Dear Johnny,
Well I finally went out and got my own copy of "The Lonesome Crowded West." I think I've played it over 100 times before you even moved away and we broke up. The only problem is that when I listen to "Trailer Trash," I still see you in a cement-brick walled apartment you could barely afford lifting weights with your brown eyes half-closed to take a break from Grand Theft Auto and doing a wicked Isaac Brock imitation causing my heart to splinter. Eating snowflakes with plastic forks/and a paper plate of course/you think of everything.
I kept thinking incessant playing of Modest Mouse has something to do with my losing you, however, I'm beginning to believe that this record is simply the perfect post-punk release of the nineties. Emo references aside (for I know little), if this were vinyl, I would have worn out the grooves by now. But this disc, recorded in 1997 and pretty much ignored by the mainstream press, is god.
Covering the post-modern American experience of alcoholism, consumerism, agnosticism and travel I can safely say after repeatedly brainwashing myself with this song that "Out of Gas" is a mantra of great debt (I kid) with the echo of words I can still hear you singing from the bathtub as I pour coffee in your kitchen into chipped green mugs. Out of gas/Out of road/out of car/I don't how I'm gonna go/I had a drink just the other day/opinions were like kittens/i was giving em away.
"Cowboy Dan" is my favorite ballad. With a slow, deliberate picky pacing, the song builds and Isaac croaks, Goes to the desert/fires his rifle in the sky/and yells "God if I have to die/you will have to die." But the great thing about this song is the way it slows pace and morphs into objective psysiological statements and then a celebration of numb meaninglessness. Everytime you think you're talking/You're just moving your mouth.
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