Modest Mouse

FOLLOW THE YELLOW-BRICK ROAD

Sometimes, all it takes is a simple phone call to begin a lifelong partnership. But hearing Marr’s recounting of the call that brought him into the Modest Mouse fold—and then hearing Isaac Brock’s take on the same conversation—is akin to a split-screen description of a blind date.

“[Former Modest Mouse guitarist] Dann Gallucci said my name would occasionally come up in conversation, and I guess Isaac must’ve figured ‘Hey, maybe it’s worth a shot,’” says Marr, explaining the phone call that led him to Portland, Ore., for a few days of unscripted jamming in Brock’s rehearsal space. “I told him ‘I’m not into doing sessions; I’m into collaboration.’ I wanted to be part of something genuinely altruistic and unusual, so when Isaac explained to me, ‘It’s a blank slate, we’re doing this one completely from scratch,’ that fit with the personal agenda I wanted to follow. I thought to myself, ‘Well, if it doesn’t work, then I’ve had a week of a good time trying to play with these amazing musicians. What’s the worst that can happen?’”

“I intentionally didn’t want to throw him in with the whole band right oΩ the bat,” recalls Brock of his strategy to manage the “what if Johnny says ‘yes?’” scenario. Improbably, Brock hadn’t even considered “no” as one of Marr’s available options, and had plotted his steps carefully enough to determine that the initial encounter would consist only of the two guitarists trading ideas to see if anything clicked. “At Stage One, I just don’t think it’s a great idea to have someone stand in a room with a bunch of people they don’t know and try to get their musical bearings. Because a lot of us in the band hadn’t played or written together in quite a while either, so we were gonna have to find our sea legs regardless. I don’t remember who had which riff or exactly how it all went down, but I do know that from the time we first started playing together, the songs started coming really easily—‘Dashboard,’ then ‘We’ve Got Everything.’” Brock chuckles sardonically, as if remembering something private: “And that’s how Johnny launched us into being the big happy family we are today.”

“I’d be playing and think to myself, ‘Is that a banjo I hear over my shoulder? Is Jeremiah adding a sample right now?’” Marr chimes in. “I say: wherever two or three Modest Mouse people be ye gathered together, let a song ring forth in a few minutes’ time.”

This your-peanut-butter’s-in-my-chocolate approach to collaboration may not have seemed entirely intuitive to outsiders—particularly not for a band whose previous release, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, sold nearly 1.5 million copies (more than the group’s 10-year back catalog combined). But for Modest Mouse, messing with what’s working is all part of the master plan—another chapter in the band’s long, strange trip toward the mainstream, which has inched ever closer even as Modest Mouse continues following its own woolly, fevered instincts instead of tracking the latest Billboard charts.

“On their previous records, Isaac had written all the songs in advance, and Dann fit his guitar parts into the gaps that remained,” remembers producer Dennis Herring, who worked with Modest Mouse on both Good News and Ship Sank at Sweet Tea studios in Oxford, Miss. “This one was deeply affected by the fact that they all wrote together. So there was a communal, dual-threat guitar dynamic to consider, a super-active left/right guitar trip happening the minute the tracks came oΩ the floor. To me, their interplay is a lot like Television’s—intertwining guitars that form puzzle pieces to be fitted together. Precision and fire.”

“We didn’t know how it was gonna go, you know?” laughs Brock. “There was a lot of dueling, but in a non-competitive way. Johnny’s really conscientious about how he plays. If there was a guitar part of mine that seemed to be the dominant one, he’d play something complementary rather than stepping on it. That actually seems like a neat way to make music—find someone who does something completely different than what you do and see what happens. So there might be a couple of us dicking around who could come up with anything at any point. Someone might be making a sandwich, and someone else could be doing something that sounded really good, and then we’d all scurry over there to make sure we’d get a chance to play on it. Sometimes we’d stop and say, ‘We’ve been playing for 45 minutes on what I’m guessing is a song—what does anyone remember that’s good?’ Then we’d pick apart the things we could trace back; those were the songs.”

If it all sounds too reductive for words—like Can, recording every musical scribble and then splicing the best bits together to form a pre-digital Krautrock mashup—Ship Sank is still a significant leap forward for Modest Mouse. The record’s angular guitars, half-hollered/half-sung vocals and precision-strike meditations on the vagaries of life signal a return to the more expansive, wild-eyed improvisation of the band’s ’90s-era indie albums (such as The Lonesome Crowded West) that first captured the imagination of a growing cult of admirers. But the new album’s melodic sense also retains a healthy dollop of Good News’ pop sensibility. And if Brock’s fans have, by now, gotten used to his Captain Deathtrips fascination with mortality and the afterlife—this is, after all, a guy who grew up in an itinerant circle of Midwest quasi-religious communities and has penned the songs “Bury Me With It,” “Satin In a Coffin,” “The Good Times Are Killing Me” and “Dark Center of the Universe”—Ship Sank could accurately be labeled a collection of nautically themed fight songs or what Brock himself has described as “a nautical balalaika carnival.” And if this sounds like a concept record, Brock may or may not argue with that assumption. He hasn’t really made up his mind yet.

“There’d be times when I thought ‘I have this narrative, and now I’m gonna find a way to make a short film, too.’ The same f—in’ thing happened with The Moon and Antarctica!” Brock laughs about his aborted grand scheme for the band’s 2000 major-label debut, firing up a cigarette after bumming a light from one of the stagehands. “But I don’t think it’s the best thing for me to wrangle all that. It’s not exactly a concept record, but it’s a concept within the record, with some common lyrics and themes. Water’s the biggest one.” He puffs out some smoke, thinks for a minute, then finishes his thought. “Some people seem to have a good deal of clarity about where their songs come from and how they write. That’s great, but I always feel like such a ponce when I talk about my music so clearly, like I know what the hell I’m even talking about or doing. That’s not really how I work. I have my own way of operating.”

Brock’s “own way” turns out to be a perfectly imperfect vehicle for his finely honed sense of post-millennial angst: Lyrical fragment after lyrical fragment paints a portrait of the singer raging against the dying of the light, flailing his fists at a world that doesn’t understand him and isn’t likely to be investing the effort any time soon. Whereas on previous records the tightly wound Brock seemed to be courting death, daring it to come near and touch him, Ship Sank is the sound of Brock flipping the Grim Reaper the bird as he whistles down the wind—“It took so much effort not to make an effort,” he sings on “Florida,” a pop-flavored mover recorded in partnership with The Shins’ James Mercer, one of Brock’s Portland neighbors and his first signing as a former Sup Pop A&R man. The vibe continues throughout the record: “It didn’t seem we’d lived enough to even get to die” (dub/funk groover “Education”); “Who in the hell made you the boss?” (the layered “Parting of the Sensory”); “We’re crushed by the ocean, but it will not get us wet” (the midtempo, Clash-like “Invisible”). This album, like Brock’s psyche these days, is overwhelmingly defiant. But don’t mistake his insubordinate attitude for nihilistic contempt; he remains very interested in having his music heard by as many people as possible.

“Modest Mouse made so many records that were sprawling, and I thought it was time for us to try one that was easier to assimilate,” Brock says of the poppier Good News, the band’s attempt to whittle down its musical approach. “I wanted us to make a record that was fun to listen to, not something you had to work at. So that makes us that much more available to that many more people. [The new] record is like a merger of Good News and Lonesome Crowded West; a meeting of those two worlds—all the long, older records with all their weird shit, and the easier-to-listen-to record. Like they had a baby. Because I don’t wanna make music for the f—in’ hipsters anymore,” he says insistently. “They’re welcome to it, too, but not exclusively. I’ve met a lot of kids who can only get their music at places like Wal-Mart, and I’m more than happy to try to be the kind of band that can reach them there. Kind of like the Talking Heads—they had some great pop hits, but then you listen to the records and there’s some f—in’ weird shit on there, too.”

Insofar as the early returns are concerned, it seems entirely likely that Modest Mouse, Inc., will continue apace with its quest for world pop domination. “‘Dashboard’ has been #1 on our People’s Choice countdown since the very first night it came out,” enthuses Mark Hamilton, programming director for influential Portland, Ore., indie-rock station KNRK. “Up until recently, it’s been hard to imagine any truly alternative band cracking the Top 40. But now we have platinum artists who are exclusive to the kind of music we care about. We think this album’s gonna be massive.”

Brock and Marr’s partnership has wrought the band’s most accomplished work to date, and this has validated the difficult journey required to see it through to completion. “It’s definitely not the easiest way to work,” chuckles Brock about the group’s experiment in democracy. “The easiest way to run anything is one person with an iron constitution and metal fist, because that person knows how it’s going to turn out and what they do and don’t want to hear. That’s definitely different than this f—in’ roundtable deal we have going: ‘Hey, maybe we should do it like this?’ But it’s a goddamned good way to do it. It was the right way to approach this record.”

When the band was rehearsing in Portland, Marr says they even consulted the small crew of homeless people living outside the studio. “Sometimes we’d go outside and talk with them, maybe share some food or a beer,” he says. “If they were shouting for a certain song or grooving around to something we were playing, we knew we were on the right track.”