So I made a deal with my parents that I would spend a year working on music. I don't want to end up being destitute and playing gigs on the weekends.' I had spent my twenties there, kind of struggling as most musicians do - you're in bands that don't appear to really have a future, but as far as you know, you have no future otherwise anyway, so you keep doing it! Then by my late 20s, I started to have that gnawing anxiety about, 'I've got to grow up. Right, if you’re from a small town, that’s a very relatable concept. Albuquerque became the symbol of my stagnant situation in life. I was in my late twenties by the time I got out of Albuquerque, so I was really chomping at the bit to find something new and experience something new as an adult. I have a lot of fondness for it, and my folks still live there and stuff, but yeah, everybody goes through a period of time - if you do live in that sort of smaller community - you kind of feel trapped. I hesitate to come across that I don't like Albuquerque or something.

Can you explain the mindset you were in when you wrote this song? This week, as Billboard pays tribute to the most iconic music to have emerged from 2001, Mercer spoke by phone about the journey “New Slang” took to become a stealth hit he also discussed his memories of Oh, Inverted World, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and about the possibility of an accompanying tour.Ī lot of the lyrics in “New Slang” are about Albuquerque. 'But it wasn't until 2004 that it came out.and suddenly, oh my God, Natalie Portman is in the movie - it was a totally different thing.' 'Right off the bat I was like, 'Sure, that's awesome, it'll be in a movie?! Whoa, how cool,'' he remembers. As Natalie Portman’s Sam promises to Zach Braff’s Andrew in the 2004 cult dramedy Garden State : “This song will change your life.” Twenty years later, Mercer is still in awe over just how true that was for him - even though he was the one who wrote it.

My first jack rabbit demo