Dashboard: A Marching Band for the End of the World

Modest Mouse: Dashboard

The floor shakes with every drumbeat. The bass thumps deep in my chest. The guitar wails like it’s pulling all the weight out of my body. I feel it before I even really hear it—music wrapping around me, lifting me up, turning all the noise in my head into something that finally makes sense.

This isn’t just any concert. This is Pack Rat 7.

Clint’s on drums, hammering out every beat like the music won’t move without him. Ricky’s gripping his guitar, leaning into the mic, his voice rising above the noise. Daniel’s bass hums underneath it all, grounding the sound, pulling it together.

Pack Rat 7 wasn’t just a band—they were my friends.

The ones who gave me a place to belong when I didn’t feel like I had one.

The ones who made music feel like more than just sound—it was a place, a refuge, a reason to keep going.

I was sixteen or seventeen when I named it. Searching for Stars.

I wasn’t sure what it would be yet—a band name, a book, a phrase I scribbled in the margins of my notebooks. I just knew it meant something.

Because that was what I was always doing.

Searching for something beyond the wreckage.

Searching for hope, for meaning, for beauty in disaster.

And so, it stuck. A phrase that felt like a promise—to myself, to the universe, to anyone else who might need it someday.

Years later, when I first heard Dashboard, I wasn’t at a Pack Rat 7 show.

I wasn’t at a show at all.

But the moment it hit—the pounding drums, the frantic bassline, the brass section blaring like a siren—it pulled me straight back. Back to those nights, those living rooms, those concerts where everything felt alive and possible.

“Well, it would’ve been, could’ve been worse than you would ever know…”

I don’t think I realized it at first, but the energy of this song—the chaos, the resilience, the motion—it felt exactly like those nights at Pack Rat 7 shows. Like those moments when everything was loud and fast and it felt like nothing could touch us.

Modest Mouse isn’t about clean narratives or clear resolutions.

They write in movement, in disorder, in the strange poetry of things falling apart but still pushing forward.

Dashboard is a song about driving through the disaster.

About looking around at the wreckage and deciding to find something beautiful in it anyway.

Isaac Brock sings it like a half-truth, like a joke the universe keeps telling.

The world may be breaking apart, but the music keeps playing.

The horns swell, the drums push forward, and somehow, everything feels a little less impossible.

I’ve always chosen to see the beauty in disaster.

Maybe because I’ve had to.

Maybe because it’s the only way I know how to keep going.

The road has never been smooth, but it’s always been mine.

I used to fall asleep on Clint’s couch during band practice.

It drove Ricky insane.

“How the hell do you sleep through this?” he’d ask, while Clint hammered out another beat, filling every corner of the living room with noise.

But it wasn’t just sleep—it was safety.

I felt safer on that couch, in that house, surrounded by the chaos of music, than I ever did at home.

The amps buzzed, the drums pounded, the guitars ripped through the space around me—but I could finally rest.

Because I wasn’t alone.

Because the noise wasn’t something to fear.

Somewhere between all those nights—the concerts, the practices, the late-night drives, the songs on repeat—I learned something.

That life is messy.

That it breaks and bends and falls apart.

That sometimes you don’t know where you’re going next.

But motion is still motion.

Dashboard reminds me of something I had already lived long before I ever heard it.

The way it crashes forward, never looking back, never slowing down—it sounds like being eighteen and thrown into adulthood before I was ready.

It sounds like having no idea where I was going, but knowing I had to keep moving anyway.

Like graduating high school with no real plan.

Like searching for stability in the chaos.

Like Searching for Stars before I even had a name for it.

And maybe that’s what I’ve always done.

Searched for light inside the wreckage.

Looked for beauty in disaster.

Because what else is there to do?

Some things, you see coming.

Others hit before you realize what’s happening.

I learned that the hard way.

I don’t think about it often, but some days, I do.

The way time blurred in the weeks after my body weak, my mind caught between survival and grief.

I barely recognized myself.

I wasn’t sure how to feel like me again after something like that.

The doctors told me I had gotten there just in time.

A few minutes later, and maybe I wouldn’t have.

And then one day, Jamie and I were in the car, driving—like we always were.

The window down.

My arm stretched out, fingers moving against the wind.

The song was playing.

“Well, it would’ve been, could’ve been worse than you would ever know…”

And for the first time in months, I let myself feel it.

The weight of everything.

The rush of the air.

The simple, undeniable truth.

I was still here.

I never knew what was ahead.

I still don’t.

But I know this—

The dashboard is melting.

The road is uncertain.

The wheels are still turning.

The songs change. The people shift. But the music remains. And in the end, it’s always been the sound that carries me forward.