Broken Bells: “Nothing matters that much in the grand scheme of things, and that's kind of a relief to me”

“I went in there and started riffing again, you know, just scatting stuff out. I had a falsetto a couple of times and Brian lit up. I figured out a lyric, then just started tracking. Once I did multiple tracks of it, that’s when I realised, ‘Oh my God, it sounds like the Bee Gees’”.

James Mercer (the Shins) and Brian Burton (Danger Mouse) are two radically opposed personalities with two completely different ways of approaching music. But ever since they first worked together back in 2008, they’ve pressed on in secret, shared inspirations, jammed incessantly, and kept on uncovering affinities. It was only a matter of time before their Broken Bells collaboration finally transformed from super-group side-project into fully-fledged band.

A lot has changed since Broken Bells, their brilliant debut album. Released four years ago now, the songs contained within were all out-and-out, no-holds-barred pop: honeyed, melodic, rewarding. In their wake, they toured the world, wowed on the festival circuit, scored a top 10 Billboard placing, received a Grammy nomination, but then everything stopped. It was unclear whether the project had a future. In the mean time the pair headed back to their domestic lives and day-jobs. While Mercer had another child and put out the Shins’ fourth record, Port Of Morrow, Burton produced records for the likes of the Black Keys, Norah Jones and U2. Feeling “almost a little burnt out”, the artist-producer also took his first ever vacation, seven months spent idling away in New York “not doing anything at all”.

Fast-forward to 2014, and—brilliant news—the duo see Broken Bells as an on-going reality. So, they have been working on new material. In fact, they’re on the cusp of releasing their second album, After The Disco, and Mercer, on the phone from his home in Portland, Oregon, is currently talking about his skyscraping falsetto on comeback single “Holding On For Life”. It seems he’s feeling a little nostalgic. “It was quite a while ago that I actually first started using it, even back in my old band Flake “, he admits. “I was doing that once in a while, but that was in the 90s when it was totally uncool to do that, at least in the indie rock scene I was immersed in. But then when the Shins started, I don’t know what happened, but I guess I gained a bit of confidence and felt sort of rebellious. I remember the B-side to ‘New Slang’, which was one of the first things to come out for the Shins on a national level, that B-side was a completely falsettoed track. So, yeah, it’s been a while. I think Brian really gravitates towards it and really likes the energy it creates”.

But have they really made an album of disco songs? Are they really jumping on that post-Daft Punk, Chic-revival bandwagon? You could say the new album is a little deceptively titled; later on, a rather more frank Burton will insist, “come on, it’s obvious it’s not a disco record”. But Mercer isn’t so sure. “I mean, it’s the music I grew up on, at least partly”, he says when asked about the similarity of his melodies to those of the Bee Gees. ‘That was the stuff that was on the radio in my childhood. It’s good shit, you know, that’s the thing. The Bee Gees were great writers and great singers and all that. When you listen to that stuff you can just hear it and go, ‘yeah, I totally fucking understand why this was a massive success’. So basically, it’s always at the back of my mind somewhere; you always have a sense of that stuff.”

These prompts of the fertile subconscious intercept at every level. As it later transpires, lyrical improvisation sometimes plays a key role in their song-writing. Here, its fruit included the album title. “Oftentimes I’ll go into vocal booths and just sort of scat out some melodies to give us an idea of the possibilities, of where the song could go melodically”, explains Mercer in an expert tone. “During one of those, I said something that sounded like ‘After The Disco’ and it was me just sort of running through random phonetics. So, we had that, and both Brian and I kind of liked it. I think, in a way, it became a context after that and it seemed like an interesting idea, a theme. You know, the sort-of let-down feeling after something splendid has happened. That became a metaphor for after your youth, after all of that stuff. It just has that melancholy ring to it, which Brian and I for some reason perversely love”.

So much so, he claims, that this melancholy mood rears its ugly, but sweet-sounding, head throughout the entire album. It’s certainly a pessimistic listen. ‘To us”, he states, “that whole concept began to take on meaning”. An hour later, we follow up the theme on the phone to Burton, who is on a well-earned break from live show rehearsals in his California studio. Before we abandon all talk of genre, he reiterates in his trademark burr, “I think we maybe should have put a question mark or something after the title because people are focusing on the positive sound of disco music too much. It’s just not.”

Adding that introspection and love-relationships figure dominantly in the subject-matter, it soon becomes clear that Burton has taken on a much greater share of the lyric-writing duties this time around. Fuelled by his 7-month break and extensive production work, particularly on the Black Keys’ El Camino (“There are little things I picked up, here and there”), this burst of creativity was clearly inspired by an intricate network of influences, diverse periods of time and his slightly complicated personal life, which he’s unwilling to comment on. “I mean I’m always influenced by different things from people I work with and you wind up using them sometimes, but mostly it’s not. It’s just the way that I work all the time: I try different ideas, different patterns start to form, and then they change again. Working with, and observing the Black Keys on that record had a big influence.”

Speaking to him like this, you’re constantly reminded that Brian should be more of a creative artist, rather than a producer, even though he is most famous as the latter. “The way he thinks of himself and the way he thinks of his work is as an artist, as a writer and a musician,” Mercer expands. “He said he had tons of things he wanted to talk about, tons of ideas that he wanted to express. And I just facilitated his writing process, in a way.”

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In order to write and record, the two of them decamped to Burton’s luscious LA studio for months at a time. But whilst Burton sees his song-writing and knob-twiddling as inextricably linked, Mercer likes to keep the Shins and Broken Bells totally separate. He treats it as a holiday; “Brian and I basically live together in his house, and wake up in the morning and head into the studio”, he says. “That was all just the same as it was the first time around, in that same guestroom and it was kind of cool. I’d gone out and done the Shins record and had this whole new experience there. And then it was sort of déjà vu, and I was back with Brian working on another Broken Bells record in the same studio, you know, driving the same route to work everyday”.

The pair would come together totally fresh-faced, with no ideas, and write songs completely tête-à-tête. “We did that for ages, and I think that’s the best way to make a record with somebody, if you can,” says Burton. “You know, it’s a snapshot of that time that we spent doing that, and so the record kind of has its own elusive feel”. “It’s quite different to the Shins, where it’s just the established idea that I’m in charge of it”, adds Mercer. “And so, there’s less of me looking for input and more of the decision-making is on my shoulders”.

This being said, in spite of their different musical backgrounds and professional processes, they’ve always been on the same wavelength: “James has gone through a lot of the things I have, so just relate both musically and lyrically as well”, confirms Burton. “But James has just been writing a whole Shins new record too, so I think he welcomed that I had something that I had to say on this one”.

The result was a contradiction: though, yes, “there are fewer abstracted conceptual subjects on this record than on the first one”, and though the lyrics may well appear “less postmodern, more clear and straightforward and more accessible therefore” (Mercer’s own words), sci-fi imagery and hippie futurism feature heavily.

“Brian is really into choral groups from the 60s”, he explains. “He really loves them, and I really connect that to the Star Trek futurism of the 60s, and as a kid, I loved Ray Bradbury and Asimov, so I just started running with that. It seemed like a cool aesthetic that we could all get behind”. Burton, meanwhile, finds comfort in the fact “the world’s so small and there’s so much more out there”. He continues, “You shouldn’t take yourself so seriously. Nothing matters that much in the grand scheme of things, and that’s kind of a relief to me”.

Evidence of this deep-seated Smallness Of Man construct is not hard to come by. Just take a glance at all the teasers, campaign motifs, and in particular, the promo video to “Holding On For Life”, whose storyline was written by Burton himself. Directed by up-and-coming director Jacob Gentry, who studied film at College with the musician, the video is the latest part of their extraterrestrial film series shot in conjunction with the Creators Project. It sees Kate Mara (star of ‘House of Cards’) and Anton Yelchin (Star Trek, Fright Night) play a lovesick humanoid couple, moving from planet landings through to weird anthropomorphic space-rave flashbacks. Burton is keen to reiterate that it’s partially “up to interpretation”.

Talking about future singles, “Medicine” comes up as a distinct possibility, and quite right. It has melodies, hooks, and couplets to die for. Apparently, the lyrics deal with a similarly negative topic to the first single. “It’s about needing to let go of your desire to hold on to things in life, the desire we sometimes have to prevent change,” says Mercer. “It’s an age-old thing that people have to wrestle with. I’d read this book along time ago called All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. It was a book about what defines modernity. And so, that became another theme, that life sort of disappears and we have to reconcile with that”.

Right now, the pair’s own means of reconciliation is rehearsing for the famed Broken Bells live show; a high-profile support gig to Outkast at Coachella looms and they’re a little nervous about it. But as regards this prominent positioning at one of the world’s most famous festivals, some might say they’ve been privileged given their respective musical histories. So, what do they actually make of this ‘super-group’ status? Mercer begins with a chortle, “I don’t know man, it doesn’t mean that much”, before switching onto metaphysical mode. “Although, sometimes I do wonder if that idea of a supergroup makes people feel that it’s not real, that we’re superhuman or something. That we’re not a real band or something would be my only concern. Actually, hey, are we real?”

After The Disco is out 3 February on Columbia Records. Stream it in full now over on DIY here.