Modest Mouse is staying out of its own way

Like many of the most iconic Modest Mouse songs, a conversation with Isaac Brock is hilarious, gruff, loopy, and strangely profound. Beaming in over Zoom, his disheveled hair set against a backdrop of skinny green trees and clear blue sky, he smiles and lights up a cigarette. “It’s habitual,” he notes. “Doing these kinds of things—interviews and shit.” 

Over the next hour, we chat about an array of subjects: death, health, fatherhood, creativity, Bob Ross, bullwhips, even the messy art of canning peaches. “I was up until 2 a.m. last night [doing that],” he admits, somewhat out of nowhere, with a laugh. “There was a shit ton of sugar water involved, and that got everywhere. Not a great idea to do indoors. There’s all sort of shit that went wrong. Are you glad you asked? Oh, you didn’t.” We also went deep on his long-running band’s vivid and often nakedly emotional eighth LP, An Eraser and a Maze. 

The album, which follows 2021’s The Golden Casket, weaves together many threads from past Modest Mouse: the heart-tugging “Remember Yourself, Not Me” sounds like a mellower, more direct version of “3rd Planet,” and the sparkly rumble of “Absolutely Necessary Never” could be a distant cousin of “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes.” But it also feels like new territory—more vulnerable and human than anything they’ve released in ages. 

Of course, it’s hard not to analyze many of Brock’s lyrics through the prism of grief. This is the band’s first album since the 2022 death of co-founding drummer, Jeremiah Green, from cancer at age forty-five. “I didn’t lose the drummer to Modest Mouse,” he says. “I lost Jeremy.” Here’s our winding—and, hopefully, illuminating—conversation. 

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Paste Magazine: Like probably every Modest Mouse fan, I was blindsided when Jeremiah passed. I hope it’s okay to ask about him, because I feel like it’s important to keep mentioning his name.

Isaac Brock: It would be weird if you didn’t.

When he died, how long did it take you to figure out what to do next—not even emotionally, but just as Modest Mouse? Can you describe what it was like taking that next step?

I didn’t have a question as to whether I was continuing as Modest Mouse, because that’s not an option for me. I’ve been doing Modest Mouse since I was essentially sixteen, seventeen years old. I didn’t look at my and Jeremiah’s relationship as Modest Mouse. That’s just where we saw the most of each other. Jeremy and I had been friends since he was thirteen—not in a way where you necessarily take it for granted, but our friendship was more fluid than “we’re in a band together.” I didn’t lose the drummer to Modest Mouse. I lost Jeremy. I know that distinction might not land how it’s supposed to, but they are different things. 

The production on this album feels a lot more organic to me, whereas The Golden Casket was super textured, like a patchwork of sounds. I’m curious if that was reactionary or if anything specific changed in your writing process. 

The process of the two albums was a night and day difference. On The Golden Casket, we decided as a band to rent a house in Los Angeles and bubble up, and we’d just go to the studio, which was a secondary bubble. We didn’t really have a record written, so we were writing it in the studio, which…made for more of a collaged record. I allowed Dave Sardy, the producer—on almost every song, if it was feeling too heavy or something—to put a pop part in. “What about something like this?” I’d be like, “Let me see what I can write to that.” It ended up kinda poppy-feeling in ways that it wouldn’t have been otherwise. 

But then with this one, we did a lot of classic playing together until something happened that made sense. [Guitarist] Simon [O’Connor] or [multi-instrumentalist] Russell [Higbee] would bring a part, and sometimes—like “Remember Yourself, Not Me,” I didn’t fucking play guitar on it at all because it didn’t need it. I was doing my best to show a little restraint and be like, “No, the song’s good without me fucking write a part. I’d just be writing a part to say I had one.” Instead, I acted like a fucking grown-up and was like, “This is good without that.” Same with “Dog Bed in Heaven”—that was something Russell had that I sang to. Every producer who came in the room tried putting drums on it. I was like, “No, you’re all overthinking this one. It’s already good. Anything else is going to drown out the goodness.” 

You’re able to write very immediate hooks, even when they’re abrasive. But I feel like that ability has sharpened over time—there are lots of great examples on this album, including “Impossible Somedays.” Have you come to care more about writing hooks over the years? Do you think you’ve gotten better at it?

I must have gotten better at it because I kind of just wait until the music feels locked into a certain part of my brain. It’s not a part of my brain that’s activated unless that happens. And when that happens, shit just falls out. The words and the tune, I don’t have to hunt for it. I keep saying this, but I just stay the fuck out of my own way. Waking Isaac steps aside and lets this subconscious singing guy feed me the lyrics and the tune. I’m not driving around singing or anything. It kind of only happens during those moments. 

It’s fascinating to compare and contrast the early stuff with where you are now. I was listening to your 1997 EP, The Fruit That Ate Itself, the other day, right before I played An Eraser and a Maze. 

The Fruit That Ate Itself was largely an accidental record. I went there to record two songs we’d written, and [producer] Calvin [Johnson] just any time we were jamming was like, “That sounds pretty good.” We made a whole record out of two days of just fucking around. 

Some songs linger around, of course. But when you release an album, do you try to treat it like a blank slate and start fresh? I know you started working on this one pretty quickly after The Golden Casket. 

It’s nice to have some stuff that’s sort of written, just because. I’ve almost never gone into any record with any clear plan. I let the vibe get created as we go along with writing and things, and I don’t walk in with the intention of “this is going to be full of mood and feeling” or “this sounds angry.” What happens is supposed to happen, and we’ll paint the fucking picture. Who’s the guy who had the PBS painting show, Bob Ross? He knows exactly what he’s going to paint every time. I have no fucking idea. Even when it starts locking in, it could still go any way, and that’s okay with me. It would be nice to sit down and have an idea and make it come to life, but it’s a primordial ooze sort of thing. 

I was really struck by how you’ve talked about processing emotion through music, how you often seem to only notice certain feelings when you listen back to the songs. Has it always been that way for you? Is that a realization you only had in recent years?

It’s something I’ve been a little better at putting into words, ya know? I also feel like songs are sort of like fortune cookies or reading the tea leaves. For me, whatever my state of mind was that I wrote a song in initially—and I notice this when I’m playing live—I still find meaning in it that’s very different from anything that was going on with me at that [earlier] point. It’s in that fortune cookie way: This is what applies to me now. I can use these songs that I’ve written in the past as a lens to project that out of and see what is there, what picture I get from it. 

I’ve always been fascinated by your Ice Cream Party headquarters, which looks like some kind of music-gear wonderland. Is that still where you spend most of your time writing and putting stuff together? 

I don’t really collect shit of any sort anymore. Ah, that’s bullshit, Isaac. I accidentally collect stuff. If someone rolls by and they’re like, “Hey, my storage space is full of these giant melting popsicles and some giant flowers—do you want them?” I’m like, “…Yes.” So now I’ve got those. It’s just my workspace and also my bar. Not literally—if I’m gonna drink, I go there. Largely, me and the band show up, just start playing, and see what happens. I don’t find myself having enough time to just sit around and play music because I’m all half farmer, half bee raiser, one hundred percent dad, constantly doing work for Modest Mouse that isn’t [playing]. When it’s time to write and we get together, I usually show up fucking empty-handed. I always show up empty-handed now. I wait until something starts happening, and I’m kinda mean about it when I don’t like it—”Moving on, moving, on! That was fun! Cool rock jam, dudes.” 

That’s the next album title right there. 

[Laughs] Absolutely. We’ll do a jam-band album. Nothing but noodles. That’s what it should be called!

“Remember Yourself, Not Me” might be one of my favorite Modest Mouse songs. I love those ornamental, hammer-on guitar parts and its overall sense of space.

I kinda put it to Simon O’Connor—he’s new-ish to the band. I said, “Why don’t you bring something for me to try to write around?” He came in with that thing, and I instantly had singing for it, which is a good sign. It was fucking great. I thought the guitar part was so good that I wouldn’t write a guitar part for it. The ornamental shit is also Simon. Everyone I play with is fucking amazing. I’m not even joking—these guys are just great. I didn’t think we’d be able to pull off half of these songs live. “Picking Dragon’ Pockets”—those guys didn’t have anything to do with writing, and that one was written in a pretty strange way. I didn’t even know how I made some of the noises. I was in a swirl of “How do I make this normal sound so fucked up that you’ll never know what it is?” Then I thought, “I suppose I should learn how to play this.” Those guys helped me learn [it]. They make it seem easy to get to these places. 

I assume having so many new musical voices over the years has helped keep things fresh for you.

I know that it has. I don’t know what it would have been like if it had remained the same set of people—maybe we would have still pulled that off. Everyone, when they start playing with someone new, is gonna fucking bring…it, whatever it is. You kind of get the best of people when you’re first playing together. 

I was incredibly moved by “Third Side of the Moon,” which confronts loss in a very overt way. 

With that song in particular, I was singing the lyrics as we were writing it in real time. We’ll record it, and then I’ll go back and be like, “What was I saying?” I won’t even know. I’ll transcribe it, much like Joseph Smith transcribed the tablets with those magic spectacles. I’ll go back in and be like, “What was I saying? What was that word?” There’s essentially four scenarios in that song, and they’re not all based on death—they’re based on loss. There are certain ways that Jeremiah and Sam Jayne [the late singer-guitarist of Love as Laughter] being gone still hasn’t fully sunk in. I will still occasionally get hyped on something and go, “I should call Jeremy!” I don’t know if that’s a by-product of living in different places. There are large parts of my life with Sam or Jeremy even, where, on some level, we do only live in each other’s imaginations. We’re there but through phone or otherwise. It’s interesting because your mind can still be tethered to the idea that, “Yes, they’re gone in the get-together sort of way, but you can still call them.”

Several years ago, when I interviewed you and your former bandmate Johnny Marr for SPIN, you talked about having written a song together called “Rivers of Rivers.” Is that still a thing?

Yeah, that song’s done! It’s one of my favorite songs, and it didn’t make this record because it didn’t quite… I had all these songs, and I was like, “I’m gonna put this record together now. Not all of them are gonna make it.” There are songs stronger than some that are on this record because they just didn’t feel right. That song is going on something that will come out in probably a year called Shadows in the Shade. It also has a song that Jeremy played on—and also another friend of ours who passed away from cancer around the same time, Rob Laakso, who used to be in Kurt Vile and the Violators, and he used to be in a band with Simon O’Connor called Amazing Baby. It was a cover of a Songs: Ohia song about dying. It’s not my song, but the whole fucking song is really powerful the way we did it, but it just wasn’t right for this either. Also, to be honest, I felt like it was too soon. 

What is Shadows in the Shade, exactly?

It’s like an album. We had a lot of stuff, and I’m hoping between here and there we write a few songs that are better than a few of the songs that are on it, and we kick those [others] down the road a little further. This was a two-part record. 

Strangers to Ourselves is labeled “The Golden Casket Vol. 1” on the vinyl. Just clarifying: Was there a kind of planned sequel that didn’t come out, or did it evolve into what became the next album, The Golden Casket?

There was supposed to be something called “The Golden Noose,” and that would have maybe been this, but it didn’t line up. There were a lot of reasons I didn’t do that. One, they weren’t actually written together, so it would have been a fucking farce. I just really liked the idea that I had a title for another record and shit. But in that instance, I just had a few fucking stragglers. In the case of the next record, that’s basically already written. The only way I was going to convince myself to not put certain songs on this record was if I knew there was a companion record. I needed it to not feel like work by the time you got done listening to it—one more song, and it would have felt like work. 

Multi-instrumentalist Tom Peloso, who was in the band for a long time, does get one credit on the new album, though he hasn’t been touring with you guys. Do you think he’ll come back at some point?

We’d like him to contribute here and there, and he and I are pretty fucking tight. I definitely plan on writing with him again. Tom is by far one of my favorite fucking people on this planet. It’ll align again. Last time we came to his town, he came on stage and played “Tiny Cities” with us. 

It seems like there’s a real open-door policy with Modest Mouse. It’s almost like a collective at this point.

I’m trying to think if there’s anyone not in the band anymore that I’m not friends with. I really like [that family vibe] too. Benjamin Weikel, I love fucking playing with him, and he helped write some of this record. He had a baby, and we were getting ready to go on tour, and it just didn’t make sense for him. Man, the first couple years of being a dad… [Drummer] Damon [Cox] is fucking great. When tracking on this record, I semi-intentionally decided I’d rather, with Jeremy having just passed, not have it be like “There’s a replacement.” Instead, different people we like are playing drums. Damon, who stepped in for Jeremy and still is our live drummer, is on a lot of the tracks. I really didn’t want it to feel like Jeremiah was being replaced by a person.

An Eraser and a Maze is out June 5 on Glacial Pace Recordings.

Ryan Reed is a writer and editor from Knoxville, Tennessee. In addition to Paste, his work has appeared over the years in Rolling Stone, Revolver, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and many other publications.

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