Modest Mouse / We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank / 2007
Fire It Up
lazy, sun-drunk, wistfully resigned
A loose, sun-bleached travelogue of drifting and stalling, where a broken-down boat or car becomes an excuse to keep not-arriving. The nonsense syllables and repeated exhortations to 'fire it up' turn aimlessness into a kind of ritual, and the song settles into a resigned, almost content acceptance that motion was never really the point.
aimlessness complacency disguised as freedom broken machinery as metaphor for stalled life nostalgia for abundance self-deception
Who's speaking
A first-person plural narrator speaking for a group of drifting companions, addressing no one in particular outside the group; the voice is unreliable in a soft way, more interested in mood than truth-telling.
What happens
The song opens on nonsense syllables that function like an engine trying and failing to turn over, then moves into a series of scenes of departure that never fully happen: pushing off, finding water, fixing a carburetor, hanging out on a shore. Each attempt at motion collapses back into inertia or repetition. Midway through, the narrator admits outright that certainty and direction were illusions even when they existed, and that knowing the way wouldn't have mattered anyway. The song ends by looping on a claim of having always had everything, which reads as both consolation and denial.
How it's built
The song alternates between a chant-like nonsense hook, a repeated 'fire it up' refrain, and loosely narrated verses describing failed departures. There's no clean verse-chorus-bridge logic; instead the structure mimics stalling and restarting, mirroring the carburetor imagery. The ending drops all narrative pretense and becomes pure incantatory repetition, functioning as a coda rather than a resolution.
Section by section
Opening chant
The nonsense syllables that open the song establish a mechanical, sputtering rhythm before any real language appears, priming the listener to hear the later refrain as another kind of engine noise.
First verse and refrain
“broke down transportation”
The imagery of stalled transport and passing time with idle reading material sets up the song's central joke: travel is imagined but never really pursued, and waiting becomes its own activity.
Shoreline verse
The vision of finally reaching ideal water only to loiter just long enough to undress suggests arrival is treated as an afterthought, secondary to the leisurely stall that precedes it.
Oranges and lovers verse
“beautifully done”
A sensual, abundant image of shared fruit and casual intimacy is immediately compared to an impossible task, framing pleasure itself as something fragile and doomed to fail even as it's enjoyed.
Certainty verses
“we really didn't know”
These paired lines function as the song's clearest statement of theme: even hypothetical clarity about direction wouldn't have changed the outcome, undercutting any romantic notion of purposeful drifting.
Boulders and carburetor verse
The shift to more violent, mechanical imagery of rolling and crashing suggests momentum without control, reinforcing that movement here is chaotic rather than chosen, followed by yet another attempt to repair and restart.
Closing repetition
“had it all”
The song ends by abandoning narrative for a looping affirmation, which can read as genuine gratitude for a full life or as a comforting lie the narrator tells to justify never having gone anywhere.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The recurring image of a broken-down boat or car and the instruction to 'fire it up' figures the whole song as an engine that keeps failing to catch, standing in for lives or relationships that can't get moving.
- simile
- Comparisons like hiding daylight from the sun and saving an ice cube from cold describe attempts that are structurally hopeless, undercutting the beauty the narrator claims to see in them.
- anaphora
- Repeated openings such as 'even if' and the closing 'well, we always' create a hypnotic, circular momentum that reinforces the theme of going nowhere.
- nonsense refrain
- The etcetera-type syllables function less as words than as sound and rhythm, evoking sputtering machinery or idle chatter and setting an unserious tone before the more reflective lyrics arrive.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a portrait of comfortable stagnation dressed up as adventure: the repeated failures to depart, the acknowledgment that direction never mattered, and the final looping claim of having 'had it all' suggest a group content to mistake stalling for fulfillment. An alternative reading takes the ending at face value as sincere gratitude, framing the whole song as a celebration of presence over destination, where the point was always the company and the moment rather than the journey.
Context
Recorded for Modest Mouse's 2007 album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, a record generally noted for a slightly more polished, sprawling sound compared to earlier releases and featuring guest contributions from Johnny Marr. I don't have reliable specific details about the writing or recording circumstances of this particular track, so I'm working primarily from the lyric itself.
Listen for
- The way the nonsense syllables mimic a stalling engine before the lyrics proper begin
- How the 'fire it up' refrain shifts in tone as the surrounding verses grow more chaotic
- The pivot in the middle verses where certainty is explicitly denied
- The buildup of imagery around boats, cars, and shorelines that never quite deliver arrival
- The closing repetition and whether it lands as contentment or self-justification
About Modest Mouse
Modest Mouse is an American indie rock band formed in 1993 in Issaquah, Washington, and currently based in Portland, Oregon. The founding members were lead singer/guitarist Isaac Brock, drummer Jeremiah Green and bassist Eric Judy.
1993 - present / Portland
Full biography and catalogue