On December 31, 2022, the music world lost one of its most creative, least pretentious, and kindest souls. To most, Jeremiah Green was known only as the drummer of the indie rock band Modest Mouse – but those closest to him will tell you that he was so much more than that.
Born to a military father in Oahu, Hawaii, on March 4, 1977, Jeremiah Green and his family relocated to eastern Washington State when he was still quite young. In an exclusive interview with New Noise Magazine, Adam Green – Jeremiah’s older brother and former DJ for Seattle’s 107.7 The End – described how music was always a big part of both of their lives. “We grew up in a town called Moxee, which was really, really small,” Adam explained. “I want to say it’s like three or four thousand people now but back then it was like 650. I mean we’re talking red-NECK.”
Both boys found solace in music at a young age, starting with the handful of mainstream songs that made it to Moxee’s radios and televisions. “Michael Jackson was huge to my brother and I,” Adam confided. “We both had Michael Jackson jackets. He had a red one, I had a black one. We both had one glove. We’d go roller skating – that’s how you’d pick up girls as a nine-year-old: a Michael Jackson jacket and one glove.”
Jeremiah admitted as much himself on a 2017 episode of “The Trap Set with Joe Wong” podcast. “I was really into Michael Jackson,” he confessed. “I remember that age when people were like, ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ and I’d be like, ‘Well, duh, dude, I might be Michael Jackson.’”
Still, life in a conservative, rural town was not without its drawbacks, especially for artistically-inclined youths. “If we hadn’t gotten out of there, I would not be playing music,” Jeremiah acknowledged on a 2020 episode of the “Never Meet Your Idols” podcast, adding, “I’d probably be driving a truck.”
Luckily, Moxee’s small elementary school offered a creative outlet in the form of Band Day, an event in which kids could play a variety of instruments and select a favorite. “And so he decided on – in true Jeremiah custom – an instrument that no one in a million years would know, let alone how to teach or fit into a school band,” Adam explained. Jeremiah’s instrument of choice? The xylophone – which does technically fall under the umbrella of percussion.
He attempted a few other instruments in addition to the xylophone, including the clarinet, ukulele, and piano. “My family was not super musical, but it was a given that you had to take up an instrument,” Jeremiah Green told Modern Drummer Magazine in 2015. “I think I just always wanted to play drums. I got a ukulele when I was a kid, but I played it like a drum. I didn’t really want to play the piano; I’d beat on that thing too. By the time I was 12 or 13, I was like, ‘I want to play punk rock.’”
“This guy named Dan moved up from L.A.,” Adam recalled. “He had a mohawk and got us into punk rock. And that’s what changed everything.” Before Dan’s arrival, the Green brothers had been skateboarding to classic rock like AC/DC, which just wasn’t quite right. But once they discovered punk, both decided that they had to become rock stars. It just became a matter of choosing an instrument.
The Greens eventually relocated to the city of Kirkland, an eastern suburb of Seattle, where a comical albeit defining moment in Jeremiah’s career took place. He and Adam were jamming on the electric bass guitar and drum set their mother had rented for them to share when a fight broke out between the two brothers. “He cracked open a Pepsi and poured it all over my drums,” Adam explained. “And I was like, ‘Fuck this, you’re playing drums now. You’re playing drums and I’m fuckin’ playing bass from now on.’”
True to his word, Adam took over the bass – which he continues to play to this day – and Jeremiah officially became a drummer. Because he had played the drums first, Adam taught 13-year-old Jeremiah his first drumbeat: U2’s “Bullet the Blue Sky.” “I had taught myself the beat,” Adam recalled, adding, “It’s a pretty simple drumbeat when you listen to it…But how many musicians can you trace back to that very first thing? And that’s absolutely 100% the first drumbeat that he learned.”
From that point on, Jeremiah was determined to master the drums. He played as often as he could, though it was challenging when his family lived in apartments. That is until he met a friend at school. “I went to what is now called a charter school,” Jeremiah told Modern Drummer Magazine in 2015. “Anybody who was kind of odd went there, and I chose to go. I wouldn’t have done well at a regular high school.” The school encouraged his creativity and even allowed him to take months off to perform with his bands. It also introduced him to other like-minded individuals, including Jeff McCollough, who would become his first bandmate and lifelong friend.
“We all had our chosen family and Jeremiah was definitely my chosen family,” McCollough told New Noise Magazine in an exclusive interview. The two bonded over their shared love of music and quickly became fast friends. Before long, Jeremiah was keeping his drums at McCollough’s mother’s house, where they often practiced together.
“We would play every day after school,” McCollough explained. “Sometimes he would make it to the house before I would. That happened for close to five years. It was one of those things where literally he would show up and go, ‘Hey man, can we play music?’ It was a daily occurrence forever.” “We were the lost kids,” he continued. “We all had drama in our houses and we kind of found each other. Jeremiah’s life was not easy and he had a lot of things he had to deal with. He would escape it playing the drums.”
McCollough played guitar – even once performing at Carrie Brownstein’s birthday party – while Jeremiah became increasingly adept at drums. The two also shared a love of music discovery and visited record stores and libraries in search of new artists as often as they could. “He was so into music and so determined to listen to everything, whether it was new or old,” McCollough recalled. “He listened to all different kinds of music. He listened to hip hop he listened to shoegaze he listened to post-punk he listened to electronic. He was listening to everything.”
But a few bands in particular really stood out to young Jeremiah Green. “The Cure was the first band I got obsessed with, posters on the wall and stuff,” he explained on a 2017 episode of “The Trap Set with Joe Wong.” “Disintegration was the first CD my parents bought me. It’s a really beautiful record.” He also credits the drumming of Lol Tolhurst – specifically his work on The Cure’s 1982 album Pornography – as hugely influential to his style.
When it came to cultivating a desire to perform with others, another group had his heart. “Fugazi was probably my biggest influence as far as wanting to start a band,” Jeremiah told Modern Drummer Magazine in 2015. “It was really great music and just sounded like something I could possibly do.” He elaborated further on a 2020 episode of the “Never Meet Your Idols” podcast, citing the inventiveness of Fugazi’s drummer, Brendan Canty, as an inspiration. “That guy’s an amazing drummer,” he explained, adding, “You can dance to that stuff, it’s not just punk rock.”
It was only a matter of time before the two pals – along with bass player Jason Talley and guitarist Tonie Palmasan – formed their first band, Peeved. “Peeved was basically our pissed-off punk band,” McCollough explained. The foursome played shows in the back room of his mom’s house – which had become something of a hot spot for local bands – before graduating to the Redmond YMCA, which, through the DIY booking efforts of Jeremiah and his posse, later became a music venue called The Old Firehouse.
“That’s where we both cut our teeth as far as live shows,” Adam said of Redmond’s Old Firehouse. “And a bunch of bands came out of that. Sunny Day Real Estate was part of that crew. A lot of nationally touring acts would come through and smaller bands – like my band and my brother’s bands – would open up for them.” Eventually, Peeved got a few gigs in Seattle, and one even paid them a whopping $8 to perform.
When they weren’t playing music together, Jeremiah and McCollough would, according to McCollough, “leave the East Side as fast as humanly possible” to visit Seattle, grab coffee, or shop at record and thrift stores. “The East Side was such a painful place to be for anyone like us,” McCollough lamented. “It was very suburban, and you were basically surrounded by people who had no idea how to treat you and were generally quite mean to begin with. They were all determined to show you how much money they had and they constantly put church people in assemblies at the high school.”
Naturally, the two also attended a lot of shows, which was how Jeremiah first started honing his percussive craft. “Back in the day I’d go to pretty small shows, and I could fit behind the drummer and actually see what he or she was doing physically,” Jeremiah told Modern Drummer Magazine in 2015. “When you’re only listening to music, you don’t know what kind of movements people are doing.”
This esoteric knowledge was especially important to Jeremiah, as he had only attended a few uninspiring drum lessons in his life and was primarily self-taught – minus a few drunken pointers from a friend’s dad’s friend, which he claimed on a 2017 episode of “The Trap Set with Joe Wong” podcast was “the best drum lesson [he] ever got.”
Two years in, Jeremiah had grown weary of people making fun of the name “Peeved” and suggested that they rename their band Drown, after a song by the local hardcore band Galleons Lap. The name change coincided with the group’s evolving sound. “With Drown, we really focused everything and became more of a D.C. hardcore band, basically,” McCollough explained. “We’d play hard stuff for quite a while and then we’d kind of break down to the point where we were playing space rock, which became shoegaze a year later.”
Years of practice had also paid off. “We were so incredibly tight as a band,” McCollough mused. “Even when I was tuning my guitar, he was doing triplets on top of me tuning and hitting it on every note. We had been playing music together long enough that he could sense the next thing I did and I could sense the next thing he did.”
Lyrically, they also tackled more mature themes with Drown, though that sometimes got them in trouble. “We were not loved because we took stands long before anyone else did,” McCollough explained. “We had songs about homophobia and racism in our set when we were like 16 years old. We were strongly against that stuff. It almost got us into fights with people.”
Sadly, both Peeved and Drown’s music remains unreleased, though at least a few lo-fi recordings exist and could see the light of day in the future. “We were kind of like Fugazi about making recordings,” McCollough laughed.
In August of 1993, Drown amicably disbanded, most of its members graduating high school and pursuing other musical ventures. McCollough wanted to play harder and faster music, and later formed the groups Blackpool Astronomy and The Bookhouse Dolls. Jeremiah, meanwhile, was still in high school. But he kept busy with his new band: Modest Mouse.
Founded in 1993 by Jeremiah alongside singer, songwriter, and guitarist Isaac Brock and bassist Eric Judy – who had been a roadie for Drown – the prolific new band practiced regularly in a shed in Brock’s backyard in Issaquah. They also performed shows at a music space known as The Goathouse in Everett, an all-ages hangout called The Velvet Elvis in Seattle, and various other Seattle venues, many of which forced them to leave as soon as they played since they were all, at that time, underage.
By 1996, Modest Mouse had released its debut album, This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About, which was immediately followed by the now-iconic album The Lonesome Crowded West in 1997. The band hit the road for its first west coast tour as soon as Jeremiah – its youngest member – graduated high school.
It’s a time Jeremiah recalled fondly. “I think the best moments of touring were when we were younger and in a van and like staying on peoples’ floors and meeting people and having cash in our pockets all the time,” he revealed on a 2020 episode of the “Never Meet Your Idols” podcast. “I didn’t know what was going to happen with our band, I left on tour the day after high school.”
It would take years of hard work for Modest Mouse to break into the mainstream and find commercial success. But that was never a big concern for Jeremiah Green. “I knew I was just going to play music no matter what happened,” he explained on a 2017 episode of “The Trap Set with Joe Wong” podcast. “By the time I got into playing music, the whole idea of being successful wasn’t really a thing…Like if a band got too popular, we didn’t like it.”
Having developed himself into a skilled drummer at a young age, Jeremiah found his talents in demand and, as a result, never had to work a standard 9-to-5 job. “He was an espresso barista for like two months when he was 15 or 16,” Adam explained. “And that’s the only job he ever had besides playing drums. So, he made a living since he was in his mid-teen years doing it.”
In addition to Modest Mouse, Jeremiah drummed for several Pacific Northwest bands throughout the ‘90s, making music pretty much any chance he got. He was briefly in a band called Has Been with bassist Jason Talley and guitarist Tonie Palmasan, both former members of Drown.
Then, in 1995, he and the other members of Has Been formed the indie rock band Red Stars Theory alongside multi-instrumentalist James Bertram of Lync and 764-HERO and violinist Seth Warren. The band released two albums and several EPs over the years, working around the busy schedules of both Jeremiah and Bertram.
In Red Stars Theory, Jeremiah stepped out from behind the kit and expressed his creative prowess in other ways. He designed the album artwork for the band’s 1996 10-inch El Paraguas and 1997 single “Castle Rock b/w Slow Curve,” played acoustic guitar on the 1999 songs “Parts per Million” and “Boring Ghosts,” and even sang on the latter.
As James Bertram’s partner, Amanda Bertram, wrote of the song on Instagram: “I remember the recording of that album [1999’s Life In a Bubble Can Be Beautiful] being so lighthearted, free-spirited, and super quick, this track being a spur-of-the-moment loopy, trancey studio jam that everyone adored. He insisted the vocals be turned wayyy down, naturally. But there he is, absolutely singing his heart out.”
In 1996, Jeremiah joined the Cure-inspired post-punk band Satisfact alongside guitarist and singer Matt Steinke, bassist Josh Warren, and synth player Chad States. The band released three albums, all of which deserve to be way more popular than they are. At one point, he was even invited to join Engine Kid – the ‘90s side project of Sunn O)))’s Greg Anderson – but he declined.
Modest Mouse remained Jeremiah’s priority – that is, until the recording sessions for the band’s fourth album in the early 2000s. While laying the groundwork for what would become the group’s breakout album, Jeremiah suffered from severe depression and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. To treat it, doctors prescribed the antidepressant Effexor, which – taken alongside alcohol and psilocybin mushrooms – proved disastrous.
“This stuff made me manic and just made me crazy,” Jeremiah explained on a 2017 episode of “The Trap Set with Joe Wong” podcast. “I was too happy; I was too juiced all the time and it ended up making all my anger come out and all of that just boiled up and made me too free. And actually, it’s really close to ecstasy. It boosts your serotonin and norepinephrine. It’s just like being on a low dose of ecstasy every day. There’s this woman who drowned all five of her children in succession on that medication right around the same time I was on it.”
Following an angry emotional outburst during a rehearsal session on March 4, 2003 – his 26th birthday – Jeremiah quit Modest Mouse. “I didn’t mean to drop out of the band that day,” he admitted to Wong. “I was just kind of dropping out of life for a little bit.” Following his abrupt departure, Jeremiah drove around, visited friends and relatives, and eventually checked himself into a mental hospital, though he only stayed for six hours. He then quit taking Effexor and consulted a healer to search for the root of his anger and depression.
“I think that things were pretty complicated with my parents and stuff growing up,” Jeremiah told Wong, adding, “It was my mom, stepdad, and real dad. My real dad lived in the backyard in his car.” Jeremiah’s biological father was an alcoholic who was occasionally abusive to him, though the two later reconciled. “If you’ve got childhood issues like I definitely did, I guess just forgive that that happened, forgive the people involved, forgive yourself, just let it go,” Jeremiah told Wong. “Because it’s not going to do you any good. It’s just a story at this point, it doesn’t matter.”
By May 2004, Jeremiah had rejoined Modest Mouse. Though he had been a member of the band since its formation in 1993, his absence caused him to miss out on the recording process for what would become the group’s most successful album, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, which featured the band’s biggest mainstream hit, “Float On.”
Still, his creative influence can be felt on the album. “Jeremiah wasn’t on that record but they wrote those songs together,” Adam confided. “He quit during the recording or preproduction and they hired a new drummer, but all those grooves and tempos and everything were written by Jeremiah. He was a lot more involved than people give him credit for.”
And the drumbeats weren’t the only part he had a hand in. The now-famous cover of Good News For People Who Love Bad News features a seafoam green wall, bleeding pink where it is pierced by seven white arrows. “That green with the white arrows in it – that’s his wall in his living room,” Adam explained. “They hired an artist [graphic designer Houston] to come and shoot arrows at his wall. The arrows stayed there for a couple of years.”
Though recording and touring with Modest Mouse kept him busy, Jeremiah always found time to collaborate with other musicians. He joined the indie rock band Vells in 2001 alongside guitarist and vocalist Tristan Marcum, guitarist Ryan Kraft, bassist Adam McCollom, bassist Adam Howrey, and keyboardist Mary Thinnes. The group released two albums and an EP.
Vells then spawned the electronic project Psychic Emperor in 2004, which featured Jeremiah on drums, guitar, and harp, Marcum on vocals and guitar, and Thinnes on the keys with contributions by various other artists. The group’s output was produced by Darrin Wiener, who often went by the alias Plastiq Phantom.
Jeremiah and Wiener – who produced the 2015 Modest Mouse album Strangers to Ourselves – also began an electronic collaboration in 2006 known as World Gang. The duo released two albums and a slew of singles over the years, including a 2008 album called Drums that features nearly an hour of Jeremiah’s eloquent and masterful drumming.
In 2007, he contributed delicate drumwork to Graig Markel of The Animals at Night’s solo album, Via Novella. Jeremiah also kept synthesizers and sequencers at the ready so he could create electronic music whenever the mood struck him, occasionally releasing these songs on SoundCloud under the names JGreen and DREAM ATTACK.
Being self-taught, Jeremiah’s sophisticated percussive style was truly unique and contributed greatly to Modest Mouse’s signature sound. As longtime fan Michael Decker astutley noted on Instagram, “His drumming always sounded like a car moving across a landscape.”
“He was so fluid in his drumming and so loose,” Adam elaborated. “A lot of it was really flowing, like water. It felt very open. But he could be tight as hell when he wanted to be. He would take a regular drumbeat and change it – just make it a little extra in some way, shape, or form – so it wasn’t so boring. He would try to be creative and fill those empty gaps with stuff.” Jeremiah was also known to incorporate oddments – like goat hoof clippings and seed pods – into his percussion.
In Modest Mouse, his drumming ebbed seamlessly between an array of tempos and moods, supplying the delicate flutters of “Grey Ice Water” as easily as the crashing cacophony of “Styrofoam Boots/It’s All Nice on Ice, Alright,” in which his salience in the song emerges so suddenly it is sure to make you jump even after thousands of listens. Whatever level of rhythmic accompaniment the music required, Jeremiah delivered it with ease. He always served the song.
“There are a couple of tracks where it’s like, ‘Fuck, man, that’s my little brother. That’s amazing!’” Adam extolled. “And I don’t know what to attribute that to except for maybe the fact that he let the music take his brain over.”
Watch Jeremiah Green jamming in the woods in 2016 (via Datachoir Sounds’ YouTube):
Over time, Modest Mouse drifted into poppier territory, which often called for simpler drumbeats. But Jeremiah also chalked the band’s more finessed sonic shift up to instrument mastery, as all three founding members were self-taught musicians. “Sometimes I feel like I was better when I was 18 and didn’t know what I was doing,” he told Modern Drummer Magazine in 2015. “I listen to some parts of those records, and they’re kind of sloppy, but I think I was maybe more creative because it was all new to me.”
According to Adam, the Modest Mouse song “Ocean Breathes Salty” is a good representation of Jeremiah’s inimitable drumming. “It almost feels and sounds like waves of the ocean,” he explained. “The verse and chorus drumbeat for ‘Ocean Breathes Salty’ I think is as perfect a drumbeat as you can get from him. If you were a drummer, you would understand how unique it is, how back behind the beat and off it is. It still sounds like a straightforward 4/4 drumbeat, but it’s not – it’s flipped, it’s behind everything.”
Jeremiah also customized his drum kits to create a bigger sound – something Adam claims he gained a taste for after listening to hip hop artists like Run DMC, Whodini, Grandmaster Flash, and the Beastie Boys as a kid. “He would always get extra-large kick drums,” Adam explained. “He liked that huge sound.” This larger-than-life booming kickdrum became a staple of Modest Mouse’s music, especially evident on early songs like “Truckers Atlas,” “Styrofoam Boots/It’s All Nice on Ice, Alright,” and “Dramamine.”
A chameleon of different genres, Jeremiah was also adept at switching gears on a dime. “He could keep on time with pretty much anyone,” McCollough recalled. “He didn’t ever fall behind. Without his drumming, I don’t think Modest Mouse would be nearly as good.” And musical prowess was only one of the reasons that Jeremiah was indispensable to Modest Mouse.
In addition to keeping the beat, he kept an even keel within the band. “If you watch them perform, Jeremiah has massive amounts of patience with Isaac,” Adam explained. “Because Isaac can go off on tangents. And Jeremiah would just sit there and smoke away and take some pictures like it was like nothing. Like it was normal, like they rehearsed it. He had the patience of a saint.”
Indeed, the chemistry between the three founding members of Modest Mouse was undeniable. Throughout the years and many lineup changes, Jeremiah and Isaac Brock were the band’s only constants following Eric Judy’s departure around 2012. For his part, Jeremiah described both of his original bandmates as his brothers and best friends.
In addition, he and Brock made a fantastic songwriting duo, with Jeremiah listed as a co-writer on several songs, including 1999’s “Night on the Sun” and 2021’s “Back to the Middle.” He is also credited as the lyricist on 2015’s quirky and catchy “God is an Indian and You’re an Asshole.”
Check out Jeremiah Green’s live performance of Modest Mouse’s “Dashboard” in 2016 (courtesy of Upcycled Percussion’s Instagram):
It might be easy for a casual fan to overlook Jeremiah Green’s contributions to Modest Mouse – and he was likely just fine with that. As the band started gaining popularity, he would often wear a bearded disguise while attending shows in Seattle. “I’d go to a show, and this guy would walk up to me and be like, ‘Hey dude.’ And I would be looking at him like, ‘Oh, jeez, it’s you!’” McCollough laughed. “He did it because he was tired of people talking to him just because he was in Modest Mouse. He didn’t like the idea of people talking to him just because he was in a band.”
“He was the most unassuming rock star you’ll ever meet,” Adam explained. “I picked him up at the airport when he left the Lonesome Crowded West tour [in December 2022] and we got a flat tire on the way home. We had to call Triple A because I didn’t have the tools and he was really bummed out that this guy was in the snow changing our tire, he wanted to help him. That’s just the kind of person he was. He never felt comfortable with people doing shit for him.”
His reserved personality often surprised people, as it was so at odds with his drumming style. “I can tell you that when Jeremiah was drumming, he was a totally different animal,” Adam revealed. “He was really soft-spoken and really, really shy. It’s always amazed me how he was a different human being when he was drumming – this confident, aggressive being – and then, away from the drums, he wasn’t like that at all.”
And drumming was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to his creativity. As a teen, he decorated his practice space with clippings from old National Geographic magazines, designed comical stickers for Peeved, and later created collaged cover art for his bands Has Been, Red Stars Theory, and World Gang. He also enjoyed drawing.
Johnny Marr – a former member of both The Smiths and Modest Mouse – detailed Jeremiah’s tirelessly creative spirit in a heartfelt Instagram post. Marr shared his experience accompanying Jeremiah on a 3 a.m. trip to Walmart in which he gathered a hodgepodge of garden supplies, toys, and “things to make things” for various art projects.
“One morning I went into his room and noticed something unusual,” Marr wrote. “All the furniture had been sprayed gold…the rugs, the lampshades…everything. Everything was sprayed gold. Jeremiah lived in his own lane. His own beautiful lane.” In a separate post, Marr also described Jeremiah as “the most creative musician [he] ever met.”
Most may not realize that Jeremiah played many instruments besides the drums. “He was capable of pretty much picking up anything,” McCollough explained. Indeed, liner notes for his various releases credit him with contributing sounds from a long list of eclectic instruments, including the djembe, flute, kalimba, death whistle, cello, Korg, harp, cigar box guitar, and vibes. He also provided backing vocals for many songs.
At an early age, Jeremiah developed another passion in addition to music. “He absolutely adored photography,” McCollough recalled. “He would find broken cameras at thrift stores and would use the light leak as a creative feature. He would also buy the old Polaroid cameras – the ones where you had to put the film in the back and wait for it to develop in the sun. It took a while and was generally never the clearest picture, it was kind screwed up looking. But he loved the way that looked. He was constantly exploring with photography.”
Taking pictures remained a lifelong hobby for Jeremiah. Touring facilitated his access to unique subjects, which ranged from nature’s beauty to bizarre examples of symmetry to comical juxtapositions. He was even known to wear a camera on stage and snap photos mid-show. Some of his visual arts talents are showcased on his Instagram account, @sluglife.
In the days since Jeremiah’s passing, countless people have come forward with memories of his serene aura, many artistic endeavors, quirky and sometimes dark sense of humor, love of magic mushrooms and cannabis, penchant for playing disorienting half-speed versions of “Beat It” while DJing, and, above all, his compassion.
“For the people he cared about, he would do most anything,” McCollough asserted. “He was that kind of person. People gravitated to him because he was so nice. I don’t think I ever heard a prejudiced word come out of his mouth ever. He was probably one of the most accepting and supporting people I ever knew.”
Speaking about his legacy, just about everyone in Jeremiah’s life – no matter how different from one another – agrees on what he was all about: love.
“He almost had like a Rastafarian spin on the world, like he just wanted everyone to love each other and no one to be fighting,” Adam mused. “He really loved animals. And human beings, no matter how shitty they could be. There’s not a single person that he hated. It just didn’t exist in his blood or his body or his mind. So, next time you think about punching someone, maybe don’t in his honor.”
“He had a great life in spite of a lot of things that could have dragged anyone down,” McCollough explained. “He was totally about love. He wanted to be good to the people around him. He didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings ever, he really hated that. He broke the cycle.”
In a post on the Modest Mouse Instagram account announcing his passing, Isaac Brock – Jeremiah’s friend and bandmate of 30 years – wrote: “Please appreciate all the love you give, get, have given, and will get. Above all, Jeremiah was about love.”
Though he was only 45 years old when he passed, Jeremiah was wise beyond his years. When not on tour, he enjoyed living in remote Port Townsend – an eccentric, laid-back western Washington town – with his wife, son, and various creatures. “I more just kind of roll with life rather than fight against it. ‘Shit happens,’” he said with a gentle laugh on a 2017 episode of “The Trap Set with Joe Wong” podcast, adding, “I like that saying. You can’t get too worked up about stuff because it just makes it worse.”
At the time, he was processing becoming a father for the first time. “I’m probably more equipped to relate to a child than most adults,” he admitted. “I feel like I am kind of still a child in many ways. I’ve grown up but I also have not grown up…I like to space out and play.” When Wong asked for Jeremiah’s parting thoughts, he simply said, “Don’t worry, be happy.”
Perhaps intentionally, Jeremiah Green went out in a blaze of glory. He played nine dates of Modest Mouse’s 25th-anniversary tour for The Lonesome Crowded West – an album that features what most consider his strongest work – in late 2022, despite suffering from stage 4 cancer. In the wake of his sudden and devastating loss, we are left with hours upon hours of the beautiful music he created as well as many photographs that offer timeless glimpses into his remarkably unique view of the world.
“I have one of these beliefs – I think it’s an Ancient Egyptian thing – that you’re not really dead until the last person speaks your name,” Adam confided. “I believe that he’s gonna be alive for centuries, Jeremiah, because people are going to listen to Modest Mouse just like we might listen to Beethoven now. His name will be talked about for a long, long, long, long time. So, he’s still alive until the very last person.”
Slug Life is forever.
To listen to a curated collection of songs from Jeremiah Green’s various projects, check out my playlist here.
In addition, some of his solo songs can be found here and World Gang’s complete SoundCloud catalog can be found here.
You can also enjoy the podcasts and magazine interview mentioned in this article in full at the links below:
Modern Drummer Magazine (2015)
“The Trap Set with Joe Wong” Podcast (2017)
“Never Meet Your Idols” Podcast (2020)
For more, listen to an archived version of DJ Marco Collins and Adam Green’s January 2, 2023, tribute to Jeremiah Green on KEXP here.
Lastly, if you would like to support Jeremiah’s wife and son during this difficult time, consider contributing to this GoFundMe organized by Modest Mouse’s tour manager, Robin Laananen, here.
