Isaac Brock doesn’t care to reminisce. As fans celebrate the arrival of Modest Mouse’s eighth studio album, “An Eraser and a Maze,” as well as the 30th anniversary of the band’s 1996 debut album, “This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About,” the mercurial frontman hits a mental wall when asked to consider what three-plus decades of Modest Mouse has meant to him. “I don’t have an answer,” he admits with a sense of finality. “Sorry.”
“I barely have a memory,” he jokes. “That’s actually one of the things that my friends and family compliment me on, which is I don’t f—ing do a lot of looking back in that way.”
Brock isn’t being rude — far from it. He’s just bracingly honest and notoriously wobbly when asked to verbalize the significance of everything and anything — from his poetically dense lyricism to the whole of his revered music career.
Having just wrapped sound check before a show at the College Street Music Hall in New Haven, Conn., Brock is sitting behind the venue as the sun sets behind him, creating a kind of halo effect, which is fitting, since we spend much of our conversation talking about life and death. Taking drags of cigarettes and sipping on a can of cider seems to clarify his thought process as he works to focus his answers. His speaking cadence mirrors his singing style, going in fits and starts, spilling out a series of thought fragments that somehow end up magically fitting together.
Almost everything about Brock and Modest Mouse as an entity defies convention and embodies contradiction: lyrics can be sardonic and upbeat; Brock has toiled in the DIY trenches and shot to the top of the charts; Modest Mouse is among the era-defining indie-rock bands of the early aughts and, until recently, spent decades on a major label.
“An Eraser and a Maze” marks the first Modest Mouse project released outside the major-label system (on Brock’s own Glacial Pace Recordings) since the group signed to Epic in 2000. “I didn’t have a bad time on Epic,” Brock says, arguing with himself a little as he considers the pros and cons of indie versus major. “I like the people I worked with throughout the years. I didn’t feel like a captive until later in the game. I didn’t feel like I was necessarily held hostage by the deal, but I mean, all the money went to them…. If someone’s making a lot of money off you…. Putting something out that actually is ours, that feels nice.”
Brock also oscillates as he debates the so what behind “An Eraser and a Maze,” which the album bio decides must be thinking about the block universe theory, a philosophy that states all time is running simultaneously. “I had to ask ChatGPT to explain block theory to me,” he says. “I’m not sure about time and space. I’ve had plenty of moments where I felt like I could travel through time or space, but I’m just not qualified to talk about it. But I did like that [interpretation]. It made me sound smarter …
“The part of my mind that’s able to sort out important concepts or feelings, I don’t actually get to participate in,” he adds of his general songwriting process. “My conscious brain is doing a bunch of desk work. All the good work is done in some part of my brain I’m not sure belongs to me. Music is the only way that I’ve ever found to actually truly unlock that.”
Even if he is only partially aware of the emotions that underpin “An Eraser and a Maze,” which was created with producers Suzy Shinn, Jacknife Lee and Justin Raisen, it’s clear that the frontman is working through feelings of loss and grief, some of which is a response to longtime Modest Mouse drummer Jeremiah Green dying in 2022 shortly after being diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. Two years prior, Brock’s old friend Sam Jayne, lead singer of regional peers Lync and Love as Laughter, was found dead in his car. Brock’s other insights on life, existence and death are more generalized; they’re just part and parcel of being 50 years old.
“I’m standing in the middle of a scale where people who are vibrant and going to live a long time are there as much as people are on the way out,” he explains. “It’s like Manhattanhenge, when the sun is just right, and it shines right down east and west. I’m in the Manhattanhenge stage of life… The intersection I’m at is knowing and being involved with people who are going to outlive me by a lot. And currently, every f—ing other week, if not every other day, I’m finding out about someone I know that is on the way out. It’s hard not to let that become the major premise of everything I do.”
Brock says he’d played with Green since the drummer was just 13. It was the early 1990s, and the pair, plus founding bassist Eric Judy, were all teenagers living on the outskirts of Seattle, in Issaquah, Wash. Heavily inspired by ‘80s and early ‘90s indie, alternative and punk pillars like Built to Spill, the Cure, Pavement and Pixies, plus even less conventional acts like Can and Tom Waits, Modest Mouse circulated in the burgeoning Northwest underground scene that also featured acts such as Lync (fronted by Jayne), Sunny Day Real Estate, Silkworm and Death Cab for Cutie.
Unlike the bands circling Seattle and Portland, Modest Mouse made a point of leaning into its outlier roots. Even though the band’s twitchy, unsettled guitar work and Brock’s singular vocal shriek would come to define the Pacific Northwest indie-rock sound, Modest Mouse insisted on being from Issaquah, and many of its early-career songs, such as “Trailer Trash” and “Novocain Strain,” were jagged meditations on suburban sprawl and lower-income life. Formative albums like “This Is A Long Drive…” and 1997’s “The Lonesome Crowded West” explored themes of endless travel and isolation amid American rural landscapes, as well as corporate greed and consumerism.
Concurrently, Brock’s cynicism had a way of giving into bouts of radical optimism, which most famously took form on the group’s best-known song, 2004’s “Float On.” The single’s accompanying album, “Good News for People Who Love Bad News,” was an overall pop-forward collection that signified the group’s commercial breakthrough and even earned two Grammy nominations in 2005.
After the overwhelming success of “Float On” and “Good News…,” Modest Mouse continued to peddle an unlikely balance of DIY quirk with commercial polish. Follow-up albums like 2007’s nautical-themed “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank,” 2015’s “Strangers to Ourselves,” and 2021’s “The Golden Casket” never quite did the same numbers as “Good News…,” and the group went through a series of lineup changes (one featuring former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr stepping in from 2006 to 2009). Brock became much less prolific, though that wasn’t exactly intentional.
“My other interests would kind of take up more [time],” he says. “Even just being in relationships… I’d spend more time on that than I would focusing on the music. I just do music in big chunks, rather than steadily.
“I used to have less of a filter,” he continues. “‘This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About’ — that should have been half as f—ing long, and it would have been just fine. But I think I’m going to accidentally appear to be prolific again, because we wrote so many songs for this record.”
Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse
(Robin Laananen)
Brock technically began writing songs for what would become “An Eraser and a Maze” soon after completing “The Golden Casket,” which was the last Modest Mouse record to include Green prior to his death. Adopting a psychedelic-rock aesthetic, “Casket” was another stab at optimism; Brock wanted to create something intentionally upbeat to sweeten the sour, post-pandemic mood. On “An Eraser and a Maze,” which features a rotating cast of drummers, including touring percussionist Damon Cox and Janet Weiss of Quasi and Sleater-Kinney, the pendulum swings in the opposite direction. But that isn’t to suggest that the record is a bummer. Quite the opposite.
The ruminative “Third Side of the Moon” finds Brock murmuring how he wishes he’d paid closer attention to the details of a friend who is no longer with him. The brief interlude “Stoner Party” was inspired by a chant the band would occasionally break into after Green told Brock a story about how he once discovered the phrase written on the wall of an abandoned house. Songs like the gently loping “Dogbed in Heaven” and the bittersweet “Remember Yourself” find Brock contemplating his eventual death in ways that mix pragmatism and genuine disappointment that nature cannot allow him to witness his children’s full lifespan.
“Some of the most important people to me are so much younger, and I constantly think [about the] law of averages based on how I’ve lived my life,” he says. “How many thousands of dollars have I spent in herbal stores and co-ops buying tinctures and stuff? ‘How long might I live?’ says the guy holding a cigarette and drinking a cider. How old will these people, who are so important to me, be when I might not be there anymore for them?”
Preoccupied as he may be regarding his time left on Earth, Brock characteristically pivots to a kind of hesitant sanguinity. “I’m not afraid,” he says. “I’m not, for lack of a better way of saying it, dying for it to happen, but I’d just like to find some way to communicate to everyone on either side that everything’s fine.”
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