Photo: Shervin Lainez & Nikki Fenix

***

Brian Burton can pinpoint the exact moment when The Shins changed his life.

“It was 2004—I was in New York at the Warp Records office, and they started playing The Shins’ second album on the speaker,” he says, while giddily describing his own mystical Garden State moment. “I was like, ‘What is this?’ and they said, ‘It’s this band The Shins.’ I wrote down their name and then went out and got the album. I just thought, ‘Who is this voice?’”

Almost 20 years later, Burton can draw a direct line from that fortuitous listening session to the creation of Into the Blue, his third record with Broken Bells—the slow-burning, always melodic band he leads with The Shins frontman James Mercer. Like Broken Bells’ first two records, Into the Blue is an airy blend of space-rock soundscapes, indie-rock hooks and hip-hop production that feels more ambitious than a side-project and more substantial than a supergroup. It’s also their first full-length effort since their second LP, 2014’s After the Disco, which hit the Top 10 and added the Bee Geesleaning single “Holding On for Life” to the Great American Indie-Rock Songbook.

In the two decades since he first heard Mercer’s heartfelt, singular voice emanating from an office speaker, Burton has gone through a life-changing shift himself, growing from a DJ known for his mashups to one of the most consequential producers of the early 21st century. Working under the name Danger Mouse, he’s added his kaleidoscopic twist to mega-records by independent-minded acts like Gorillaz, The Black Keys and Portugal. The Man, elegantly bringing a hip-hop sensibility to the roots-rock and psych sets. He’s also proven himself to be a generous collaborator, steering cross-genre all-star projects like The Good, the Bad & the Queen and Gnarls Barkley, whose oft-covered single “Crazy” has likely worked its way into as many early 2000s video yearbooks as any other song.

Yet, despite all those accolades, Broken Bells still holds a special place in his heart.

“It’s my due north, a place I can look at if I’m not sure what I’m doing or what I wanna work on,” he says. “I can ask James if he wants to get together and work for a week and it’s the most natural thing.”

As he is describes how that casual bromance led to three thoughtful, well-produced and well-charting records, Burton is sitting on a sofa at Relix’s New York studio, which is located close to his Manhattan apartment. Dressed in his trademark business casual attire and with a touch of gray in his fuzzy beard, he speaks slowly and quietly, coming off much closer to an art-rock songwriter than a fast-talking top-shelf producer.

“I don’t really have a ‘main project,’ but this is as main of a project as I’ve ever had,” Burton says, sinking into one of the studio’s red sofas. “James’ attitude from the beginning was very much in the same realm as mine. He doesn’t really care about trends or being on the radio—he likes things that are melodic and feel good and are catchy, like I do. But he also likes experimentation.”

Broken Bells’ core duo first started working on what would eventually become Into the Blue back in 2014, shortly after Broken Bells wrapped up their support tour for After the Disco. Mercer took a trip down to LA to meet up with Burton, and they began batting around some loose ideas.

“It’s just a nice getaway when we get together and start trying to put our heads around what songs we have to work on,” Mercer says, calling from his home in Portland, Ore., shortly after dropping his kids off at school. “We try to come up with some new things and to just have fun in the studio. It’s casual. Brian works really efficiently so things happen really fast, and we can get a lot done in a week.”

As The Shins’ longtime guiding light, Mercer helped define indie-rock in the early 2000s, shifting college-rock back toward clean pop melodies and earnest storytelling at a time when garage-rock and artsy experimentation ruled the alternative movement.

Usually, Mercer says that he just “shows up” to his sessions with Burton, without bringing any specific ideas to the table— the friends will pick up some instruments and start from scratch. However, when Mercer arrived for this particular session, Burton surprised him with a stack of samples—the first time The Shins songwriter had utilized that hip-hop-forward approach.

“He had some samples that he had looped so he already had music for me to listen to, and it made it go much quicker,” Mercer says. “It’s just more fertile ground for me to try and come up with melodies. I was excited for that—it is where Brian got his start.”

Burton credits his work with A$AP Rocky for inspiring his return to form. “The original Bells stuff was about me trying to see how much I could do without samples,” he says. “I just stopped working with them, quite purposely. But I wanted to get back to that with this one. The way rappers work, a lot of the time, is that they hear a piece of music that’s already done and then they figure out what they’re going to do with it. When I’ve put James in that position a couple of times over the years, I’ve always liked the results. With samples, you can only work within the parameters that are there. James was able to come up with these magic melodies or responses to things. That’s also how I worked with CeeLo [Green] and Gnarls Barkley—he would hear all the music and just respond to it. And you get a larger range of stuff, for better or for worse.”

Instead of utilizing a proper studio, at first, they hunkered down in Burton’s basement space and started working on some stripped-down ideas. Burton says that part of the reason he decided to jump back into the studio so quickly was to avoid touring. “I thought, ‘If we start making stuff, we won’t have to go back out into the world,’” he says. “Whenever I release new music, I get the itch to start all over and give it another shot.”

They went song by song, kicking things off with a certain drumbeat on one tune and a chord progression on another. Burton’s recent work with Michael Kiwanuka was also top of mind, and some of the tunes they cut inched closer to an Isaac Hayes soul vibe; he says that one of his goals on the LP was to hear Mercer’s voice more. “He has such a unique melodic sense,” the producer gushes. “Where he goes with these melodies and what he does is just so unique and so beautiful.”

After those initial sessions wrapped up, Mercer took their nascent ideas and returned home to Portland, where he worked on lyrics to accompany their melodies. And, despite their lo-fi techniques, the duo couldn’t resist adding some orchestration into the mix. Burton also recruited a few musicians from his stable of collaborations to complete their tracks, including Sam Cohen—the guitarist and producer best known for his time in post-jam psych projects Apollo Sunshine and Yellowbirds, as well as his work with Bob Weir, Kevin Morby, White Denim and Joe Russo.

“People have been telling me to work with Sam Cohen forever,” Mercer says with a laugh. “Tons of friends who know Sam have suggested we write together or that he should produce some music for me. But, the funny thing is—because of the way it was recorded—we still haven’t met.”

Cohen adds his touch to the somber “Love on the Run” and the fuzzy “Into The Blue,” both of which he scores co-writes on, while drummer David Christian, Tedeschi Trucks Band vocalist Alecia Chakour and The Roots’ drummer Questlove also lent their services at various points.

“I couldn’t crack the drums on this one track,” Burton, who handles much of the kit work himself, admits. “So I used this drum loop Questlove had sent me.”

Both Mercer and Burton describe their sessions with summer-camp fondness. They would meet up periodically, in both LA and Portland, to explore different ideas and also to escape the stresses of everyday life. “It’s very casual,” Mercer says. “There’s times when we’ll wake up and we’re not in the mood to work or something, and we’ll just go have lunch.”

“We’ll just drive to the coast or do whatever we feel like,” Burton says. “And then we’ll buckle down when we know we need to get some stuff done.”

The duo also used the sessions to mine some old ideas they had never completed; the origins of the string-laden lament “Invisible Exit” date back to the group’s tour in support of their 2010 self-titled debut. Other tracks slowly came to light over the past few years. The extended break between LPs, magnified by the pandemic, also gave them time to massage their cuts without the pressure of a firm release date.

“We sat with the unfinished stuff for a long time—we just kept wanting to do new stuff and then came back to it,” Burton says. “We weren’t in a rush to prove anything or finish anything. We just kept working.” “

It gave us the freedom to experiment and take risks—not so urgently trying to find a strong song that’ll be on the radio,” Mercer says. “It just freed me up. I think we both felt like, ‘We’ve got this—it’s gonna work.’ The way Brian takes these ideas and sculpts them, they sound so different from when we start with them. It’s fascinating.”

***

Broken Bells’ really begins at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival in 2004, when Burton and Mercer first crossed paths in person. Mercer was familiar with Burton’s breakthrough Jay-Z/Beatles mash-up The Grey Album, thanks to The Shins bassist Marty Crandall, who would consistently turn Mercer onto, in the singer’s words, “the latest cool thing.” Burton was also on the bill and quickly bonded with the members of The Shins backstage.

“Marty knew exactly who Danger Mouse was when he showed up, and we just had a great night together—we had a lot of fun running around and seeing Morrissey play and we just hit it off,” Mercer says. “After that, he would show up randomly at shows, and we would hang out. The rest of my bandmates, at the time, were partying pretty hard, and they would be inebriated. And I would be the only one left who could really have a conversation with Brian. We would have these long talks. I was curious because he was blowing up at the time, and he would tell me stories about how shit was changing for him. I remember saying, ‘What do your parents think, man? Are they stoked?’ And we got closer through those conversations.”

Soon after, Burton and Mercer decided to make their partnership more formal. In addition to laying the groundwork for Broken Bells, Burton concurrently recruited Mercer to work on a track for his Dark Night of the Soul collaboration with Sparklehorse, which was eventually released in 2010.

“There came a time when I was really stressing out with The Shins—personnel issues type of stuff—and I didn’t know what to do,” says Mercer, who has long been the group’s primary creative force and principal songwriter. “I was thinking, ‘Maybe I just need to start a different band’ or ‘Maybe I could work with somebody else?’ I thought, ‘Maybe I need to break out of my shell and not just have all this control over this one thing.’ It was difficult because you have to manage all these personalities. So I told my manager about this and, somehow, Brian got word that I was in that state. He was looking for something new to do, so we just met and had another one of those good conversations in LA and decided to work together.”

Early on, they also agreed to try something more immersive than Burton simply producing a Shins record. They also decided, off the bat, to make Broken Bells a completely collaborative endeavor.

“The intent, for me, was to start a new project,” Burton says. “I had done Gnarls Barkley, and I liked that simplicity of just two people. Bands are hard when it is more than two people. We didn’t even think about going to anybody else. Between us, we could play all the instruments ourselves. It was romantic in that way. It was totally ours to control.”

“The game was to be played that way when we first started. We just showed up,” Mercer explains. “And the whole deal is we’re 50/50 on this. We just said, ‘Let’s just get together and write.’”

Burton even voiced his input on the lyrics, an area Mercer traditionally owned himself.

“Brian will have a lot of suggestions, and he’ll be very critical of some parts,” Mercer says. “So I’ll go back and rewrite them—he’ll come up with really good word choices for me.”

Curiously, though The Shins is ostensibly the classic definition of a band, in certain ways Broken Bells is actually a more collaborative endeavor.

“The Shins is mostly James sitting and writing the songs on his own and then fleshing them out with other people,” Burton explains. “With this, we start everything from scratch.”

Mercer and Burton recorded Broken Bell’s entire self-titled debut on their own over the course of about a year, before they even started shopping it to labels. Then, they channeled their DIY roots and hit the ground running like any young, hungry band would.

“We did the whole SXSW thing, playing 10 shows and doing stuff in the parking lots,” Burton says. “When I did Gnarls Barkley, our second show was Coachella. So I felt like this was my first time truly being in a band. People may have known me or The Shins, but we were still playing a lot of music nobody had ever heard of when we started and that was a lot of fun.”

They also quickly bonded over their shared love of ‘60s music, psychedelia and indie-rock, even though the new friends had wildly different upbringings. Mercer— whose father was in the U.S. Air Force— hails from Hawaii, attended high school in England and Germany, and spent his college years at the University of Mexico. Burton was born in White Plains, N.Y., before moving further north to Spring Valley, N.Y., and then south to Stone Mountain, Ga., and Athens, where he enrolled at the University of Georgia. In addition to pinpointing universal stars like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Tears For Fears as reference points, they also discovered that they shared a mutual interest in The Zombies, Harry Nilsson and the Athens collective the Elephant Six Recording Company, who served as a Rosetta Stone of sorts.

“I worked at a record store with John Fernandes, who was in [Elephant Six Recording Company group] Olivia Tremor Control, and he turned me on to a lot of psychedelic music—that’s how I got really into psychedelic music when I started to sample,” Burton says while describing the scene. “People weren’t scrappy with each other—if anything happened, then everybody was really kind of cool about it. Nobody said, ‘Well, they’re not the best band. Why are they [breaking through]?’ I think R.E.M. had that attitude and brought that with them, and it affected everybody that came through the Athens scene. There was this semi-hippie attitude that was real and very positive.”

“We were living totally separate lives, yet we were both digging the same collection of bands,” Mercer says, noting that he and Burton fell in love with the Elephant Six Recording Company at roughly the same time, on opposite sides of the country. “Marty, who was in Flake Music with me before The Shins, worked at Bow Wow Records in Albuquerque, N.M. We were all struggling to record with 4-track cassette recorders and doing all that stuff, and then here came these bands out of Athens that were doing it—and doing it well. So we learned how to record by listening to them, and it elevated our recording abilities. The first EP I did for The Shins, Nature Bears a Vacuum, was me trying to do as good a job as those guys.”

Mercer says that he had moderate exposure to rap music when he was growing up but admits that he was “one of those kids in school in the ‘80s who loved breakdancing.” He also credits some of the same friends who turned him onto hardcore music with expanding his palette on the hip-hop side. “When I graduated from high school in ‘89 and I came back to the states, I remember N.W.A. had become the thing, and my friends who were into Suicidal Tendencies were all now sharing their tapes.”

Released on Columbia Records in 2010, Broken Bells was a commercial and critical success. The album was nominated for a Grammy and the single “The High Road” was omnipresent on college radio and at hipster coffee shops for a while. Burton and Mercer quickly returned to the studio to expand on their lush, orchestral sound with a four-piece choir on 2014’s After the Disco; the set was also a hit and cemented Broken Bells’ status as an enduring project.

Broken Bells supported both LPs with extended runs, clocking in well-received sets at marquee venues and festivals like Coachella and Bonnaroo. The band’s 2014 outing, in the particular, felt worlds away from the DIY recording vibes Mercer and Burton often bonded over, pushing the envelope of what an “indie-rock show” could look like production-wise.

“That last tour cycle we did was kind of the pinnacle for us,” Mercer says. “It had these super-choreographed video elements that were really cool and challenging because you couldn’t screw up—you couldn’t get off the boat once the song started. You had to nail it.”

Between Broken Bells sessions and tour dates, Burton’s star continued to rise as a producer. In addition to partnerships with Karen O and Daniele Luppi, he racked up credits with some of the biggest names in music, including Norah Jones (Little Broken Hearts), U2 (Songs of Innocence), Adele (25) and Red Hot Chili Peppers (The Getaway). During one “drought” for him and Mercer, Burton also buffed up his indie-rock bona fides by working with Parquet Courts. “We were just doing different things for four or five months and I just love those guys,” he says. “Working with them, I just got out of the way a lot.”

Mercer also remained busy with The Shins. The outfit’s 2012 LP, Port of Morrow was primarily a partnership with producer Greg Kurstin, while Mercer sat at the helm for Heartworms—with the exception of the track “So Now What,” which was produced by former keyboardist Richard Swift, himself a noted producer and songwriter. (Blurring the lines between his outlets a bit, through the Broken Bells tour Mercer also connected with drummer Jon Sortland, who has since gone on to join The Shins.)

After tinkering with their third album since the After the Disco tour concluded, Broken Bells were nearly done with Into the Blue when the pandemic hit; they then proceeded to spend that surreal two-year period finishing it up and finessing what they had already completed. Burton says that, even though he doesn’t plan to do a major support tour behind the LP, he wanted to wait until the music-world opened up to drop the record, instead of simply “throwing it out there.”

But though Broken Bells had already made headway on their third album by early 2020, and The Shins had recently completed a touring cycle, Mercer still says that he hit a roadblock at the outset of the COVID era.

“It wasn’t like we had any huge plans that were cancelled, but I shut down and I went through a dark period, honestly,” he says. “Unrelated to all the pandemic stuff, it was a crossroads for me. We had finished Heartworms and I was really happy with the record. We went out and toured it, which was fun, and then I came back, and I was once again in a situation where I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So, for me, working on the [Broken] Bells stuff was a relief—something to focus on. The roles are understood and it’s fun and easy. It was good to just be able to get away and focus on work and hang out with friends.”

***

Into the Blue dropped in early October, less than two months after another long-gestating Danger Mouse project, his collaboration with Roots MC Black Thought, Cheat Codes. That record is his first full hip-hop release since 2005, and Burton describes the process as night and day from working on Broken Bells— though equally rewarding.

“With Black Thought, I do all the music and then he comes in and does all the vocals and lyrics so it’s very compartmentalized,” he says. “We did a lot of music that got us to one place—to the one album—and we’ll work on another one now. I’m always working on five or six things at a time. Those were just the two that got finished during the same time period, and they got stacked near each other because of not wanting to wait. I’m glad I got to do hip-hop again and it was interesting watching them both come out around the same time and seeing how different the genres really are—how different the voices are and how loud things can be when you do anything with hip-hop as opposed to what is or was indie-rock.”

However, though Burton has become a defining voice of the here and now, he still yearns for his new music to exist in the context of some classic formats. “With a podcast, it is one person listening alone, but with the radio, you know that thousands of people are still hearing this at the same time so it hits you a little differently,” he says.

Broken Bells’ new effort also arrived during a busy time for The Shins. Shortly before Into the Blue dropped, The Shins launched a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of their genre-defining 2001 debut, Oh, Inverted World.

The night The Shins released Oh, Inverted World, they performed in the lounge at New York’s famed Wetlands on a bill with The Gourds, while The Dirty Dozen Brass Band appeared upstairs. “That was a great time—it was this new, exciting moment,” Mercer says of that booking. “It’s interesting because, looking back on that stuff, I was just so ignorant. I really didn’t know anything about what it would be like to be signed to a record label or anything.”

On their recent outing, The Shins ran through Oh, Inverted World in its entirety at the top of their show, though Mercer is the only member of the act from that era who currently performs with the group. “It was just a very different period of time in my life, and it’s strange because I think back and I’m like, ‘There’s some really good, strong ideas on that record.’ I feel proud that the work holds up, but that period of time was also this dark phase for me. So it was interesting to look back with 20 years of perspective.”

He also sees parallels between those early forays into songwriting and his recent work with Burton.

“There’s a piece of that lyrically on this new Bells record,” he says. “This record, to me, is dark. It’s sad, lyrically. There’s a lot of loneliness in it, tinges of regret and so on. I remember having a couple of passages that I had written for one of the songs and Brian was like, ‘That’s too dark, dude.’ So he was good at tempering that bias that I have, though I was still able to express some of that.”

Burton echoes his bandmate’s thoughts. “There’s a lot of heavy stuff on this record and it is meaningful, but I do hope that there’s enough room for people to take what they will and use it themselves,” he says. “I don’t want people thinking of me and James when they’re listening to the music. If I was 22, then I would be like, ‘me, me, me,’ but the older and better you get, the more you have to move out of the way and not focus on yourself or the personality of what’s behind the music. It’s not as important anymore.”

Looking ahead, Mercer and Burton already have plans to regroup in January for their next writing session. While it remains to be seen if they will continue to add samples into the mix or try another approach, Mercer is excited to follow Burton down the wormhole.

“Brian did hint that he has this idea to be very experimental and try some new stuff so I’m excited to see what’s up. He has all these elements in his quiver, like the hip-hop side of thing. He’s such an expert in that world and it’s fascinating. I have a very loose schedule so I can make time whenever he wants to get together. Especially with this week coming up, it’s going to be pretty casual because there is no deadline. We can just enjoy each other’s company and see what happens.”

“We’ll see what sounds are starting to nag at us,” Burton says with a grin. “Hopefully, it won’t take eight years.”