It is difficult to put in words how much I love the #music made by this band during most of the nineties.

I was late coming to the Mouse, relatively speaking. I first caught up with them in the latter half of the nineties somewhere in the three years between the release of The Moon and Antartica and the first two ‘proper’ albums, the one I always thought was called ‘This is a Long Way to Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About’ and ‘The Lonesome Crowded West’.

I bought both CDs after I found an MP3 online of 'Birds vs Worms'. A student, Jamie Nimmo, had heard me play Pavement on the radio. I made students listen to my radio show for their research assignment in a subject called sound and music. I had to get listeners somehow. Jamie said I might like Modest Mouse. And he was right.

I remember where I was standing when I first heard the opening chords of Dramamine, it was a warm day, the window was open, the Princess was working in the veggie patch. I don't think I listened to any other records that entire summer.

Towards the end of the nineties, like everyone else who loved their music, I was worried. Modest Mouse signed with Sony. When the Sex Pistols signed with EMI in '77 it was the beginning of the end of punk. Anarchy never works when it's packaged up and sold to as many people as possible. And if there was ever real anarchy in music it came in the form of Isaac Brock's songs, his singing, and the way he punished his guitar.

When their first record on Sony, The Moon and Antartica (2000) came out, the critics loved it and it was hailed as a masterpiece but, rather predictably, I didn’t mind it but it didn’t move me, it didn’t, you know, hurt like their previous records, The Lonesome Crowded West and the album I have been referred to for nearly 20 years in error as This Is A Long Way to Drive For Someone with Nothing to Think About (1996) – and so I’ll keep calling it that just of told time sake. I thought The Moon and Antartica a little bland. It had ‘compromise’ written all over it.

Isaac Brock was reportedly unhappy with the way the record was mixed and after its release he remixed it, just for himself, so he could listen to it the way he wanted it to be. Unbeknownst to me this remastered remixed version was re-released in 2004 and I finally caught up with it more than ten years later. It is an almost entirely different record – far more intriguing, intense and urgent, but subtle and lyrical too at times – and here I am weeping with gratitude. What a gift from the Time Before.