![]() ![]() But anyways, a year-and-a-half rolls around and I have been talked into it – me and Clay are producing this fucking thing – and then we got ten days into and I fired myself. But I appreciate that dynamic for the most part – having someone that hasn’t been just so in the reeds that they can’t see clearly that this is actually super, super lame this thing you’re doing “Granted he loves playing that part, but why are you playing it? It’s fucking stupid, stop!” I enjoy that. I dunno, Kurt Vonnegut always thanks his editor. I really enjoy the outside input – as a writer I’m sure you appreciate sometimes having an editor, even if they take out your favourite bits. I was, like, ‘I don’t know man, I do not believe that I should be producing my own record’. “That was the only attempt at trying on a different producer that we had actually done prior to going in, and when the time rolled around that we were going to be recording the record for real me and my friend Clay Jones – who’s helped on this thing – decided that we were going to do it. But at the end of the day it’s probably just a collection of a whole bunch of focused ideas and concepts, but no I didn’t know what the fuck I was hoping to make when I went in there – I never do and I never probably will.” There were moments of fucking clarity of purpose where it was, like, ‘This is what I’m doing’ – and this was an actual plan by the way – ‘I’m going to make the most boring record that I possibly can!’ Just something that started nowhere and went nowhere, and not for the sake of being pretty and things – it was partly because the scramble to be interesting chips away at me and is just a heap of trouble all the time, so I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll just make a record that’s so fucking normal it’s weird?’ Then I got bored five songs in and harvested the organs from some of those songs and started off on my merry way with a new lack of direction and shit – I just wandered into the wilderness again, I’d lose that direction and find it again and then shitcan that too. At several different points I knew exactly what I wanted, and at several different points I then realised that I didn’t want that. “In general I just let things be what they’re going to be to an extent – once I can make out the hazy image of what it’s going to be then I can step in and steer it in a direction, but in the first fifty percent of getting a song to that point you just kinda let shit fall in place and try not to have too many restraints on what it’s going to be. “I think if I’d tried to steer it I would have ended up steering it off a fucking cliff,” he ponders. They emerged at intervals for tours and festivals, but for the longest time actual new Modest Mouse music remained a concept rather than a reality. Marr was gone – having amicably disappeared off the radar – and further line-up changes occurred as the band remained squirreled away in Brock’s Portland studio Ice Cream Party working on what would gradually take shape as their new opus. ![]() ![]() They had conquered the system which they’d shown no interest at all in conquering, and obviously in the process left themselves with a conundrum about what to do and where to go next because the next few years became a blur of rumour and speculation about their creative collaborations and intentions. In 2006 Johnny Marr – legendary guitarist for UK iconoclasts The Smiths – joined their ranks, adding his distinctive tones to their next album, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, which incredibly hit the top of the Billboard album charts, completing the most unlikely of Cinderella transformations for this most willfully and steadfastly strange outfit. From there things just kept getting stranger for Modest Mouse. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |