Modest Mouse switched up their set list each night of their summer tour, never playing the same set twice. With a discography of seven studio albums and two compilation albums, this is easy to do. It also meant that fans who attended both performances near the band’s current hometown got to hear different songs live as well. Modest Mouse recently ended their co-headlining tour with The Flaming Lips at McMenamin’s Edgefield in Troutdale, Ore. They played two nights of shows near their Portland, Ore. home before heading up to Carnation, Wa., for their first headlining festival, Psychic Salamander festival.

Hometown bias might be at play here, but in my opinion Modest Mouse’s set on September 11, their last night of the tour, was the best. Starting from the first song of the night, when Modest Mouse opened with, if I absolutely had to choose, what would be my favorite song: “3rd Planet” from 2000’s The Moon & Antarctica. Part of my surprise at the opening song stemmed from my lack of expectation that they would play much of anything from The Moon & Antarctica, considering they were slated to play that album in full in honor of its 25th anniversary at their upcoming festival that weekend. In reality, the band may have been preparing for the album play through because The Moon & Antarctica had the most songs on their set this night with three in total, the others being “The Stars Are Projectors” and “What People Are Made Of.”

After placating the long-term fans in the audience with “3rd Planet,” Modest Mouse jumped into “Float On,” the catchy feel-good tune that earned them their “mainstream” breakthrough in 2004. While the majority of bands tend to save their most popular hit for last, it felt like a conscious and strategic choice to lead early with this hit. Whether fans in the audience were there for The Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, or were a fan of both, the anthem got the crowd of thousands singing and dancing along. The energy for the evening was set and Modest Mouse followed their hit with some deep cuts, “Never Ending Math Equation” from their 2000 compilation album Something Out Of Nothing and “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine” from their 1997 sophomore album The Lonesome Crowded West.

Modest Mouse also played two currently unreleased songs: one premiered live for the first time earlier this summer, which is presently titled “Dogbed/Sheetrock” on their set lists. The other, “Third Side of the Moon,” they have played live at most of their performances since last summer. I hadn’t listened to any of the previous live recordings of the unreleased songs before the show and each impressed me. “Third Side of The Moon” especially captivated me, with vocalist Isaac Brock’s punchy lines and poignant lyrics that had me crying by the end. The lyrics, rife with grief, seem to be a memorial for Modest Mouse’s original drummer Jeremiah Green, who passed away in 2022. “I still cannot remember if your eyes were green or blue or brown. I wish I’d paid attention to every word you said, but you always spoke in whispers and I ain’t so good at listening,” Brock sings. The song also seems to allude to the death of Brock’s friend and fellow Pacific Northwest indie musician, Sam Jayne of Love As Laughter, when he says “a few weeks later they found you frozen in your car.”

After “Third Side of The Moon,” I thought surely Modest Mouse had hit their emotional bandwidth for the evening, and I couldn’t shed any more tears, but the band proved that wrong when they closed with “Dramamine,” their first hit from their debut album, This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About, and the first song I heard from Modest Mouse as a child that originally got me into the band.

Admittedly, I had come to the show for Modest Mouse. While I’d heard a few songs from The Flaming Lips in the past, they weren’t a band I had ever gotten into or listened to much. Thus, I had no idea what to expect for the co-headliner’s set, but I’ve also learned through my concert photography journey that sometimes that can be the best experience — to be surprised and without expectations. And in the case of The Flaming Lips, that was certainly true. When I first saw that The Flaming Lips would be closing the evening and not Modest Mouse, I thought that was strange, considering this was Modest Mouse’s hometown show. But once I saw the set up and production level for The Flaming Lips set, I understood why. The excitement in the crowd was palpable as the band entered the stage. The crowd was multi-generational — for a band that got its start in the ’80s, I was surprised at the level of excitement from the kids as well. Of course, this would all make sense shortly.

Vocalist Wayne Coyne hadn’t even entered the stage yet, as the rest of the band started with the cinematic instrumental “Sleeping on the Roof” from their 1999 album The Soft Bulletin. This only increased the excitement more, and as soon as Coyne joined, hands raised and cheers rang out in the crowd. The band went into “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots,” and soon after, large inflatable robots popped up on stage behind Coyne. As the band went into part 2 of “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots,” confetti blasted over the crowd and large balloons, also filled with confetti, appeared. The audience jumped and reached for the balloons, and each time one would reach the stage, Coyne tossed it back to the audience. Every so often, one would pop and rain confetti over fans below. Coyne brought out his streamer gun, shooting streamers into the audience and kids at the front of the barricade reached over to try to catch some of the flying streamers.

The confetti, balloons, and inflatables didn’t end after the first few songs, either. When they played “The Golden Path,” The Chemical Brothers song the band collaborated on, Coyne danced on stage with an inflatable sun and inflatable aliens donning silver jackets and matching hair. “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (With All Your Power)” was accompanied by inflatable lips and eyeballs. Before the song, Coyne instructed the audience to sing along, even if you don’t know the lyrics, because all you have to know is “yeah yeah yeah” since it is repeated in the song 75 times.

The confetti-filled balloons magically seemed to multiply during “She Don’t Use Jelly,” the band’s first breakthrough hit from their 1993 album Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, which the band played before finishing their official set with “Do You Realize??” More confetti rained out over the crowd, and an inflatable rainbow arched over Coyne on stage. Regardless of their familiarity with The Flaming Lips, everyone in the crowd was singing along to their number one hit, the words on the brightly colored screen behind the band guiding them along.

The band returned for an encore. With Coyne donning an American flag as a cape, he introduced the first song of the encore, a cover of “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath, and prefaced it with a tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne as well as his brother’s friends who lost their lives in the Vietnam war. “Play this song every day so we never forgot how horrible and stupid wars can be,” he told the audience. After the Black Sabbath cover, the band finished the evening with “Race For The Prize” from The Soft Bulletin. At the end, as confetti filled the air, Coyne victoriously held up balloons that read “Fuck yeah Edgefield” as the audience cheered.

It was in that moment I became a Flaming Lips fan — they had won me over. As I left the venue, I felt jealous of the fans heading to Seattle that weekend , who would get to see two days’ worth of Modest Mouse and The Flaming Lips, and regretted my choice to not make the trip up there. I resolved to myself that I would definitely make it to next year’s Psychic Salamander festival and would not miss any opportunity to see The Flaming Lips again.

Later, after I arrived home from the show and collected the confetti that had piled up on my wheelchair and in my bag, I noticed a detail I had missed earlier during the commotion of The Flaming Lips production — the pink confetti was cut in the shape of robots just like the ones Yoshimi battles, a detail that proves just how much thought and dedication The Flaming Lips puts into their live shows.

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