Exclusive Audio: Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock

Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock spoke to our Austin Scaggs on the eve of the band's new album release, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank (out March 20th). He covered a lot of territory, including his new bandmate Johnny Marr, Deadheads and how an unauthorized Modest Mouse biography might read.

On Johnny Marr's tips for quitting smoking.

On Brock's reserved hatred for dirty hippies.

On punk-ass "biographers."

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  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
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  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

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