Modest Mouse’s new album, An Eraser and a Maze, includes several songs one might interpret as being about grieving death. The track “Third Side of the Moon,” for example, finds frontman Isaac Brock struggling to remember the color of someone’s eyes.
Indeed, Brock tells ABC Audio he’s lost people in recent years, including original Modest Mouse drummer Jeremiah Green, who died in 2022. He also says he’s been thinking more about his own mortality as he watches his children grow up.
“I think about, ‘Oh … what kind of message can I leave them that makes them feel OK about people passing on?'” Brock says. “At some point they’re gonna have to deal with that … rather than just lamenting the death of people, how can I actually make the people who remain feel better about people passing on?”
The song “Dogbed in Heaven / Give It a Skeleton,” meanwhile, might be triggering for those who’ve had a furry friend cross the rainbow bridge, though Brock says it isn’t specifically about a dog, rather a “main character passing on, or on their way out and out, thinking about the people they used to love.”
While death may be a motif on An Eraser and a Maze, it wasn’t something Brock purposefully tried to tackle with the record.
“I kinda get out of my own way and let me subconscious do the writing,” Brock says. “So to act like I intentionally was trying to write a record that approached death or even life or anything in any specific way isn’t what happened. What happened is I just kinda let the record happen.”
An Eraser and a Maze drops Friday. Modest Mouse will launch a U.S. tour Thursday in New Haven, Connecticut.
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