Talking with Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse

Near the end of An Eraser and a Maze, the eighth and newest album from Modest Mouse, there’s a song lasting all of 34 seconds. “Stoner Party” is more of a conga line, really, with no melody and no discernible point. It’s just funny. And it’s just kinda there, sandwiched before and after the sublime rock, gritty, punky and rhythmic and melodic as hell, on the rest of the set.

“I pulled that thing off the record so many times,” laughs Isaac Brock, Modest Mouse’s founder, songwriter, lead singer and ruler of all things. “Mainly because I didn’t want the parents of the kids my kids go to school with get too much of an idea about me.

“Then I realized Isaac, you’ve been pretty mouthy for a number of years. You’ve already made your bed, buddy. Don’t worry about it. Put your weird-ass party song in there.”

Exploding out of Issaquah, Washington in the post-grunge 1990s, Modest Mouse’s mix of rock ‘n’ roll grit, eclectic rhythms and atmospheric embellishments has served them – well, served Brock – well, since the early, independent records and the major-label hits The Moon and Antarctica, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, We Were Dead Before Our Ship Even Sank and Strangers to Ourselves.

“Float On” became the band’s best-known single, in 2004.

With Brock as the sole remaining original member, Modest Mouse is starting a tour behind An Eraser and a Maze next week; the very first date is Wednesday (Sept. 16) at the BayCare Sound (find tickets at this link).

The Catalyst spoke with Brock via Zoom.

St. Pete Catalyst: There’s a belief that once music turns into a business, or a job, that it’s not so much fun any more. After all these years, for you is it still the great adventure it always was?

Isaac Brock: The fact is – the recording, for instance, part of it’s always not been fun. Creating’s great, and the brutal work of getting it right isn’t necessarily fun. It’s rewarding. It’s more akin to going to the gym, which I have very little experience with any more. Where it’s not necessarily fun, but once you get through it you’re like ‘Yeah! I’m f—in’ great.’ So that’s fine.

Do you mean the process of finishing the record?

Yeah. The whole process. Getting to the point where you’ve got an exciting idea you want to record, that’s fine. But then really making it actually land and feel right is f—ing tedious. I mean, picking out microphones is tedious. I don’t love gear in the way that a lot of people might, that would make that fun. It’s like, what works?

Playing live is fun for the playing live part of the day, but the getting ready and the waiting around is bullshit. I’m about to start a tour, in Florida, and it’s six weeks long. And six weeks sitting on a bus sounds not ideal.

But once I’m doing it, it’ll be fun.

You’re one of those people who turned the studio into another instrument. Is that sense of discovery still there? “Hey, let’s put a backwards guitar in here!”

Oh sure. In the early days of recording, with really, really simple tricks, you’re like ‘Oh yeah, we’re the Beatles. We’re flippin’ the tapes over.’ When we started, there was no software. If you wanted to do fades, everyone had their position on the mixing console, to do any rides or whatever, to synch things into the mix. Bit of a dance there! And that was fun. Pretty simple ideas feel like grand artistic moves. Again, reversing the guitars.

Now, the joy of doing that’s been turned into an operation on a computer, and so we have to find new ways to make it hard for ourselves. And we do!

You said somewhere that song ideas come to you from somewhere in your subconscious. Do you ever write something, look at it and go ‘What the hell is that about?’

“Then I listen back to the recordings and I transcribe it, like Joseph Smith and his f—in’ magic bag, y’know? Usually it’s like, I’m gonna write this down, whatever I said, because that’s the way the phrasing should work.” Screengrab.

Almost every time I’ve woken up with a thought and gone ‘Oh, must get this down’ – which I don’t do a lot of – but when I have, and the light of day comes, I’m like ‘Uh-oh, you don’t know how to spell,’ and ‘You forgot a bunch of words that would have maybe made this sense,’ or ‘You skipped something ‘cause this can’t be what you were thinking, there’s not a complete thought here,’ that happens a lot. And also on the occasions that I have something important that I’m like ‘I should write this down,’ and I’ll come back to it later.

And I don’t, and it’s forgotten until I’m flipping through books. ‘Can I keep this?’ ‘Should I throw it away?’ ‘Oh, I was writing out lyric ideas. Close call; good thing I didn’t use those.’

So that doesn’t really work for me, man. It seems like the best way to go about it for me is when we’re writing music, whether it’s me alone or us as a group, my brain locks into it and the conscious part of it, day to day Isaac, gets pushed aside and this thing that’s been doing all this interesting work behind me, behind the scenes, is like ‘Here’s what we’re saying.’ And I kind of just sing the shit.

Then I listen back to the recordings and I transcribe it, like Joseph Smith and his f—in’ magic bag, y’know? Usually it’s like, I’m gonna write this down, whatever I said, because that’s the way the phrasing should work. Then I’ll try and come up with a different way, using my awake brain, to write a song using these shapes. Ninety some odd percent of the time, I just end up going with the words that were there, and it’s better than me getting’ in the way of myself.

Sometimes abstractions make for a more interesting song. I’ll think about Dylan and his typewriter, banging out words – maybe a lot of those songs weren’t supposed to make any linear sense.

Yeah, he’s a slave to the rhyme. I think he did a lot of ‘Eh, the listener will figure it out. I don’t even have to know what it is.’ And goddam well I have. I’ve listened to those songs thousands of times, and I get a little bit different every time, because it wasn’t married to reality so heavily.

I try to make a little more sense than that and things when I’m looking at something. I’m like ‘Can this make sense?’ But then … I don’t know.

One of the only records I can listen to from start to finish over and over again is Blood on the Tracks. And I think he knew what he was doing on that one. Then I get envious of the storytelling; that’s some pretty deep and detailed storytelling. The details, he’s gettin’ a little Steinbecky on that.

What’s your favorite track?

What’s that one where he has the line ‘I can’t help it if I’m lucky …’ oh, ‘Idiot Wind.’ That’s a good one, just the way it starts: ‘Someone’s got it in for me …’ The whole thing is great.

Matter of fact, as soon as I’m done doing interviews, I’m going to listen to that record.

It’s mellow and mean-spirited. That’s kind of a rare thing. Usually if people are being a little shitty, they like to pick up the energy. I know I do. But that whole record just kinda purrs shittiness.