Five Years Was Worth the Wait

Simple Song arrived in early 2012 as the first new Shins material in five years, and the title was doing a lot of defensive work. Nothing James Mercer writes is actually simple—the track opens with a rush of stacked guitars and layered vocals and then keeps finding new rooms to walk into just when you think it’s settled. It was the lead single from Port of Morrow, the album where Mercer had effectively rebuilt the band from scratch after breaking with his former collaborators. The five-year gap made retrospective sense. He had to figure out what the Shins were when they were only him. Simple Song sounds like someone who worked that out.