Despite three decades of sprawling think pieces and a song catalog that made him a modern alternative rock figurehead, Modest Mouse lyricist, vocalist and guitarist Isaac Brock continues to sweat under the wide Northwestern sky.
Modest Mouse sprouted from the Issaquah, Wash., underground and broke through in 2004 with the double-platinum “Good News for People Who Love Bad News,” propelled by the infectiously upbeat “Float On.”
Brock says that song was birthed almost wholly without intention as a faster “fun ska song” version of “The World at Large” before growing into a “real song.”
“There is no … intention behind that,” he said with a laugh.
Ahead of the band’s Oct. 10 show at Citizens Live at the Wylie in the Hill District, the only remaining member of the band to have played on that record following the 2022 cancer death of drummer Jeremiah Green at 45 sat in the sun on his Portland, Ore., porch wearing a darkened beanie.
“I’m recovering from something, I don’t have as good an excuse as a bachelor party,” joked Brock. “I think a solid week of self-sabotaging, real-life avoidance and just trying to fly directly into the sun. And mistakes were made, man. So here we are.”
While both his biggest commercial hit and his latest mistakes lacked intention, the second year of his farming endeavors — driven jointly by witnessing the fragility of the food supply system during the covid-19 pandemic, impassioned environmentalism and “finding meaning in the physical world” — does not.
“I’m afraid all the time that the food supply is gonna go and I’m gonna just not know what I’m doing. And it turns out I still don’t know what I’m doing and that still might happen,” said Brock. “Currently, I don’t get anything out of it except for kind of a combination self-esteem boost and kick in the crotch in my self-esteem, because I’m not great at it, man. I got home from tour, and there’s a bunch of rotting cucumbers and store-bought cucumbers in the fridge, because my kids didn’t go pick them.”
The fruits of his labor — or lack thereof, so far — are diverse,
ranging from the products of a 5-acre hazelnut grove, to common and easy-to-grow produce like cucumbers, potatoes, carrots, onions — and even bees.
“I’m keeping more alive than I’m killing, so that’s a thing. I’m on year two with them with this batch, and the only reason I’ve gotten any honey out of it is because I had a failed hive — I call it winter honey because it was such a mess. I forgot — I decided not to put it in the kind of premade frames that they could follow,” he said of his bees. “So they built everything sideways, and there’s no way to get (it) out without like taking the whole hive and just melting it down, dead larva and all. So, you know, nice, protein-rich winter honey. This year they did pretty good, but they only have enough honey for themselves, none for me to steal.”
He hopes his food one day lands in community markets.
“That’d make me feel like I was doing something actually positive,” said Brock. “Growing food for the communities is always a plus, and it feels good. But I haven’t done that, so I don’t know. I assume it feels good.”
Currently, the father of three and everyman-existentialist quipper is also mulling over plans to start a soil amendment company that he can leave behind without anxiety while on tour.
“I don’t know a thing about it. Luckily, the guy I’m starting it with does,” he said.
Self-awareness has set in amid his farming shortcomings.
“It’s coming to terms with (the idea that) I assumed I already knew more than I do, and it turns out I don’t know a thing,” he said.
His attempts to learn the finer points of agriculture have all recently fallen under the shadow of Modest Mouse’s first independent album in 30 years and its first since Green’s death, “An Eraser and a Maze,” which critics across the
country have dubbed a return to form on the back of tracks like the crushingly honest and vaguely shame-tinged “Third Side of the Moon.”
The song laments not remembering the color of several departed characters’ eyes. In addition to losing Green, in 2020, he lost another friend of more than 30 years in Sam Jayne, frontman of Love as Laughter, who was found deceased in his car.
“I mean, just a series of different types of loss,” he said of the song’s inspiration. “I was kind of just running through a list of people that had either actually left the physical world, you know, died or whatever — just that mess — and some of it also like relationally, you know?”
When asked how the shame present in the song might have manifested, Brock remained as far from an answer as his farming exploits.
“I don’t think I know yet. I think writing the song was supposed to be part of figuring it out,” he said. “I don’t think I have.”
And while quick to label a past album like 2021’s “The Golden Casket” as an optimistic one, he said he was still discovering the throughline of “An Eraser and a Maze.”
“I don’t know, man,” he said. “I’m having a hard time seeing it right now.”
As he awaits those answers, he’ll keep working on his quarter-acre produce garden and beyond.
“That went OK,” he said of the produce. “I can do better.”