25 years ago, The Shins’ 'Oh, Inverted World' changed our lives

25 years ago, The Shins’ 'Oh, Inverted World' changed our lives

This song changed James Mercer’s life. Fed up with the Albuquerque music scene, which he found “macho, really heavy, and aggressive,” as he put it in a 2012 interview, Mercer picked up an acoustic guitar and wrote “New Slang,” a relentlessly catchy indie-folk tune in the bright key of C major. At that point in his life, his future band, the Shins, didn’t have an album yet. Since 1992, he’d been singing and playing guitar in Flake Music, a group …