the background singer is James Mercer from The Shins. =] great song. new album's pretty darn amazing!

i think he is being extremely sarcastic, saying that we have an explanation for everything, know how everything works, how the world turns etc etc. so he is saying that since we "know everything" there is nothing left to learn so we might as well push our car into the sea or pass out drunk in a car.... i see this as a very sarcastic song saying basically, yeah well, "science is shit". (props to tenserock on the quote)

I am a huge Modest Mouse fan and Brock's lyrics have always shown the meaningless he sees with everything. In the song "The View" from Good News a verse goes:

"For every invention made how much time did we save? We're not much farther than we were in the cave."

The irony is that somebody who sees so much meaningless in the world vests so much time and energy describing that meaningless. Over the last few years Brock has come to express this irony through sarcasm in his music. That sarcasm shines through in this song.

Before General Relativity, Newton's laws of Gravity were seen as definite yet had holes. 80 years ago Einstien declared light speed a constant yet today there are Scientists that debate that. There is debate about dark energy and whether or not it is real. Point is even within Science there are different schools of thought and everybody thinks that their thinking is correct.

We look at our ipods and miniture cell phones of today and picture how in the near future they will be smaller with more memory, yet we still haven't even returned to the moon. There are all sorts of futurists proposing how the future is going to look however most past futurists were wrong and those who were right were for the most part lucky.

Yet Brock mocks complacency and it's stupid to stop trying. The point is well....there is no point which is what the point of this song is, if that makes any sense! =P

In my opinion this song is about how people have to know everything. That is the reason for religion (science to some people). maybe some things weren't meant to be known by man. Humans try to find all the answers for everything in the universe. Modest mouse isn't just a band to me. Issac writes more than lyrics, he writes rules to live by for the people who have nothing else. Who says its just music? Its changed my life forever. Peace

cool song, who sings in the back?

I don't know but it pretty much makes the song. This and Parting the Sensory are my favorites on the new cd.

I don't know where you heard the we were'nt that lucky and one correction is "pushed it over the edge we could have all been not be" ps its receded not receaded

Anyways this is a great song and it talks about how many people think we know everything and that we really don't but we make ourselves so we aren't scared or confused. The thing i don't get is anyone in science knows that we don't know anything so i don't see why he is bashing science. Voltaire once said once you realize that we don't know anything you can start to learn. Thats not a qoute just the jist of it. GREAT SONG!

I love it so much!!

I couldn't really understand all the backing vocals that Isaac does so I just omitted them all. If you can decipher them, just let me know. Plus I didn't feel like doing the other backround vocals and writing We've ... Everything over and over.

You mean all the screaming after the calm part? Because I wanted to know what he screams. :'(