Modest mouse

Thrasher Magazine, July, 2004 by Jesse Locks

FOUR YEARS AGO I FOUND MYSELF IN SANTA CRUZ, CA pressed against a stage staring up at Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse. Blinded by lights, I moved my head in the direction of his voice all night. The venue was over-sold, as were most of the shows on The Moon and Antarctica tour, with kids singing and screaming along passionately to Brock's stories about life, religion and the world. Four years later I'm at a BBQ hosted and prepared by Brock at the small, comfortable two-bedroom house he rents with ins girlfriend in Portland, OR. I spend most of the afternoon getting to know him and his bandmates, guitarist Dann Gallucci, bassist Eric Judy, and new drummer Benjamin Weikel. Everyone is warm and friendly. And after the dishes are washed, Brock suggests the porch for the interview. He leaves the front door slightly ajar to hear the early Dylan and Stones records playing from inside. Obviously uncomfortable, he tells me he likes to listen to music and smoke during his interviews. I watch him struggle to explain his ninth and newest record, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, and the personal questions surrounding the tumultuous last years that have included moves, arrests and jail time, estrangement from previous drummer Jeremiah Green, and the birth of a son. Brock is an extremely volatile personality, either answering with brash opinions or extremely thoughtful comments. He's complicated, uncompromising and incredibly interesting. Few people will ever really know Isaac Brock other than from his songs, and he'd probably prefer it that way.

It's been four years since you released your last record. Why so long of a wait?

Four years is hard to summarize. I had a kid, Eric had a kid, I moved from Chicago to Florida to a logging town and then now to Portland. A combination of wasting time and doing shit.

You received mixed comments in the press on the tour for The Moon and Antarctica. The record was being hailed as damn near perfection while people were questioning your character and personal actions.

We don't tour for records; I should clarify that. We just tour.

Did the media invent a persona for you?

I don't ever read reviews. I won't read this one. They complicate things. So I don't know what they were saying. It doesn't surprise me that they were mixed, people are either going to like shit or not. Either way it's not going to change how I feel about what I did. I was happy with it. The end product didn't sound as good as it should have, and that's why I just went back and re-mastered it.

Who do you listen to then?

No one really. I don't even listen to myself sometimes. I ought to though. You make something and you don't look back because it's done. It was what it was--except for what you personally felt that could have been improved on; that you didn't necessary accomplish what you were trying to do on a song. I guess you try and improve on that. There've been a few albums that I thought were perfect. I don't feel like I've made a perfect album. I'm satisfied in trying to make just one.

Do you consider yourself an optimist, a pessimist, or a realist?

That depends on what time of the day. You are asking this question like you don't feel any of these.

No, I'm asking the question in response to people saying this record is very optimistic.

Yeah, I intentionally tried to project that life-is-still-sweet message. Sometimes you'll run into dark patches and tiffs time I ran into the opposite.

You recently moved to Portland from the logging community of Cottage Grove, Oregon. Did you prefer living in a rural town to cities like Seattle and Chicago?

Big cities didn't feel right, I got this romantic notion in my head of living in the middle of nowhere and chopping my own wood. Turns out if you live in the middle of nowhere you've got a lot of time to drink. I can't imagine doing that again for a while, I'm sure soon enough I'll get sick of this (living in Portland) and go back, Seems like we're always standing there on brown patches looking around for the green ones. Right now I feel like I'm standing on a green patch.

How does an Ugly Casanova song differ from a Modest Mouse song?

They don't. I specifically made a point when working on that record, that anything I wrote went on that record. When you're working on something you shouldn't cherry pick your songs. You're not going to extract all the sugar out and put it on one record and then use the citric acid for this other project; then you've got something that is either too sweet or too fucking sour on both ends. Where am I going with this analogy?

How about: why it was important for you to make the Ugly Casanova record.

There wasn't much going on with Modest Mouse then. We were all distracted for whatever reasons. Honestly, I'm not sure why it was important. It was important for me to play with other people. I definitely needed to make that record.

Many of your songs have an underlying blue-collar working-class sympathetic feeling to them. What do you find particularly interesting about that subject?