us inside every song on the record, 20 years on. “Kissing the Lipless” “I remember thinking it was cool that I was using that dissonant chord, that major seventh. In my mind, that reminded me of My Bloody Valentine. I was just kind of learning new things, and I like that song a lot because it sounds a little less traditional than a lot of the stuff I’ve written for The Shins.” “Mine’s Not a High Horse” “I was really proud of the guitar solo I did on that, because it reminded me of something Will Sergeant would do, from Echo & The Bunnymen. We went on tour with Preston School of Industry—which was Spiral Stairs from Pavement—and after a couple of months, he came up to me—maybe he’d had a couple drinks—and he’s like, ‘I figured you out, man. I figured you out.’ And I'm like, ‘What is it?’ He goes, ‘Will Sergeant,’ and I go, ‘Yes! Yes, exactly.’” “So Says I” “That was an interesting song. I remember thinking about The Clash for some reason, I guess because it’s got this aggressive nature to it, but it's in a minor chord, so there's this sadness to it, too. I was stoked on that and I don't know when I came up with the idea of that opening chord, but I thought that was cool because it was kind of like ‘Hard Day's Night.’” “Young Pilgrims” “Under the record contract with Sub Pop, I had to provide 10 songs. One of them was called ‘Mild Child,’ and I just couldn't get it to work. I was struggling to figure out how to produce or arrange it, and it failed while we were in the final days of mixing up in Seattle with Phil Ek. So my cortisol goes through the roof: I need a song now and it needs to be good. But I was sleeping on the living room floor at [guitarist] Dave Hernandez's house. And I didn't feel comfortable sitting in the house with all these hipsters every night, drinking and playing video games, so I would go out to the van and just try and write. That ended up being ‘Young Pilgrims,’ which I'm proud of, but it was a blank page. I had never had grown-up responsibilities, really, had never actually been under contract with a proper label and had people waiting to see what was going to happen—and it manifested itself in insomnia. I was just so stressed out and sleep-deprived that I started hallucinating, seeing things.” “Saint Simon” “The thing that's neat about it is that cascading the la-la-las, for whatever reason, worked over all of the chords. I had a melody that worked, and I wanted to end in a place that would loop you back to the beginning in some sort of graceful way. [Drummer] Jesse [Sandoval], when I played it for him the first time, he started calling the song ‘Balls Atingle,’ because he said that when we would do the la-la-las and it would kick in, it made his balls tingle. So I guess that's a pretty good compliment. Jesse’s a terrific muse in that way.” “Fighting in a Sack” “We had played it a few times live, and it was a whole step higher, and I would struggle because it was at the very, very top of my register. When it came time to record it, I was like, ‘Let's just do it a whole step lower.’ So it went from E to D, and later, I sort of regretted that—like, I should have just went for it on the record and then worried about it later. I was fortified in that fear because one of the guys from Beachwood Sparks, he had heard me do it live a couple of times on tour and he noticed—that's just how good his ear is. I changed it not that much, but he heard it and he was like, ‘I wish it was still in E, man.’ Sorry, dude.” “Pink Bullets” “It’s a very nostalgic, fond memory of someone, a relationship that you had in the past. I had been working on it a little bit when I was doing Oh, Inverted World, and I remember having ‘Past and Pending’ and this song—I knew I only wanted one of the two. I was working as a bookkeeper in Albuquerque for a property management firm, and it's such a boring job. There was a fair bit of downtime, so I would sit and pretend to be working, but really be drawing or writing down poems or little ideas that I had, planning and plotting how I was going to try and make a cool band. And on one of these pieces of paper I found something I’d written, just an idea: ‘Life is a movie, so poorly made that even you could be the star.’ It wasn't very poetic, but that's where that line comes from: ‘A movie so crass and awkwardly cast that even I could be the star.’ I was pretty stoked on that.” “Turn a Square” “It sounds like a rock ’n’ roll song to me, so I was like, ‘Well, what do rock ’n’ roll guys sing about?’ They sing about girls. I was a single guy and I was alone for a while there and I was pretty lonely—so it wasn't too hard for me to talk about what it is to be a heterosexual dude and to see a good-looking woman and how compelling it is at times. It's embarrassing even for me to say it, to admit it, but it's true. That's what I was doing.” “Gone for Good” “It almost has a New Mexican vibe to it. I don't remember sitting down and being like, ‘Oh, I want to write a country song.’ Generally, I sit with the guitar and I'm just kind of messing around—I don't have much intention at all. My dad was a country music singer in nightclubs, so I grew up listening to country music and I have that in the back of my brain, especially those old classic things from the ’60s and stuff.” “Those to Come” “I had that song for a while. I used to do the plucking part on electric guitar, because when The Shins started out, it was just a two-piece—Jesse on drums and me on guitar, singing. It kind of worked onstage, even in Albuquerque, which was weird because most Shins songs didn't really work that well in Albuquerque—it was more of a rock town, like heavy stuff. Dave Hernandez added in that weird heartbeat sound, and [keyboardist] Marty [Crandall] wrote the organ solo, and it was just kind of done. Lyrically, I remember thinking about wanting to get married and have kids. I felt like, now that I'm doing something and I have a career, maybe I have the right to do it. I was just pondering life and mortality, and it lent itself to sort of strange meanderings.”