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Interview: Modest Mouse
- Jack Montague
- 15 hours ago
- 8 min read
Interviewed by Jack Montague
Isaac Brock, the founding member of Modest Mouse, has been releasing records with a band of cycling members since 1996. Their new release, An Eraser and a Maze, celebrates the legacy of the distinct Modest Mouse sound, charting into the familiar abstraction of Isaac’s stream-of-consciousness lyricism, vocal crunch, and noise-focused playing style. The release marks the thirtieth anniversary of This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About, honouring the band’s first ten years of success with a masterful sense of musical decisiveness and maturity.
I called Isaac recently on a particularly cold day in Brisbane. He greeted me on video from his back porch in Portland. Though the sky in the background was the pastel blue of early American June, Isaac told me his worries were not skyward, but emerging from the ground. “A colony of ants is attacking me!” he said. These evil ants, though, didn’t reach Isaac before he got to telling me a slew of exciting and interesting things. We talked about discography, lyricism, weird pedals, and the ways we discover music. Getting into his artistic process was a blast.
An Eraser and a Maze was such an incredible listen. The sound felt very new but also honoured the character of your past albums. Coming off the back of a long process of in-studio recording, what is your mindset when preparing to hit the blocks touring, and how do you maintain longevity on tour?
To be honest, and this is different from when I was a bit younger, I just take it easy on drinks most of the time, because otherwise you’re gonna burn out. And the other thing we do a lot of live, is making sure we don’t do the same show twice. Unless we’re playing albums which is a different thing. But when we’re putting together a setlist we want to make sure every day is kind of new to us.
There’s a big space in your discography between your first ten years and the most recent ten years, with lots of output from 1996-2007, and from 2015-now. I find your sound always remains itself through the whole discography. How has your process evolved making records in the last ten years as compared to the first ten years?
My filter has gotten better. Let’s say the record in 1996, Long Drive. It was a double album, and to be fair it really didn’t have to be. I should’ve just cut some songs, you know. But for some reason I didn’t know how to say ‘This is fine Isaac, but it’s not that fucking fine.’ Creatively at that point, it was slightly easier on some levels because I hadn’t done it before. So everything I wrote was, in my mind, a new invention and I had cracked the code and done something no one had even done before. I have heard many a record since to prove me wrong, but you know how it goes. I also had a tendency to overcomplicate songs back then. I just kept adding parts where they didn’t need to be, sometimes. Some of it has held up and I’m glad I made those decisions at the time, but I just don’t like doing that anymore. I feel, on some level, that when you’re liking how a song is going, you don’t necessarily want that pretty song to turn into a yelling match. It can be a vibe killer.
You said there’s an “entire fucking factory” in your head that does the good stuff, and that you just manage the day to day things. I love to get into the mundane parts of people’s process and get a sense of how they do their work from that. What is it about your day to day process that supports the factory inside your head?
Let’s take, for instance, the day to day process of working on a song. We’ve done the exciting part of coming up with the general idea just by playing and jamming on the ideas, which is fun. But at some point you’ve gotta figure out how long these parts go, and maybe that not everyone needs to be playing at the same time. So we get a demo track and listen to it back, and we end up adding 20 times more shit than we should, and at some point wondering ‘hang on, where’s that song we wrote?’ And it’s underneath a pile of weird sounds. And then we spend four months figuring out what to get rid of and what to keep. We usually end up walking right back to day one, getting rid of whatever we added.
I’d vote to say that the day to day part of your mind might be fucking up the subconscious parts that do the hard work.
It’s as if your own work keeps freeing you to make more work, and you guys keep getting better. How do you think you’ve stayed that individuality and managed to keep improving each record for the last thirty years without burning out?
I’m terrified of making the bad Modest Mouse record. So every record actually gets a little harder because I lose perspective, you know. As far as staying true to our sound, I don’t have a choice, man. I couldn’t sound like anything else if I wanted to. I couldn’t just wake up tomorrow morning and start pumping out Bad Bunny songs or something, because I’m just not qualified.
Something I thought was beautiful is the list of people your assisting producers had noted working with. In order of Lil Yachty, Kim Gordon, U2, Weezer, and Charli xcx. How did those extra sets of hands come into the studio process and help shape the final product?
So let’s say Jacknife Lee, for instance. He was in and out of the making of this record, and in the first instance we were writing together. Him and I went down to California and worked on stuff. Song About Nothing is just us jamming. So we were very much involved. And then later on, his role became more secondary. We’d just say ‘Jacknife, we’re painted into a corner here, what’s your opinion?’ Then Justin Raisin (of Lil Yachty and Charli xcx) and I had a playdate, too. We were like, ‘Let’s get together and see what happens,’ so I went down to his studio for three days and he had a group of musicians he likes playing with. We wrote two songs together, one of which ended up on the record. The way he approaches music is much more collage-y and hip-hop. We’d play something and he would make a framework for it to work, which Jacknife does a lot of too. Susie Shinn is a much more classical producer where it’s more like ‘What is the song, lets play the song, and how can we help this song be better?’
Song About Nothing reminds me of a new genre I’ve been calling “electro-rock”. It fits into that fresh and now sound a lot of more recently formed bands are getting into. The effects often feel like I’m hearing electronic music from a guitar. Are you enjoying the indie rock sound in the US at the moment?
I wish I heard more stuff from new bands. If I’m being completely honest here, I have a six and an eight year old who are in charge of the stereo almost all of the time, and so I hear terrible things. I’m in a swirling world of Jojo Siwa. I hear new music, but when I do hear it, it’s in a spotify playlisting sort of way. Recently though, when we went on tour I decided to do away with the tour bus and drive myself, which was really fucking nice because I had time to listen to new stuff. I was sitting in the front seat and when songs came up I could shazam them.
But the overall approach to how music gets delivered to our poor little brains nowadays completely changes how we discover music. I used to go into a record store, find this thing, and bring it home. Let’s say I bought four 7-inch records or a couple of LPs, that’s what I fucking had that was new to listen to. Creeper records was definitely a thing. You could put on something and be like ‘I don’t know’ and then hit the third song and go ‘Oh, now I get it!
Anyway, you say this is called electro-what? Electro-rock?
Electro-rock.
What makes it electro rock? Make sure you copyright this.
I think it’s rock bands getting in with newer and weirder pedal tech. They Are Gutting a Body of Water is the first band that comes to mind. They use new RAT pedals, and sometimes it ends up sounding nothing like a guitar.
Yeah, the reason I circled back and asked about that was because I thought that was maybe what you were talking about, and I’ve got shit to say. One, the pedal industry is like a hundred-fold of what it was in the 90s. Back then we basically had Dunlop, Boss, RAT, and whatever other pedal companies. But now, I think people, because of the ability now to put digital chips in pedals, can get them a lot closer to the sound of synths. There’s just so many options for making interesting and fucked sounds now. And to take it one step farther, our method of production and recording is so much, like… you don’t have to land your part, ever! You just throw your weird sound around and then cut or shuffle it off. You don’t have to have like five people by the control board moving faders so you can have a fantastic mix. It’s great, and it’s also the bain of my existence, because with recording I can just get so far down that road that it’s unworkable. My producers end up telling us, woah, you guys, that is a lot of fucking tracks.
It’s like: here are seven tracks of thimbles. They’re thimbles. We’ve gone through and picked our favourite thimbles.
I had a big smile on my face when I found out you were a fan of The Drones. I guess it makes sense to me that you’d dig Gareth Liddiard’s music.
I fucking love The Drones.
You guys have a lot in common in terms of both being really abstract and spatial lyricists. What is your process like as a lyricist, and is physical space an important part of that?
It has been. Right now I’m looking at grass and trees and watching the birds chirp, so I don’t think I can really speak to the grime of the urban landscape. You know, my studio is down there in the centre of Portland, so it’s a bit more colourful there. In terms of lyrical process, the one truth to my lyric writing process is that, when the music gets going when we’re jamming or playing, a part of my brain almost involuntarily comes up with a tune. The words come out. And I’m not like ‘what do I want to say here?’ or ‘what is the answer to the question this guitar is asking me?’ It’s just in there, and I don’t even get to oversee how it’s created or how it comes out. And if I’m lucky I either hit record, or remember it and transcribe it. I usually get 90% of the way there without thinking about what it is I’m singing. And then after that it’s just fine tuning, lucky me.
I have to ask the pleading question of all Australian journalists. Are you planning on coming back here for a tour?
I’m really hoping to get there at the beginning of next year. We’re touring the states till almost December. Then I’m avoiding fucking touring in December because Christmas is a crazy time as it is, without me having to be in and out the door. And I tend to leave January alone too, but it’s really nice in Australia in January and February, so that’s why I want to come in February.
I’ll be spending the next six months theorising about the Australian tour setlist. In the meantime, An Eraser and a Maze (out in physical press and on Bandcamp and streaming services) is keeping me well occupied.
Modest Mouse's brand new album 'An Eraser and A Maze' is out now
Available to listen here
