229. Song No. 3,455: “Float On,” Modest Mouse
Good News for People Who Love Bad News, 2004

For the longest time, despite an obvious unflagging fondness for their music, I would’ve never thought Modest Mouse would be a band I’d fiercely loved for decades. And no matter how much the passage of time and its accompanying experiences force me to grow and evolve as a person, I will apparently forever feel like a total poseur for admitting that the band’s most accessible album is also my favorite. And this, by far their most popular song three albums and almost 20 years later, helped ensure that Good News is still the one Modest Mouse album everyone knows.

“Float On” is also one of the most aggressively, overtly optimistic song in the band’s catalogue. Isaac Brock always seems hellbent on wresting some reason to live from this hellscape world’s diminishing options even if it’s a labor tantamount to wringing blood from a stone, and this is such a successful, true-to-form manifestation of that effort that it’s impossible not to love just for its stark honesty and authenticity alone (its catchiness certainly helps, though). Finding happiness is just as messy as it is fleeting, and Brock and the boys do a damn fine job of making that worthy undertaking sound like the hard work and perspective shift it requires to pay off in full.

Because life really is full of reasons for gratitude and heady bursts of bright sides if you come at it with a good-faith willingness to see not only its daily gifts but also the bigger picture. And there are so many of those little moments tucked into this song providing that we’ll all float on, “even if things end up a bit too heavy”: mistakes without the braced-for consequences (“I backed my car into a cop car the other day / Well, he just drove off, sometimes life’s okay / I ran my mouth off a bit too much, oh, what did I say? / Well, you just laughed it off, it was all okay”); proof that a challenge shared is an onus halved through bond-strengthening shared experiences (“We both got fired on exactly the same day”); shitty experiences that at least yielded a lesson learned (“A fake Jamaican took every last dime with that scam / It was worth it just to learn some sleight of hand”).

What sets this band apart, I think, is a demonstrated mastery of balancing extremes to give both their music a lived-in tension and those illustrated obverses amplified meaning. For all the rough-hewn hope immortalized in their catalogue, there is some kind of fire and frustration at the core of Modest Mouse, which is also an inevitable sensation born of unflinchingly raw lyrics, the guttural intensity of Brock’s vocals, and an eternally refreshing lack of interest in sugar-coating the things adults should be able to frankly dissect. It makes for visceral, fleshy music that growls and snaps and makes you work to understand its appeal, but freely extends a more-than-proportional-payoff for putting in the effort to find your way in and falling in love with the richly complex tapestry on full display across two and half decades of music.

“Float On” delightfully eschews all that, and it does so as Modest Mouse approaches every other song: honestly and with both eyes open and enough respect for the audience to lay out everything in no uncertain terms. It is more of a invitation than any of their other songs with a message that, especially coming at what we sweet summer children thought was the societal nadir of the Bush II era, needed to be said just as much as it needed to be heard.

(It is such an endearingly positive song that of course Ben Lee, the happiest guy in the music industry, did one dreamily charming cover of it.)

(This optimism is, of course, not at all negated by the music video’s rather grim narrative following lambs to slaughter: We’re all born to drift off into the immortal ether and release our energy back into the cosmic swirl of everything that ever was, so we might as well fill up on all the joy we can find before we go.)

I can’t think of a better song to end the year with, and as pragmatic but comforting as a parting shot as “Bad news comes, don’t you worry even when it lands / Good news will work its way to all them plans.” Be well and go into 2023 with the hope in humanity and dedication to kindness we all deserve for ourselves and owe to one another. ❤

(No, really: If we’re starting this year off with some fucking terrible news, the least we can do is love a little bit harder to make up for these brilliant lights that flicker out far too soon.)