I don’t remember how I found Modest Mouse, and maybe that part doesn’t matter. I just remember how I felt: lonely, disconnected, achy in that way only teenagers on the precipice of young adulthood can ache.
It was almost winter, and everything was crisping up and preparing for death. I trodded up and down the roadside, shapeless in layered flannels, and gave myself windburn.
I had no destination in mind; I would simply walk as far as the grass would take me, pretending I had some greater purpose. Occasionally, I’d listen to music.
I’m on my way to God don’t know
My brain’s the burger, and my heart’s the coal
I’m trying to get my head clear
I push things out through my mouth
I get refilled through my ears
“Heart Cooks Brain,” by Modest Mouse
“Heart Cooks Brain,” an ode to emotions dominating logic. The song sounded the way I felt: lumbering, wind-chapped and just a little pathetic. There was a thread of humor there, too, a shock of self-deprecation highly attractive to my melancholic teenage self.
The song came from Modest Mouse’s sophomore album, “The Lonesome Crowded West,” listed by Pitchfork as one of the greatest albums of the 1990s.
It’s a long album — with a runtime of over an hour — and despite its various stylistic shifts, it manages to maintain a cultivated sense of honest disillusionment throughout.
I think of dried out autumn leaves and the scent of car exhaust, or clumps of fur falling off a squirrel carcass. Ephemeral things. An orange sun dragging across a bleached-bone sky. The ineliminable passage of time. Nostaglia like a knife through your ribs.
When you’re a teenager, misery feels eternal. Time flows like concrete. Everything smarts like you’ve rubbed yourself raw with pumice. You put on eyeliner and pierce your own ears and buy a digicamera, because all of these things are Acts of Self-Actualization and they’re the only things you can do that seem to matter in your state of semi-powerlessness.
You’re a kid-but-not-quite, teetering on the precipice of ego death, writhing in your ill-fitting skin. You’re barely autonomous, and no one understands you, so you commune with radio waves. You look for salvation in strange places and in strange music. The act of listening transforms into the art of ritual and you keep the magic to yourself so no one can steal it.
Live in trailers with no class
Goddamn, I hope I can pass
High school means nothing
Taking heartache with hard work
Goddamn, I am such a jerk
I can’t do anything
“Trailer Trash,” by Modest Mouse
My friends didn’t “get” Modest Mouse, and I didn’t bother trying to make them understand. Sure, everybody knew “Float On,” but the band’s other stuff? Too abstract. Too weird.
Maybe they were right. Isaac Brock’s penchant for colorful metaphor — (“eating snowflakes with plastic forks“) — and reedy, sometimes staggering voice wasn’t for everyone. Especially in “The Lonesome Crowded West.”
The album wore many hats. Sometimes it was plain indie, slow-paced and stripped down (“Out of Gas“). Other times, it was almost punk (“Sh– Luck”) or straight-up folk (“Jesus Christ Was an Only Child“).
The multitextural quality of the album was one of its principal appeals. It wasn’t a cohesive narrative, per se, but it was like an impressionist painting; stepping back from the flurry of discordant brushstrokes revealed a harmonious picture.
The Lonesome Crowded East
Life gets lonelier when you’re an adult. The energy to sustain social relationships, let alone make new ones, is often far too finite. It often seems unsurmountable.
Over the summer, I moved to the country. As I puttered away from the city and through miles and miles of farmland, I felt lonelier than ever. Familiar landscapes and familiar people melted into sprawls of tobbacco fields and sunbleached barns.
In the first few weeks of the new semester, I spent these drives near tears, languishing in the agony of complete and utter solutide. My chest ached like a bruise. I felt as frivolously miserable as a teenager with a bad haircut. I was borderline inconsolable, on the verge of total breakdown.
So naturally, I cranked up the radio.
Out of gas, out of road
Out of car, I don’t know how I’m gonna go
I had a drink the other day
My opinions were like kittens, I was giving them away
“Out of Gas,” by Modest Mouse
The feeling of comfort I felt as a teenager returned as the album progressed. I hummed the chords as I drove farther and farther from the city. The lyrics were tired like I was tired, but the beat’s energy lured me away from that Edge of Young Adult Madness and into a state of tacit acceptance.
The idea of a “Lonesome Crowded West” is intentionally oxymoronic, and more real than ever. The breakdown of community leaves us isolated even as the bloated bellies of our cities progressively swell.
Whether it be the result of neoliberalism, socioeconomic instability, climate change or TikTok, the loneliness epidemic is rewriting the mechanics of our social culture and leaving young people fractured and disconnected.
I see the themes of “The Lonesome Crowded West” reflected in my own lonesome crowded East. We’re all overworked and overtired, watching the landscape be rendered unrecognizable in real time. We ache for lost familiarity and hunger for the new and exciting.
Things are different and things are the same in the best and worst ways. So it goes.
-J
