Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock, surrounded by potted plants and loads of sound equipment at his Portland, Oregon-based Ice Cream Party studio, exudes his signature laissez faire charm as he fires off witty one-liners. It’s that sharp sense of humor that’s been trickling into the Modest Mouse catalog since the band’s 1996 debut, This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. Subsequent album titles like The Lonesome Crowded West (1997), Good News for People Who Love Bad News (2004) and We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank (2007) illustrate Brock’s penchant for creative writing and suggest there’s some digging to be done.
The band’s latest, 2021’s The Golden Casket, finds Brock further exploring his own musings on death, which seem all the more poignant since the passing of Modest Mouse co-founder/drummer Jeremiah Green. Green died in December 2022 from cancer at just 45 years old, a monumental blow to the close-knit group of musicians.
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“It doesn’t hurt much to talk about,” Brock tells SPIN. “I’m not sure why. I’m gonna miss him and all the right shit you’re supposed to say. I don’t know if it’s actually sunk in.”
But as Modest Mouse prepares to embark on the Good News For People Who Love Bad News tour in honor of the album’s 20th anniversary, Brock appears to be in a good place. The band spent the better part of the year touring with Pixies and Cat Power and working on a follow-up to The Golden Casket, although Brock has yet to decide on when it will actually materialize.
“I thought it was going to be done a year and a half ago,” he says. “But we just keep stacking wood on the pile. We basically have too much stuff, but we’re not finishing any of it. We get to a place where we enjoy it and work on it for a while. And then we’re like, ‘Let’s move on. We’ll come back to that.’ Then it’s just this endless train of almost songs. Then I keep going on tour, and nothing derails music like playing music.”
Modest Mouse
(Credit: Robin Laananen)
While that may be true, Brock is clearly comfortable onstage after decades of being in the spotlight. At a Denver stop in June, he ditched the jeans and T-shirt for a baby blue suit as he belted out fan favorites like “Float On” and “Dramamine.” Now 49, he’s “a suit guy,” he says with a laugh. Brock celebrated a birthday on July 9, which—in addition to Green’s death—could be another reason his own mortality is a subject of discussion not only in conversation but also on The Golden Casket.
“Maybe I’ll run down my mortality list a little bit at the end of the night and shit, but before my eyes are open, often before I’m even out of a dream, I’m having conversation with myself about all the fucking shit I’ve done, do, and will do that could equal death,” he explains. “Or just normal shit like, ‘God, I hate being a passenger in a car.’ Let’s start there.”
But Brock’s relationship with the concept of death has drastically shifted.
“For years it was just ‘you die, you’re dead. That’s it. Good for you, right?’” he says matter-of-factly. “That’s a really easy opinion for a 16- to 35-year-old guy to have. You still have your entire life plus another life plus potentially another one of those lives; it depends on where the fuck you are. You’re just like, ‘Death, whateverrrrrrr!’
“The entire narrative of any organized religion is just so fraught with fucking plot holes and it gets rewritten, edited, or interpreted to the fucking umpteenth degree by some moron and his tribe of moron bearded sons and shit. So I just locked myself off from the idea that there was any other way that the world functioned other than a live-die science scenario.”
Brock wouldn’t divulge exactly why or how his views changed, but he admits he doesn’t “want to miss” any of what life has to offer, a strong hint that death is something he fears, too.
Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock in 2004. (Credit: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)
“In the last five years, a series of things that I cannot share involving situations, people I met, things happening, and whatnot—there were so many that I haven’t been able to catalog it or quite get my head wrapped around it. There’s this idea that the entire universe is energy and you can’t remove anything from the universe, everything is connected and whatnot, and that means everything, everything.”
“I do believe that the way our consciousness works, I think you can lose that when you die, but I don’t think you can lose what made you exist. I think death is something very different than what we think it is.”
The topic will assuredly be revisited again on the upcoming Modest Mouse album but will likely be shrouded in metaphors and colorful language that will require a few listens to sort out.
“I hit it in such a vague and overly wordsmith-y sort of way that I don’t lay into it and tell a specific story like Johnny Cash,” he says. “It’s not like that. Or even David Berman, who is the best of the word wizards, or John Prine; so many people are good at that. I’ve had my moments but more often than not, I’m very, very fucking good at painting a room that doesn’t have to be a specific room.”
It’s the most confident Brock has sounded about his own material. Despite Good News for People Who Love Bad News netting a Grammy Award nomination for Best Alternative Music Album in 2005 and its lead single, “Float On,” getting a nod in the Best Rock Song category, Brock still isn’t necessarily convinced his pen is as magic as it is. In fact, Brock offers a resounding “no” when asked if he knows he has a knack for stringing words together.
“More often than not it requires people letting me know that I do,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Oh do I really?’ ’Cause it’s still a little…dangerous to be proud in this field. I do worry that sometimes I’m not thinking it through enough, where I may actually be getting too comfortable. Where we’re at in the writing process now, I wish you were hearing what I’m working on.”
“I think so far on this record, I’ve written some of my best shit and some of my most questionably phoned-in shit, and you won’t ever hear the phoned-in shit ’cause call canceled.”
Modest Mouse
(Credit: James Joiner)
Brock saw the success of “Float On” coming—not in an arrogant way, but at the time it was written, he could see its potential. But the mass appeal of another song from Good News for People Who Love Bad News, “Ocean Breathes Salty,” admittedly caught him off-guard.
“There’s usually two or three songs where it’s like, ‘This is what people enjoy listening to,’” he says. “The rest of it is what I do to them in the meantime, although I was kind of surprised about ‘Ocean Breathes Salty.’ I forget that people have feelings other than hyped and shit, in a Top 40 sort of way.”
“Float On” ultimately lost the Grammy to U2’s “Vertigo,” but Brock isn’t losing any sleep over it, even though there’s a sense he would’ve liked to win.
“Everyone says they don’t care and at the moment, it feels like they don’t care, but it was like, ‘Yes, how nice it is to be a contender in a sport you didn’t know you were playing,’” he says of the nominations.” It’s like a game you didn’t think you were trying to win. I didn’t even know it was a game. I thought it was music, but I guess there’s awards.
“As someone who’s been a three-time-Grammy nominee loser, I can tell you it would now feel really nice to not find out. It’s like if there’s a sweepstakes and they didn’t ever enter you in it and they just sent you notices saying you didn’t win. The third time you got the notice, you’d be like, ‘Fuck, they sent me another letter. I hope I didn’t lose again.’”
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