On the drive into Oakland to see Modest Mouse I decided to go the extra mile as a music journalist and asked my friend who was coming along, “So, why do you like them?” He said that a woman he used to date had played ‘Float On’ for him. “I love how much funk and soul they put in that song,” he said. There was a pause, we passed an In-N-Out Burger, a tension briefly seized the air inside of my Toyota. He took a breath and continued, “Honestly, it was at an age where I was confused about a lot of things, and I heard that in their music.” I understood.

‘Float On’ was the upbeat indie rock anthem emblematic of the mid-2000s, and the song that shot them into mainstream stardom, but Modest Mouse has always predominantly bought and sold in the economy of confusion, bewilderment, and disconnection. The buoy that keeps the band afloat (pun somewhat intended) above the insufferability of those thematics is frontman Isaac Brock’s ability to translate his meditations on existential dread into angular, distinctive, alt-rock earworms. The lyrics interrogate doubts—the irreconcilable kinds about God and dying—but are delivered with a healthy dose of sarcasm and the music itself courses with life, urging you to move with along with it. I try not to speak in absolutes, but if there is a universal principle for humanity it is that we are full of doubt, and we love to dance. Modest Mouse showed up as my generation stepped into the confusions they would carry for the rest of their lives. They gave voice to an, at that time, inarticulable anxiety that had started to dawn and unfurl in our teenage minds that maybe there wasn’t place for us to fit perfectly into in the grand scheme of things. “Ice age, heat wave, can’t complain / If the world’s at large, why should I remain? / Walked away to another planet / Gonna find another place, maybe one I can stand.” More so than that, though, is the adolescent miracle of granting us escape from that very angst by acknowledging it without judgement and then continuing to play. I’d like to say my friend and I were driven to this show by nostalgia. That I was excited because of the sentimentality, the blurry affection, I had for a younger, lost version of myself, and what hearing these songs might conjure up from the past. I think we are still confused, though. I, at least, have some dread about just what exactly I’m doing here. Either that confusion, or this music, is timeless. Given that the show was sold out, I’d gamble it’s a bit of both.

A good concert creates a hermetic seal between itself and the world outside of it. It’s why I go to concerts, why anyone does. The Fox Theater is cavernous, with vaulted ceilings and an archway decorated in a latticework of golden, Asiatic-inspired molding. The walls are covered in lavish ornamentation of a bygone era. The bottom floor is multi-tiered with a sizable pit area in front of the stage. A balcony section looms over the back third of the room. The house lights bathe everything in dim amber, transforming all they touch into a surreal antiquity. Even without a band playing, the venue provides an ample foundation for escape into a world fantastic and impossible. It was a good place to see a band that deals in the paradox of confronting and, in doing so, sidestepping harsh realities.

The audience hit a wide age range, but the center of mass was people in their mid-twenties and early thirties. A surprising number of them looked like me: big, tired-looking dudes with beards. I saw a lot of women in worn denim and flannel shirts. Lots of leather jackets and dyed hair. Most everyone had the rough-around-the edges-charm you’d expect to see at an alt-rock show. I realized a lot of us were still the weird, lonely kids we were when Modest Mouse was at its zenith of popularity, only now we have driver’s licenses, bills, and facial hair. I thought about the song ‘Never Ending Math Equation,’ the opening track off the album Building Nothing Out Of Something. The song starts with an infectious guitar lick, the drums swoop in with an upbeat swing, and then Brock bluntly proclaims, “I’m the same as I was when I was six years old / and oh my God I feel so damn old / I don’t really feel anything.”

The headlining set began with an empty stage filled with billowing fog and saturated in a deep magenta light. A mountain of music equipment lay inert in the murky purple. There were three drumkits, which, I soon learned, was for the three drummers in the band. The oddly serene sounds of rainfall and birds chirping played, settling on top of the not so serene sounds of people screaming from excitement. The lighting changed abruptly to a combo of hot, almost neon, pink and light blue, making the stage and front row look like a velvet blacklight painting in the style of Lisa Frank. The band came out and immediately, no banter no bullshit, dropped into ‘World At Large,’ followed by ‘Cowboy Dan,’ and ‘Never Ending Math Equation.’ We sang along because we knew every cryptic, resonant line.

Modest Mouse, apparently, changes its setlist for every show. The band has a deep catalogue of hits and lesser known cult favorites, all distinct from one another. Given the number of possible permutations, the opening three songs set a definitive tone for me. ‘World At Large,’ from Good News For People Who Love Bad News, is one of their slower songs. Brock waxes poetic about a sense of dislocation, of not belonging. His musings refuse to settle, though. They are invested in capturing the emotional experience of feeling out of place without offering condemnation or solution. ‘Cowboy Dan’ from Lonesome Crowded West is straight up about an angry cowboy named Cowboy Dan who gets drunk and tries to shoot God. It’s one of my favorite songs because, although it is an overt narrative fiction, it comes closest to elucidating the unspeakable itch of bewilderment at the center of Modest Mouse’s music. The drums beat in a jangling dirge, an electric guitar is picked with a sinister twang as Brock sings, “Well, Cowboy Dan’s a major player in the cowboy scene / He goes to the reservation drinks and gets mean / He drove to the desert, fired his rifle in the sky / And says, ‘God if I have to die you will have to die.” It’s ridiculous enough not to become bloated on its own self-seriousness, but here we have the injustice no one can escape from. We’re alive, one day we’re going die, and are impotent to hold whatever put us here accountable for that. ‘Never Ending Math Equation’ reduces existence to a nonsensical series of variables and inputs, resulting in chaos, leading Brock to exclaim, with his trademark lilt and lisp, “Oh my God I Feel So Alone.” I’m sure this sounds very bleak if you haven’t listened to these songs, but there is joy thrumming in the melodies. The crowd surged to the rhythm, hooted, were overcome. Music like this allows us to celebrate in the face of what scares us.

I’m not saying that everyone came to this concert out of a mutual vendetta against God. What I mean is that Brock hits his stride when locking in on the raw emotional eruption that occurs in response to the recognition of futility, and that is a scalable experience, it doesn’t just happen to us in a broad metaphysical sense. Given that this show was in the Bay Area and mainly populated by millennials, it is a safe bet that the crowd skewed more toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. The 2016 election turned American politics and social landscape on its head, and it did so in a manner that left a lot of people feeling powerless and disenfranchised. This isn’t to compare Trump to God, or say that Modest Mouse is a political band, although their music is vehemently anti-consumerism, but they do excel in making songs that crystallize a sense of helplessness and anxiety. It could be argued that Brock’s lyrics have been dragged out of existential abstractions and taken on an almost prophetic sense of tangible urgency for a lot of people.

The first time I listened to Modest Mouse, I was thirteen. It was 2005, and my dad had died in a car accident the day before my freshman year of high school. Grief had unplugged me. I did not feel connected to my own body, let alone the world. Whatever center I thought there was holding me together, or providing meaning to being alive and aware, slipped away like white noise. I didn’t have language to say any of this then; at the time I was just a receptacle for visceral oscillations of numbness and rage. Somehow, ‘3rd Planet’ ended up on my iPod. The opening line of the song, “Everything that keeps me together is falling apart,” was resonant to a part of me I had lost access to. It didn’t fix me. Saying this song cured my grief isn’t true and a pretty egregious undercut to the impact that death has on us. It did provide words for what I was feeling, though, and that’s significant in its own right.

I think what Modest Mouse gets at incredibly well, and what I’ve been trying to express in writing this, is that it is okay to be confused and to feel lost. It’s okay because it is completely unavoidable, and so, seeing as no one has an instruction manual for being alive, why not be okay in direct spite of its inevitability. The songs we gathered to listen to don’t offer up a solution to existential crisis because there isn’t a way to transcend them, but it is possible to dance anyway. To drive you and your friends to a theater that is part relic and listen to music that gives voice to the fear, and in doing so removes its power, at least for the two hours that you are there. Modest Mouse played a fourteen-song set and a seven-song encore. They opened the encore with ‘3rd Planet,’ and when they did I forgot that there was anything outside of the neon lights, fog, and the thrum of bodies pressed against one another. The band did not play ‘Float On.’ I bought a t-shirt afterwards and my friend and I went to the In-N-Out Burger we had passed earlier on the way home. I’m still confused and feel lonely from time to time, but so do you. Let’s dance.

Author Details Jordan Ranft Author Jordan Ranft is a California Bay Area native. His poetry has appeared in ‘Rust+Moth,’ ‘Midway,’ ‘(b)oink,’ and here. He has worked as an arts/culture and music writer for The East Bay Express, Sacramento News & Review, and Brokeassstuart.com. He’s at a point in his life where a lot of his favorite musicians are also his friends. It is delightful. Follow him on twitter, or don’t.

