Getting match fit with his band from inside a “shitty, cinderblock building” in Tampa, Florida, Modest Mouse mainman and Portland resident Isaac Brock is reflecting on the fact he can’t enjoy the advantages of The Sunshine State.
“That’s how it goes,” the songwriter sighs. “The weather’s pretty much exactly like Dublin in Oregon. Or used to be. Global warming has given us some nice weather which I don’t know what the fuck to do with because it makes me feel uncomfortable. I’m like, ‘This is great that this is happening but it’s terrible news! Fuck, good weather is terrible news now!'”
Good news for people who like bad news, we guess. A man who once sang about being a-ok with his car being on blocks because he was already exactly where he wanted to be, Brock can find the positives with his current, cooped-up-in-a-cinderblock situation – namely finally having brand new material to rehearse and tour around the world.
“I need to get moving again, man, I don’t know if I’m comfortable with too much familiarity.” The accompanying press that comes with promoting a record, however, has less appeal.
“Turns out I’m still not good at it,” he chuckles. “I either say too much or too little. I say too much to the wrong people and say too little to the... wrong people! And there’s plenty of wrong people. I’ll drink to feel comfortable doing these things and then I’ll find myself just being like: ‘And here’s something I shouldn’t be saying. Enjoy!'”
The recurring question will be about the length of time Modest Mouse have taken between 2007’s We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, the Johnny Marr-assisted album that went to the top of the charts in North America, and the rather fantastic Strangers To Ourselves. Has he got a pithy answer down pat yet?
“Well, no one sat down for eight years and then went ‘shit, we’ve gotta put out a record!’ Everyone was consistently busy with one thing or another.”
Keeping Brock busy was production work – “turns out it takes as long as producing your own record!” – and some film scoring, though he does confess that the creation of his band’s sixth long-player was the longest they’ve ever spent on a project.
“Just recording the thing took three years because I accidentally built a studio. I wanted a meal and built a restaurant; that sort of scenario. There was no one else on the schedule to be like ‘we’ve got to hurry up and get out of here’. Nope, I’m going to just keep re-doing this bassline for the next whole week. Eric Judy had left the band so we’d lost our regular bass-player and we were trying new people as well.”
One of those being Krist Novoselic.
“Yeah, Krist is great.” Is any of the low-end on the finished product the work of the Nirvana man?
“No, you’d recognise it. It sounds like a bunch of boulders falling down a mountain! We ended up finishing tracking with one of his songs that will end up on the next record. It fits the second piece, the companion piece to this record, a bit better. We basically made two records at the same time. Which, if people look at it that way, cuts the amount of time it took us to make this record in half, man!”
There’s his pithy response right there. Whatever way you cut it, however, the process sounds like it could have spiralled out of control and entered the realms of Chinese Democracy craziness.
“I was also aware that could happen, and it was happening. I’d be working for three days without sleeping. Then sleep, go back to it, and go ‘woah, it’s got to be redone!’ This is crazy people shit. You are not above this happening to you, dude. Take note: you’ve seen this happen. You don’t want to end up like Brian Wilson, eating nothing but cake. This brand of craziness I don’t actually find charming and I’ve never seen anything good come of it... And I was going bankrupt, I was going to be living under a bridge again, like real soon!”
Turns out having a chart-topping album doesn’t afford you endless breathing space these days.
“I’m not sure what having a number one record means. It offered me a few months of the lights being on. But no, there are no guarantees. Back in the day I had pretty low overheads, if you will. So it didn’t take much to keep me adrift. We had that one record, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, which did pretty good at a time when that mattered. That offered me an opportunity to get too much overhead and then have to worry about how to maintain that. But I don’t understand how the economics of music work at all anymore. Do I get paid still? Does that go on?! I think Spotify gets paid and they then pay the labels to not bother ‘em. But I’m not sure the labels pay us.”
Not in it for the money, Brock is eager for the companion piece to get a swift release. It might be called Whatever (or a misspelt Whabever, to be “antagonistic”). Over-thinking things is out.
“I had the title for this one pretty early on and I kept trying to find some other title because it seemed too easy. This whole fucking thing’s been an exercise in making things harder than they’re meant to be!”