The Shins don't sound like this anymore...
This was their break-out tune, the one that got them discovered and signed. And it eventually raised their profile with its inclusion in the soundtrack for the movie Garden State.
Garden State is a movie that will stick with you for a while after you see it. The song and the film share a major theme - this strange disillusionment with one's hometown. The song talks about it in a really apt way: If maybe the singer had felt a little more included, a little more accepted, he sees how he could've easily made himself right at home and been happy there forever, right along with the bakers who wake at dawn and ply their trade for the daily traffic. There was just something keeping him disinvited.
Garden State, in a way, tries to complete the arc of the song in a hopeful way, dramatizing this turning point where the main character actually finds love on a trip back to his hometown. I can tell you first hand, there is no experience truly as heightened as finding that person who will marry you, and you instinctively know this with an amazed certitude. In that experience, the hometown in Garden State actually ceases to be just the hometown for both of these people, and it becomes the setting for something absolutely new to them. The movie ends on this great kind of cliffhanger where all the possibilities lay out ahead of these two people who have found each other, and you really hope you are watching the origin of some great, long story between them.
Francois Truffaut actually explored a similar arc decades earlier, but he didn't just stop in the first act; he continued to make engrossing sequel films about the same couple, following them caringly, then painfully to divorce, and even further to a kind of rapprochement. He probably would've made a sequel or two more, but cancer robbed him from us. Now, Truffaut's male lead was performed by one of the most charismatic film actors of the 1960s, the feisty Mr. Jean Pierre Leaud. I don't know if I could handle multiple installments of Zach Braff. And Natalie Portman had a Republic to die for... So I think we're good where Garden State left off.
I've totally de-railed this post.
The lyrics really are impressive, so full of novel wordplay and metaphoric detail:
"I'd a danced like the king of the eyesores"
"Dawn breaks like a bull through the hall"
"God speed all the bakers at dawn may they all cut their thumbs,
And bleed into their buns 'till they melt away."
The music structure is two full verses, then a shortened verse the third time around. There are three choruses, but the third uses new lyrics as a kind of resolution. I love little structural decisions like this to keep the song from being boringly symmetrical.
It's all held up by a guitar part for the rainiest of rainy days.
I close by praising the vocal melodies of James Mercer, here in his early period. This is what truly makes the song. He is one of the masters of the long phrase, unfurling these elegant, calm lines with assured series of chord changes underneath to compliment, breaking standard time signature so subtly in places as to be almost unnoticeable.
His gifts are plainly apparent in this song, which is why he was so frustrated writing it, not knowing if his talent would ever find appreciation, where he was at or anywhere else. But it turns out he had good friends who championed him, got this song heard by the right people, and for him, it worked out. We all heard what we were meant to hear.