It’s a beautiful June afternoon in 2021, and Isaac Brock is sitting on the roof of Modest Mouse HQ in Portland. Nicknamed Ice Cream Party, it’s a huge warehouse building that includes offices, a kitchen, a studio, an elevator stacked with guitar pedals and other musical equipment, and an assortment of weird paraphernalia you might expect to see in a thrift store and wonder who the hell would ever buy it. The answer, it seems, is Isaac Brock.
On the expansive Ice Cream Party roof, he’s wearing short turquoise running shorts and a white T-shirt and drinking a White Claw while blasting new Modest Mouse songs at full volume from an old suitcase that’s been converted into a portable Bluetooth speaker. These are not, however, songs from The Golden Casket, which will become available for the world to hear when the clocks strike midnight. These are songs intended for the record that will follow it, though he says he’s not sure when that’s going to be released. Given that there was a six-year gap between that record and its predecessor, and an eight year wait for that one, it’s anyone’s guess—including his—as to when these songs might come out.
At a time when the world is still learning how to exist alongside COVID, he’s busy listening to—and happily sharing—these songs. They sound dark, electronic, ominous, brutal, brilliant. He decides he wants to take a photo of the two of us sitting next to each other, but when he turns his phone on, the camera shows the god-like clouds hovering over Portland in front of us, hanging around, as he might say, like black Cadillacs outside a funeral. Distracted or forgetful or something else entirely, he ends up taking pictures of the sky instead as heavy bass rumbles forth from the small speakers that can’t properly contain or convey its power. He goes for a sip of his can and realizes it’s empty. We roof hop for a while, climbing up and down ladders on Modest Mouse HQ and the buildings nearby, head back inside to grab some more White Claw, then return to the roof.
He decides he wants to take some photos of himself swinging a chair above his head, but he’s left his phone inside, so asks if I can take them. I oblige. He then takes photos of me swinging the chair above my head. It’s not as easy as it looks. Eventually, these drinks done, we head back inside to go out and buy more alcohol from a convenience store around the corner. Brock picks up a couple cans of 7.5 percent hard kombucha. The cashier seems to recognize him behind his facemask, but it’s hard to tell if he knows who he is or if it’s just because he’s a regular. We walk back to Ice Cream Party, entering through its back entrance. What was meant to be an hour-long interview becomes an eight-and-a-half-hour adventure, a trip inside Brock’s brain, a journey through the DNA of a Modest Mouse song. In other words, time just stops.
As it turns out, though, time actually just keeps going, second after second, minute after minute, year after year. Half a decade later, the next Modest Mouse album, An Eraser and a Maze, has been released—unlike that interview, which was never even written until now, in this strange space-time vortex where both past and present collide and exist at the same time, even if they really don’t. But this is, after all, the guy who once wrote the lyric “I’m the same as I was when I was six years old.” That’s not entirely true, but it’s not exactly a lie either. He was around 28 when “Never Ending Math Equation” came out and he recently turned 51. His hair is noticeably grayer than it was in 2021 when I meet up with him again to give the interview another go, and he looks older than he did five years ago, but don’t we all? He’s also noticeably more sober. Not in general, just right now. Then again it is 11:20 a.m.
One thing that’s remained constant, however, is Brock’s fascination with memory—or the lack of it. Or the fear of the future loss of it. He’s not really sure if any of those songs he played on the roof five years ago actually ended up on this new record beyond the opening gambit “Pickin’ Dragon’s Pockets” and “Song About Nothing.” One of the many things he did during that 2021 interview was demonstrate a headset he’d been using to improve his memory and cognitive skills. According to the manufacturer’s website, it’s a “transcranial-intranasal brain photobiomodulation” device that attached to his head and allegedly beamed red light inside of it. His eyes widen when it’s mentioned.
“Oh yeah!” he exclaims as if he’d forgotten all about it. “I loaned it to someone and I don’t know where the fuck it is, man. That shit was expensive! That’s how bad my memory is—I loaned my memory device to someone and don’t know who I loaned it to. I even looked into buying a new one, but then I got with my boyfriend, ChatGPT, and was like, ‘Do a deep dive on the actual peer-reviewed proof on this shit,’ and it was like, ‘Nope.’ But I take so many fucking memory supplements. I think some of them work, but some of them make me feel like I’m almost on drugs—you know, like the drugs are about to kick in. But memory.”
He stops talking with words and instead lets his face do the work with a grin-cum-grimace that says “I don’t know” together with a shake of the head. Still, at the time, before he lent it to someone, before ChatGPT told him otherwise, he seemed pretty adamant that even if it wasn’t working, it was at least doing something. “I mean, that’s what I like believing,” he says. “The $1,700 brain laser—of course I want to believe it worked. You had to put a laser up your nose, too. I’m surprised they didn’t make it a rectal laser, just for a laugh.”
Memory isn’t the only thing we lose as we age. As Brock knows all too well, the older you get, the more people you lose. That’s why this feature was never written the first time around: my dad, suffering from Alzheimer’s, took a turn for the worse. He’d hang on for another couple of years, but at the time, thinking he was about to die was debilitating, and so the piece fell by the wayside. Grief is something Brock also knows intimately. On New Year’s Eve 2022, aged just 45, founding Modest Mouse drummer Jeremiah Green died from cancer. It’s one of a number of losses that the band leader has encountered in recent years, and they’ve all hit him hard. Even back in 2021, Brock was suffering from heartbreaking grief following the death of his close friend, Love as Laughter’s Sam Jayne. As the day of that interview turned into night, mortality and absence took an increasing toll on Brock, became an even more salient topic. With every sip of alcohol, it felt like he retreated into his grief and fear of dying even more.
Sometimes, though, it’s light-hearted. During the course of the eight or so hours we were together, he made numerous phone calls to friends and associates. With one, he suggested hanging out “sometime soon, because I’m about to be so busy that we might not know each other until one of us is putting flowers on another’s grave and shit.” Other times, it’s much more morbid. When Brock decides we should listen to some music, the first track he plays is “Destination 2000” by Love as Laughter, but he soon switches to one of the band’s more mellow, maudlin songs, “Don’t Worry.” That one’s from the band’s final full-length album, Holy, which was released in 2008 on Brock’s own label, Glacial Pace. As it’s playing, Brock recalls when he was “14 or 15, the first band I ever started was with Sam.” It was called Lync, and Brock played bass with them, though not for very long. Through doing so he met Jeremiah Green, and Modest Mouse would soon form.
Even though he and Jayne were never really in a band together for long, their friendship was a crucially fundamental part of who Brock would become, and for Modest Mouse’s existence. And as Jayne’s voice floated ghost-like through the air of the Ice Cream Factory, Brock seemed to grow heavy—with sadness, with regret, with memories. He was silent and reverent as Jayne sang the first two lines of that song—“Waiting for the funeral and the march / You’ve been gallantly holding the torch”—before he resumed talking. “I love this man fucking more than most people and shit,” he said. It’s touching that he uses the present tense, but then again love for a person doesn’t just die because they do. “I’m not even sure he liked me some of the time and vice versa, but I love this man. He was a brother.”
On An Eraser and a Maze, Brock turns that love—and the lacuna left by Jayne’s death—into something tangibly intangible with the devastating and gorgeous “Third Side of the Moon.” He’s the only original member of Modest Mouse left, and he definitely steers the ship, though he does collaborate on writing with the other Modest Mousers who are onboard at any given time. The album’s title track captures grief perfectly, though in Brock’s typically idiosyncratic fashion. A song defined by absence—and surely Green’s is present in there, too—the singer remembers his late friend by being self-aware, through a string of nearly identical lines, that he can’t even recall the color of his eyes. It’s a stunning descent into the abject unreality of death, into the effect that losing someone has on you—your body, your heart, your mind. Not that Brock thinks carving Jayne’s loss into lyrics like that helped him deal with what he calls the “heavier chunk of time” that this album generally looks back on.
When asked about writing this song, he enters a mode of concerted and visible self-reflection. “You’ve got to find ways to stare at the moment,” says Brock. “There’s elements of when people pass away—especially if you don’t live in the same fucking house or town as someone—that your mind still plays tricks on you, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ll just give this guy a call.’ One of my best friends who cuts my hair passed away of a heart attack last year. Because he lived in town and I was used to getting ahold of him more often, it occurs to me more often that he’s passed away than it does even Jeremiah or Sam. I’ll drive by his area and be like, ‘I’d like to—oh! Nope, can’t do that.’ I’d stop and say hi to them, and now I’m just like, ‘Oh, well, fuck—they closed the coffee shop and my friend died?!’”
In that brief moment, you can almost hear the weight of tragedy colliding with the levity of whimsy. It’s almost funny, but it’s not intended to be. It’s just the way things are. For a man as obsessed with paradoxes and contradictions as Brock is when it comes to song titles, album titles, and lyrics, it’s perfect.
At one point inside the Ice Cream Factory back in 2021—late at night, after we’d moved on from the hard kombucha to a big bottle of vodka, the only alcohol left in the studio at this point beyond all the stuff running through our veins—Brock decided to have another listening party. This time, it was bands on Glacial Pace. “I’d like to play things that actually matter,” he declared, his distinctive lisp ever so slightly exacerbated by the booze, but also equally obscured by the music that he was talking over. He’d end up playing songs by Love as Laughter, Mimicking Birds, Talkdemonic, Morning Teleportation, and probably some others that time and booze have obliterated the memory of. “The shit that I put out on my record label was some of the best shit put out in 20 years, and no one gave a fuck,” he told me sadly.
Modest Mouse circa 2021 / photo by James Joiner
Back then, the label was essentially over, because Brock was done with it. He loved—loves—the bands that were on it, but it was a lot of hard work, especially for the frontman of a group as big as Modest Mouse. There were also too many tragedies for Brock’s liking in the end, what with Jayne’s death and the suicide of Morning Teleportation’s Tiger Merritt the year before in 2019. And so, drunk and nostalgic for a past and label that had come to an end, Brock gathered together and gave me a collection of Glacial Pace vinyl to go with a pair of two preserved lizards in a jar he’d given me earlier. “It’s the last of the shop,” he said about the records, as Mimicking Birds’ gorgeous and appropriately plaintive “Burning Stars” filled the room. He’d already said earlier that he wasn’t “impressed with the process of putting out records,” yet that does seem to be the case.
Hell, he isn’t—wasn’t—even excited that The Golden Casket had technically been released during the course of our conversation. “It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “There’s what I do, which is make records and shit. And then there’s getting records into people’s hands, and that’s other people’s fucking business. This is why I wasn’t very good at running a record label. I put out some fucking amazing music, like some of the best music of its time and shit, but I wasn’t really all that interested in how to, like—” He stops because he’s tripping over his words. That’s kind of how his brain works, anyway—words form faster than the thoughts inside his head. But six hours of drinking makes them tumble out even faster, even more scattered.
“If you don’t fucking find yourself at least once a day agreeing with one side of you and disagreeing with the other—I mean, that’s the fucking human condition right there.”
“At that point,” he continued, “someone should hear it, and everyone else should hear it, because that person thought it was good, right? But that’s not how the world works. Do you eat at McDonald’s because you heard how good it was? No, you hear about it fucking because everyone knows about it. So fuck that model. I’m not fucking that motivated to do that and shit. Sub Pop has done good shit, a lot of people are doing good shit. But that’s not—” The words and thoughts were stumbling over each other now. “I don’t have the fucking—” he tried again, then stopped. “I don’t give that much of a fuck. Because at the end of the day, if I need to, I should be able to just fucking, like, kind of sing and fucking have opinions in a local pub, or my church, or wherever the fuck. It’s a tricky universe.”
Never say never, though. After five studio albums on a major label—which came after two studio albums on the indie label Up, not to mention their actual debut, Sad Sappy Sucker, that had been slated for release in 1994 and then shelved until 2001 after The Moon and Antarctica broke the band through to the mainstream, and the odds-and-sods collection Building Nothing Out of Something, plus a bunch of EPs that confuse the chronology of this brief-but-deep inhalation of the band’s discography—An Eraser and a Maze was released on, you guessed it, Glacial Pace Records. Granted, it’s in conjunction with distributor Virgin Music Group, but it’s technically the band’s first independent release in over two decades, and on a label Brock had pretty much resigned to the grave.
Isaac Brock, Modest Mouse
It’s also the first album to be released since Green’s death, though his ghost is contained within the 34-second whimsical chant of “Stoner Party.” Were it not for his presence on the track, it would feel throwaway, silly, ridiculous; but because of it, there’s a kind of gravity to its nonsense. It’s one of those paradoxes that so fascinates Brock on paper and record, manifested in real life. “I agree with myself less than I should,” he shared early on at Ice Cream Party. It might be before any alcohol had been consumed, but he still launched into a surreal analogy about “putting an umbrella up your butt and opening it.”
“Is it religiously wrong?” he continued. “Is it unlucky to open your fucking umbrella in a building? Are you not supposed to put your umbrella up your butt and shit? Is it not raining up there? There’s so many fucking sides to what is just a simple, impossible-ish act. No one’s just one thing unless they’re nothing. And that’s not a fucking paradox. If you don’t fucking find yourself at least once a day agreeing with one side of you and disagreeing with the other—I mean, that’s the fucking human condition right there. As far as I know, every single fucking thing that you can have happen in your life is actually basically bred to be a paradox.”
“In the ways that I might seem like bullshit or whatever when I’m talking about fucking the magic of the mind and all that stuff,” he said as he placed the machine, still boxed, on the table, “the fact that my head’s getting used as a cellphone and all that shit, I don’t make shit up. Rarely, if I get really drunk, I make up shit. But it’s not important shit. Keep an eye open. The world’s fucking getting more weird. If you ever fucking hear a ringing and you fucking start thinking weird shit, you keep my number in your fucking phone and call me.” It comes off more like a threat, but it’s clear he means well.
The conversation would soon get derailed, as was often the case. Brock’s is a brain that never seems to stop buzzing. It’s why he’s so fascinated by things that verge on the conspiratorial on a surface level, but which, when you listen to him actually elucidate his worries and concerns, make sense. Or at least make more sense. One of the phone calls he received during my time at Ice Cream Party would involved a conversation about the other person hearing things they shouldn’t have. Indeed, it’s something that Brock himself said he’d encountered. He was adamant that his head has been used as a communication device. At one point, he was placing tape recorders around his neighborhood to try to capture the signals and sounds he was hearing. When he found out I listened to cassettes, he gave me one of the recorders.
For all the morbidity that’s inhabited Brock’s life in recent years, and for all his eccentricities, everything pales in comparison to the clear love he has for his two daughters. You can see it in his eyes, his smile, when he talks about them. He’s also the first to admit that, the first time around, he wasn’t a good dad to his son, who’s now in his mid-twenties. This time, however, Brock’s dedication to his daughters is so overwhelming it’s also manifested in his songs. First, there was the doting, tender ode on The Golden Casket, “Lace Your Shoes.” On this new record, there’s “Remember Yourself,” which turns Brock’s pressing awareness of his mortality into a beautiful slice of post-death advice for his daughters. Parenthood, he says, is “still great” these five years on, and he starts talking about going to his youngest daughter’s kindergarten earlier that day. But of course that soon turns into another thought and story.
“They have ‘Friday Sing,’” he explains, “where the parents come and sit and sing with all the kids from three different classes. It’s a lot of fun, but this is the last one I’ll be able to make because I’ll be on tour and shit. I messed it up a little for a second. I believe it was because I was laughing because the teacher did something fucking super funny. I think she made us all sing like opera singers. I don’t know. My eight-year-old rides around on her motorcycle someone who works for me got her for 50 bucks and it’s crazy. She tore off yesterday on this thing and it’s a motorcycle that can actually drive me around—it can haul a 190-pound dude around, so an 80-pound kid can really get going. I haven’t shown her that there’s a switch that makes it go twice as fast, because she’ll be in the fucking hospital.”
Clearly, there’s a more responsible side to Brock that his daughters have drawn out of him, but it doesn’t mean the more reckless side is completely gone. He says that Modest Mouse’s cruise back in February “was super fun—and I believe I drank a lot, too.” A couple of days after the initial studio hang, he said a similar thing. I’d texted him the photos of him swinging the chair and his reply came as follows: “dude. thanks for hanging. hopefully you didn’t develop a hangover. you did not seem drunk. i drank….waaay too much. now i have concerns.”
Later, in May 2022, I spotted Brock walking into the convenience store near Ice Cream Party sometime around midnight. We were both with friends. I said hello, and the four of us headed to the studio with some drinks. We were there until maybe 5 a.m., and another blur incurred, but I remember Brock saying early on, “I should probably be glad that interview was never published, shouldn’t I?” He was—is—concerned about things he said that he didn’t remember saying or that he shouldn’t have said on record. Presumably, he doesn’t want to look bad or piss people off. He needn’t have worried. Besides, he’s also a walking, talking contradiction, and though he says he’s truthful when it comes to the important things, it’s impossible to know if that’s true.
Besides, no interview could ever fully capture who Isaac Brock is, or who he isn’t. That’s presumably why so many features with him—including this one—end up being so long. Because his mind is an infinite universe, ever expanding, ever changing. He’s a complex, fascinating human—and a deeply human human, no matter how much he embraces his inherent weirdness. Yet through it, both in person and through his music, he also challenges you to look at life in a completely different way. In fact, as much as the title of An Eraser and a Maze is a metaphor for grief, it also serves as a metaphor for how his brain works.
Because Brock is an enigma and an open book, a self-aware paradox who thinks and feels and exists on a deeper plane than most of us. He desperately wants to understand the universe and explore its inner workings, erasing and retracing his steps as he does so. Because for Brock, life isn’t a maze he wants to escape. It’s one he wants to know how it works and get to the center of. He knows that’s impossible, but goddammit if he isn’t going to try. FL
photo by David Iskra
