“Douche-baggery has always pissed me off.”
James Mercer talks to James McNair.
What events and influences fed into Heartworms? “Everything I’ve experienced. The art I’ve seen. The real life shit. Loving and hating a lot of this world. Having a family. The usual things, I guess. I’ve also been really loving Ariel Pink’s stuff lately and his attitude. [It] gave me inspiration to be brave and take risks.”
Is a heartworm some kind of significant event that lodges in the heart? “That’s kinda the idea. I wanted a word to describe what it feels like to love someone who doesn’t love you back. It’s like you’re infected with some sort of emotional disease. Then I remembered the ’90s band Heartworms and it made me nostalgic. It all made sense somehow.”
You’ve said Name For You is a call for female empowerment inspired by your three daughters… “I don’t want women in general to have to put up with frat-boy bullshit. I think I’m more sensitive to the issues because of my family life, but douche-baggery has always pissed me off. I think everyone should own their own sexuality and not be reliant on the society around them for some sort of approval.”
Do you fear for your daughters in a Trump-led America? “No more than anybody else’s.”
Mildenhall documents your time living at an RAF base in England aged 15, and in Ramstein, Germany. As an American kid passing through, was it tough to make friends? “I think I was especially bad at meeting people. The first year I moved to England I really didn’t hang out with anybody outside of school hours. But it also meant time spent alone listening to records and singing along in my room.”
That song mentions a kid in school passing you a Jesus And Mary Chain tape. Which one? “Psychocandy. It sounded absolutely bizarre to me. But slowly the songs revealed themselves. They were just pop songs dressed up in hip threads and dark glasses.”
Half A Million sounds as though it’s channelling early Cars or Split Enz. What is it about? “I really wanted it to sound like a Cars song. It’s about the pressures that we all feel I think nowadays to be many different things at once. I especially like the line directed at a girl when the character says: ‘A virgin in the moonlight, a freak on the scene.’”