What Modest Mouse Taught Me

The first name on my influence list is an indie rock band from Issaquah, Washington, and people find that confusing until they hear the record.

Dread as a subject

Modest Mouse write about dread better than almost anyone. Not sadness — sadness is easy and everybody does it. Dread is different. It is the feeling that something is wrong at a scale you cannot see the edges of, and that you are small inside it, and that the landscape does not care.

That is a hard feeling to put in a song without becoming either melodramatic or vague. They do it by being specific about physical things. Roads. Trailers. Distance. Weather. The feeling arrives through the objects rather than being announced.

That is the single most useful technique I have ever stolen.

Geography is a character

Their records are about places, and the places are not backdrops. The emptiness between towns is doing something.

I live in Texas, which has more emptiness between towns than almost anywhere, and a state flower that takes over the roadsides every spring whether anyone wants it to. The album is called Bluebonnet Plague. That is a Modest Mouse move executed in a different genre: take the landscape you actually live in and let it carry the feeling, instead of explaining the feeling directly.

Something's growing where it shouldn't be. I didn't ask. Nothing that spreads ever does.

Songs are allowed strange shapes

The other thing is structure.

Rap is often rigid — sixteen bars, hook, sixteen, hook, eight, out. It works, which is why it persists. But Modest Mouse songs lurch. They stop. A section arrives once and never comes back. A song ends somewhere other than where it was going.

Once you have internalised that a song can do that, you stop defaulting to the grid. Some of what gets heard as odd structural choices on my record is not me being clever. It is me having listened to a lot of indie rock before I ever wrote a verse.

Why it matters for a rap record

Because everything else on my list is rap, and if you only take from inside the genre you make a slightly worse version of what already exists.

The density and nerve came from rap. The dread, the geography and the willingness to let a song go sideways came from a band that has never rapped a bar.