There's a specific kind of fame that arrives through someone else's movie and it might be the strangest kind there is. The Shins know it better than almost anyone. Their 2001 debut Oh, Inverted World was an indie darling, the kind of record that traveled hand to hand, burned CD to burned CD, and then in 2004 a film called Garden State put "New Slang" and "Caring Is Creepy" directly into the ears of millions of people who had never heard of the band at all.

The scene is famous now. Natalie Portman hands Zach Braff the headphones and says the song will change his life, and then, in a piece of cultural timing nobody could have predicted, it sort of did. The album's fortunes flipped almost overnight and the band found themselves famous in a way that had very little to do with anything they'd done differently.

Far Out Magazine took a look back at how the band actually handled that, and the short version is: carefully, with a fair amount of squinting. James Mercer, the band's frontman, was caught off guard by how much the film moved the needle. And the fame wasn't just sudden. It was borrowed. Audiences weren't discovering The Shins; they were discovering a character's taste in music and then working backwards to the actual human beings who made it.

The band had built their audience the slow way, touring, releasing records, gathering the kind of listeners who find you because they went looking. Then a film did in one weekend what years of groundwork couldn't. There's a version of this story where the band resents it. But there's another version where a working band gets to keep making records because a movie bought them the freedom to.

What I keep coming back to is the asymmetry of it. The film used the songs as shorthand for sensitivity, for the interior life of a character, and the band then had to live inside somebody else's emotional framing of their work forever. Every interview for years ran through Portman's line. Imagine writing a song alone in a room at night and having its meaning permanently fused to a romantic comedy beat you had nothing to do with...

And yet the songs held up, which is the part the movie couldn't fake. "New Slang" was already a small masterpiece before anyone in Hollywood heard it. The film didn't make the song good, it just aimed a firehose at it.

The Shins survived the surge, kept releasing records, and watched the whole phenomenon curdle and then sweeten again in cycles as Garden State went from beloved to mocked to nostalgia object. The fame never quite fit, and maybe that's the most honest ending available. Some mysteries resolve. This one just keeps echoing.