"Float On" by Modest Mouse
"And we'll all float on, okay?" — the shrugging, off-kilter singalong that carried indie rock onto every radio station, mall speaker, and burned CD of 2004. A decade-old cult band from Washington state suddenly had the most reassuring song in America.
Modest Mouse had spent a decade as indie rock's beloved weirdos before anyone's mom knew the chorus. Formed in 1993 in Issaquah, Washington, by Isaac Brock, Eric Judy, and Jeremiah Green, the band built a cult following through the 1990s — The Lonesome Crowded West (1997) is now considered one of the defining albums of mid-90s indie rock, and The Moon & Antarctica (2000) drew a near-perfect 9.8 from Pitchfork. What they didn't have was a hit, and nothing about Brock's yelping, lurching songwriting suggested one was coming.
Then came "Float On," released in March 2004 as the lead single from Good News for People Who Love Bad News. The optimism was deliberate — Brock later explained he was simply fed up with how badly things had been going, so he wrote a song where every disaster works out okay. It topped Billboard's Modern Rock chart, and in one of chart history's great disconnects, this inescapable, generation-marking song peaked at just No. 68 on the Hot 100. It earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song — losing to U2's "Vertigo" — and pushed the album to platinum, with "Ocean Breathes Salty" following as a second hit.
The song became shorthand for the moment indie went mainstream — the era of The O.C. soundtracking and Garden State earnestness, when "I listen to Modest Mouse" stopped being a secret handshake. It never really faded either: the single has since gone five-times platinum in the US, floating on, as promised, long after 2004 ended.
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