Modest Mouse is one of those bands I’ve heard about all the time — for years — without ever knowing much about them. In fact, for the longest time I assumed it was an individual, not a whole group. The name kept showing up in reviews of albums and songs by other artists, often in a “Featuring Modest Mouse” or “w/Modest Mouse” sort of phrasing. I figured it was a stage name for a producer who didn’t care (for whatever reason) to use his real name. Snoop Dogg, Modest Mouse. Made sense, right? [See addendum below]
Well, duh.
Some things to like about this song (from 2007) and this video:
- Per Wikipedia: “The lyric, ‘The dashboard melted but we still have the radio’ references Planes, Trains, and Automobiles when Del (John Candy) is telling the police officer about the car after it is burned.” (The line does crack me up. It shares the ironic, mordant sensibility of the old line about a medical procedure: The operation was a success but the patient died.)
- The story told in the video really has nothing to do with the lyrics, except in the most distant, hint-of-an-allegory way. But the video consistently entertains nonetheless — especially at the song’s end.
- Guitarist Johnny Marr (originally with The Smiths) became a semi-regular member of Modest Mouse around the time this video was shot. In an interview with David Todd, he reported on his favorite thing about the video:
One of the best objects that I’ve ever come across, I got when we did the “Dashboard” video for Modest Mouse. I’m only in it for a split second*, but I’m playing a guitar that is a record deck with a guitar neck on it. That was the device I’ve been looking for all my life. That’s what I’m trying to do, using the guitar as a record player.
- I really do like the lyrics to this song, looooong lines and all. Also according to Marr, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock more or less wrote them on the fly.
Finally, in the course of preparing this Midweek Music Break, I at last learned the source of the band’s name — a line from a Virginia Woolf story, of all things:
I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest, mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises.
[Lyrics]
Addendum: oh, this is funny — I knew the band okay, but somehow in my head they got conflated with the musician/producer Brian Joseph Burton, a/k/a… Danger Mouse. This revelation came to me a second after I turned out the light at bedtime last night; I suppose I should be happy it came to me just a couple of days too late. Or ever.
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* The “split-second” in question comes at around the 3:26-3:27 mark.
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