“Ocean Breathes Salty” by Modest Mouse

"Ocean Breathes Salty" was the follow-up to "Float On", the second single pulled from Good News for People Who Love Bad News, Modest Mouse's fourth studio album, which Epic put out in 2004. Isaac Brock wrote the lyric and shaped the music with Dann Gallucci and Eric Judy, and he sings it in that cracked, sardonic yelp that always sounds a heartbeat away from a laugh or a sob.

Brock and Gallucci knot their guitars together, Gallucci layering in keyboard, while Judy's bass swells and recedes like a tide and Benjamin Weikel keeps the drums rolling easy. Dennis Herring produced and mixed it with Jacquire King, who recorded it alongside Clay Jones. It is indie rock with brine in its lungs, sweet enough for the radio and odd enough to stay interesting.

The single's sleeve carries one of the band's emblems, an upturned hot air balloon trailing an anchor. Chris Milk directed the video, a small, sad fable: a boy nurses a bird with a broken wing, a bird that keeps turning into Brock, and runs off with it when his mother wants it gone. He sleeps in a field dreaming of the day it can fly, wakes to find it dead and buries it, and then the band, costumed as animals, turn up to play the song out.

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