Song of the Day — 04·07·26
Convenient Parking
Modest Mouse
The Lonesome Crowded West is a record about cars and parking lots and highways — about the infrastructure of American capitalism as a spiritual landscape. The album moves through this infrastructure the way a driver moves through a city built for driving rather than living.
Convenient Parking is one of the album's most sardonic tracks — the title itself a kind of American haiku, the narrator surveying a landscape defined by accommodation of the automobile. Brock's guitar playing here is among his most economical.
Returning to The Lonesome Crowded West in 2026, the album's central subject — the spiritual cost of suburban sprawl — feels no less urgent. Brock saw it coming.
"Nobody wrote about the American nowhere like early Modest Mouse."
— The Wire · 2002