“Dashboard” by Modest Mouse

"Dashboard" was the first single from Modest Mouse's 2007 album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, where it sits second in the running order. The band's mailing list got a link to the finished track on January 3, and radio had it by January 16, and it sounds built for that: a wiry, bouncing, strangely jolly rocker with a yelped vocal, twitchy guitars and a groove that wants to dance.

Brock wrote the lyrics, and the music is credited to six people: Brock, Jeremiah Green, Eric Judy, Johnny Marr, Tom Peloso and Joe Plummer. Dennis Herring produced it and mixed it with Joe Zook, and Clay Jones, who engineered, shakes the shakers. The line about a melted dashboard is a nod to Planes, Trains and Automobiles, to the scene where John Candy's Del explains the burned-out car to a police officer.

It reached number 5 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart and made the Hot 100, and later that year Rolling Stone put it at 87 on its 100 Best Songs of 2007. A UK single with "King Rat" on the flip followed in May, timed to the band's tour there.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.