Modest Mouse‘s Isaac Brock has been known to take as long as eight years between albums, but nearly three decades into his band’s career, he’s ready to pick up the pace. Three years after the release of the well-received The Golden Casket, he’s already recorded enough songs for a new Modest Mouse album with producers including Jacknife Lee and Dave Sardy, and intends to put one out by next spring. “In my early days of putting out records, I wrote music every fucking day,” he tells our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. “And then sometime after The Moon and Antarctica, I spent less time and then I spent less time and less time, and then gaps got big and I didn’t like that. So, yeah, I’m happy to be back to writing every day again.”
The interview centers around the 20th anniversary of Modest Mouse’s classic major-label breakthrough, Good News for People Who Love Bad News (which has an expanded reissue out now), and Brock also reveals that he’s tentatively planning a tour for the fall featuring the original band that played on that album, including drummer Benjamin Weikel, who filled in for the late Jeremiah Green. “It’s the only record where I can do a tour with all the living members, all the exact same members,” he says, acknowledging that he’s still figuring out how to fill out the rest of the set list.
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Elsewhere in the interview, Brock goes deep on the making of Good News, from the creation of “Float On” to how his vow to quit drinking fell apart by the time he needed to track vocals. “I’d quit drinking for about two and a half months and during tracking the vocals, I actually considered murdering [producer] Dennis Herring,” he says with a laugh. “And I was like, I’ll be back in a minute. I was going to turn myself into the police station across the street. And I stood there and I stared at it and I thought about what my day would be like. And then I looked up the street and I saw a bar, and so I just fucking wandered up to the bar.”
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