R.I.P Jeremiah Green

10 min readJan 9, 2023

I started writing a piece about one of my favorite albums several months ago. It’s a sacred thing, writing about one of your favorite pieces of music. Whenever I do it it’s a special time and feeling. There’s an air of extreme importance. I usually start it off with some sort of flamboyant imagery-laden description of how it makes me feel, and it’s all fantastical or whatever. And that is not to say it isn’t the truth, it is very much the truth, that in which I write and describe, but it’s perhaps a bit hyperbolized. An attempt to use art to describe art.

But as I sat down on the fifth floor of my dorm building in the computer room, I didn’t exactly know where to start. I go to that room whenever I seriously want to get a writing session in. It removes me from the comforts of my room, particularly my bed, where I usually spend a day, a week, and just sink deeper and deeper in lethargy until my joints become indisposed and my muscles useless. It feels like my left arm’s joints are running only on impulsive engines as I browse through meaningless scraps fermenting, in perfect design, on web browsers and airwaves. Meaningless but so damn entertaining. Oftentimes I’ll get distressed and blame these media meals for all my problems, my strange digital figure that has developed, which I see in the reflection of my blank computer screen whenever I first open it up before another repast. But the truth is it’s both. And the half I can change is me.

So I’ll go to the study room with the three old Dell desktop computers and sit in front of the one furthest to the right and log in. Pull up Medium, Google Docs, and Canvas on three separate tabs. And write. Or attempt to. Or not. But I usually will be able to write some stuff. More and more as I get older I realize how essential the environment is to our success. Whether artificial or natural, superficial or relevant, we may use our environment as an artifice to trick ourselves out of whatever skin we are in, whatever skin we are within. And for some reason, Dell computers in a tiny, lonely room do it for me. Not empty, lonely. There very much is a difference. Cold and isolating. But comforting. A new environment allows one to see those adjectives in a new way, a constructive one. Building with elements off of the atoms and compounds of alloyed molds. Humans prefer square and rectangle rooms it seems. I guess for efficiency.

So with the new but controlled stimulation, I approach the clunky keyboard with a booted-up mind, ready to interpret some data. I like the keyboards. With their unwieldy clicks, affordable refurbished greys. But at the time, months ago, as I intended to write about one of my favorite albums, nothing was clicking. Remember how I said it’s a special time and feeling, one of extreme importance? Yeah, well that can sometimes get to me. I pull a big hmmmmmm, and then a sigh. I can’t do this shit justice. This shit? Have you heard this shit?! I mean frankly, it’s one of the greatest things ever. One of the best collections of songs ever put together on the same tape. One of the most genuine statements from a band. Ever. How could I do it justice? Oftentimes, right there, as I stand looking up from the bottom of the long college-ruled stairs, I’ll bundle up the paper with my unwritten conscience, and just save it for another time. That’s when a thought rock meets a hard place, and I’m stuck right in between. I end up just browsing for a bit, looking up new albums to listen to, seeing what’s going on in the NBA, and checking my emails. The last one is a lie. I never check them. Probably should start doing that.

But you know what? No, I thought. I’m gonna write about this. This time. Even if it takes awkwardly retrieving a crumpled ball of notebook paper and an oddly small no. 2 pencil from my back pocket while being crushed by a boulder centimeter by centimeter. Fuck it, I’ll contort my arm and afterward use the hard place as a desk. My mind’s vexing rubble can’t stop me this time. This is why we have rib cages and skulls anyway. Well… Anyways, this is what I managed to type…

“Modest Mouse and Feeling Modest: the Anonymity it Brings
Recently scrolling through Instagram I discovered a startling fact, it is soon to be the 25th Anniversary of The Lonesome Crowded West. If you’re online, it is likely some of those close to you, friends, family, and even people you don’t know, have posted on their stories about the birthday of some of their favorite albums. The albums that they put on to make them happy, to make them dance, to make their long grueling drives to work entertaining, to make the tears come when you need them. These deeply engaging albums find places upon our bookshelves, whether we want them to or not; for the years to come we will reach for that book, gathering dust, with its tattered and torn binding, but somehow pages fresh and new. And we will read it. And we will smile.
We emphasize so greatly the moments when we first experience an album, the fond memories of feeling a newly bound leather book for the first time, the fingers grazing its skin, something consumed by so many, yet simultaneously so fresh. As someone who listens to music, particularly complete albums, I know with certainty I am not alone in wishing I could listen to things for the first time again. Strawberry Jam, You won’t Get What You Want, Ant’s From Up Their. What was that physical jaw-dropping astonishment like? How would it feel to the person I am now? If you’re familiar with Ants From Up There, you know it came out only this year (last year), yet being as recent as that is, still, my despotic nostalgia won’t let up. The greyhound bus ride I took to Tallahassee the day it was released, with its musty dewey windows, was the perfect backdrop for songs like Haldern and Basketball Shoes. How can you contain a 12 by 2-and-a-half meter bus in a jar? How can you contain a 12 by 2-and-a-half meter bus in a jar with all its doors and windows? Well, this jar must just be magic because here it sits in my head…

And then I stopped. I only went back to this piece once, and when I did so skipped the rest of the introduction because I wanted to write about the moment I had just experienced which made me open the chest back up.

…I woke up this morning feeling at peace; in those waking moments, pulled from the froth of darkness, I was dripping from head to toe within the clasp of two pinched fingers, soon to be consumed by a peremptory pair of rendering jaws. As I lived in that trice, my hair dripping hydrous tar, hands and feet dangling, I reached for my phone below me with one last effort stretch. I managed to grab it, and as it sat in my hands I went to apple music, pressing play on the song Bankrupt on Selling. As my harmoniously hushed head was filled with Isac Brock’s pure, genuine feelings of modesty, out my eyes came, almost infinite in its minisculely, something truly and utterly clear…”

I don’t exactly even know what feelings were described to this day. Because they were indescribable. It was attempted however in the early A.Ms after I had awoken and couldn’t go back to sleep. So what do I do in a scenario like that? Listen to Modest Mouse. I’m listening to them right now as I write this. But if you couldn’t already tell, although I had managed to write something, it was practically nothing. An incomplete introduction where I only mentioned the album I was to talk about once, and a paragraph containing the essence of a feeling. Matter of fact I spoke more about Ants Form Up There than I did The Lonesome Crowded West.

That’s the album. The Lonesome Crowded West. Wow, what a masterpiece. I love Modest Mouse, and several of their albums compete for a spot as my favorite, but right now if you asked me, I’d probably say it’s this one. From frantic to desolate soundscapes, with vocals that match such a seesaw, one thing is for sure, this is a heavy album. I think if you sat with the title for a bit you could already realize that. There’s something about the word lonesome. Maybe it’s because of its ruralness. It’s helpless undertones. It’s as if you’re dodging your true feelings a bit when you use it in conversation, but still crying for help. It feels that way when I use it. And then there’s the word next to it creating an oxymoron. Crowded. I think we’ve all heard it said before, being alone in a big crowd can be lonesome. But there’s something to be said when it’s more than moments. It’s life. Some major ingredient of the stew which you just can’t escape, leaving such a lonesome taste in your mouth due to its copious amounts.

I taste it almost every day. In a good week maybe every other. In a great one once. A whole lot of this ingredient was on the laminated instructions for this album. They whipped up some bitter-tasting shit in the studio. But we can’t truly understand its taste without finding where it’s sourced from. The West. Duh. Specifically Issaquah, WA. I mean, you don’t get much more northwest than Issaquah. And Isaac loved it. And I’m sure the rest of the band did as well. You can tell by the care with which nature is depicted throughout the band’s discography. And I can imagine their childhood much like mine, originally a Georgia boy who was completely enthralled with nature and everything it had to offer. It really is everything. I’m sure in their origin stories nature was even more involved than mine, as I was in the suburbs. The natural world is your space. You coexist with your family, friends, and other mammalian lookalikes but ultimately the focus is on you and what surrounds you. Not in a selfish way, but one that gives purpose. It’s like within those little genes of ours that we don’t fucking understand at all, some of us just can’t let go of what we know so well, what we’ve known for thousands of years. So how does that work in a world of urbanization? Modest mouse explains it doesn’t for everyone.

And that’s what I was going to dive into with my piece. How the lyrics of Modest Mouse provide light into the modest producing world we are creating. With all the great things and comfortable things, some of us can become lost. It’s hard to explain these feelings because, at the same time, we can enjoy the newfound positives of the world, yet still this sadness that I feel, I can’t exactly explain it. But I see it in Cowboy Dan. I see it in the guy who moves like Crisco disco, whose breath is 100% Listerine. They help me understand. Go listen to that album and feel the feelings, I won’t spoil them anymore. For some, it won’t click. For others, you will appreciate it. I hope for at least a few it resonates as much as it does with me.

But I’m not here to write about one of my favorite albums of all time. An attempt at it's fruition was done a couple of months ago and has long since been buried. I’m here because of Jeremiah Green.

I’m a bit more lonesome now that he’s gone. I never knew the man. But we all knew him. Constructed through the fabric of him he leaves behind in each and every song. What a drummer. What a fucking drummer. I’m about to begin taking up drumming myself and he’s going to be a huge influence that’s for sure. But all that doesn’t matter right now because he’s gone. And I can say all I want about the music, and how it ranks in the scene of indie rock, and how its sad sound and lyrics are so great, but at these moments it all sounds so trivial. And it is. Because he’s gone. Peacefully in his sleep.

I hope he has been loved. He has been satisfied. He has been happy. Why fight the other feelings, because they must come, but I just hope they didn’t loom over his life. Because the world can be so cruel, and so confusing, the music Green made throughout his life elaborated on that very fact, but it better have laid up during his 45 years before his life was cut short by cancer.

I’m so appreciative of all he’s done for me even though he doesn’t even know who I am. I never grow attached to celebrities, musicians, and actors, because what’s the point? The sad thing is I didn’t know much about Mr. Green until after he died. But this one hurts. Because the music sounds so good. Because it’s soundtracked my life for so long. And because I understand it so well and feel it understands me. That’s the power of it all. The power he leaves on this earth.

I know Brock and those close to Green are absolutely devastated. And it devastates me. I wish the best for everyone who Green has known. I wish the best for everyone who has listened to Green play drums, even if they didn’t know it was him. Because maybe you’re listening for some of the reasons I do, and those are tough reasons. Because life is tough. For all of us.