With song titles like "Shit Luck," "Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset" and — from his band's latest album, Strangers to Ourselves — "Shit in Your Cut," it's safe to say Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock would've had a hard time launching his songwriting career in Nashville. Heady lines about shooting guns at God, isolation, alienation, drugs and death don't sell too well on Music Row. Perhaps that explains why Modest Mouse hasn't played Music City since a 2007 Ryman stop.
Actually, it has nothing to do with it, but the band's long-awaited return (they play a nearly sold-out two-night stand at War Memorial Auditorium on Tuesday and Wednesday) couldn't come at a better time. As Nashville's skyline grows taller by the day, the pros and (mostly) cons of urban sprawl are an increasingly hot-button topic in this town, but are our songwriters writing about it yet? How has nobody in Nashville written the definitive anti-condo song yet?
Brock has been railing about such concerns in song since Modest Mouse's 1996 debut This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About, in the process offering a sprawling discography of shrewd poetic musings on the crushing effect urbanization has had on mental health, history and humanity. Below are nine choice Brock lyrics that critics of New Nashville might relate to.
From "Custom Concern"
"Their custom concern for the people / Build up the monuments and steeples / To wear out our eyes ... Message read on the bathroom wall says, 'I don't feel at all like I fall / And we're losing all touch, losing all touch / Building a desert."
From "Novocain Stain"
"Remember through towns / With fear and fascination / On what was here / And what's replacing them now / Interchange plazas a mall / And crowded chain restaurants / More housing developments go up / Named after the things they replace"
From "Convenient Parking"
"Soon the chain reaction started in the parking lot / Waiting to bleed on the big streets / That bleed out on the highways and off to other cities built to store and sell these (plastic) rocks / Well aren't you feeling real dirty / Sitting in the parking lot"
From "Bankrupt on Selling"
"They'd sell off your soul for a set of new wings and anything gold"
From "Cowboy Dan"
"Well, Cowboy Dan's a major player in the cowboy scene / He goes to the reservation drinks and gets mean / He drove through the desert, fired his rifle in the sky / And says, 'God if I have to die, you will have to die' / Well, Cowboy Dan's a major player in the cowboy scene / He goes the the reservation drinks and gets mean / I didn't move to the city, the city moved to me"
From "A Different City"
"I want to live in a city with no friends or family / I'm going to look out the window of my color TV / I want to remember to remember to forget you forgot me / I'm going to look out the window of my color TV"
From "Paper Thin Walls"
"Laugh hard it's a long ways to the bank"
From "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes"
"We're goin' down the road towards tiny cities made of ashes / I'm gonna hit you on the face, I'm gonna punch you in your glasses / Oh no!"
From "Spitting Venom"
"Hold on to what you need / We've got a knack for fucked-up history"
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