There came a time when I left my prairie hometown, my family, all the friends I had, and went to college in central Minnesota. As well as having a profound academic experience, I expanded my singing and songwriting skills, and I fell in with a group of rogues from the area who were themselves producing some very impressive music, parties, hangouts, and all the rest. I graduated college, aloofly read Franny and Zooey during my commencement ceremony, and the next day moved to musical Minneapolis, where many of these rogues were moving also.
These people were a marvel to me, and I still haven't quite collected all my thoughts about them. They settled in a few residences in the city that became loci of artistic derangement and madness of all kinds, drawing in new personalities who themselves carried along their own wild associates. I often found myself with them, talking the long late talks, falling into my film and photography loves, falling in love with new excellent like minds, and hearing all manner of new music.
This song, of all songs, is the soundscape of the sweetest, most pure of my times with all these wonderful souls. I have stroboscopic-feeling memories of joyous bodies freeze-framing in dance to this then-new song. But I think it is, let me be clear, a brilliant song on its own merits.
Point of order: I don't have the widest experience with Modest Mouse. There are earlier albums that have greater cred with some of my associates. I've heard enough to know that this song sticks out like a sore thumb in their commonly darker, noisier repertoire.
But its incongruity actually has an important origin, something that also evokes those times in a different way. I'll let Modest Mouse singer Isaac Brock summarize it:
"I was just kind of fed up with how bad shit had been going, and how dark everything was, with bad news coming from everywhere. Our president George W. Bush is just a fucking daily dose of bad news! Then you've got the well-intentioned scientists telling us that everything is fucked. I just want to feel good for a day."
Sometime last spring, I was talking to a young guy working at the Target checkout. He told me he was scared to death about potentially having Donald Trump as president. He asked me what I thought. I didn't feel like telling him my realpolitik answer, but I did volunteer that I spent my 20s under the cloud of George W. Bush, September 11, and his insane response to September 11 - and though I have never fully escaped the stress of those times, I still made pretty good use of years I was never getting back. And maybe that's the reason this blissful, funky, weird song sticks so desperately as an era-definer for me. Isaac Brock probably didn't realize that so many people needed a song like this - but in fact, this era ended up producing some of the most impressive surreal, dance-friendly new music across the board.
I'm not ready to pull all those strands apart for anyone. If I never do, at least I have my own teleportation in this song's funky guitar strum.