Any surprise by the change for the listener is deserted once Brock returns to the prior sets of arpeggios, closing on a repeated lyrical line, “ Everyone’s afraid of their own lives / If you could be anything, you’d be disappointed, am I right?” On any other album, such a serrate of material might feel disjointed, immature, and even reckless but on The Moon & Antarctica, Modest Mouse have actually been pulling off this sort of mischief in the twelve tracks leading up to this song, even going on further to effectively carry such a unified division of material to its very end on the tumultuous final fifteenth cut, “What People Are Made Of”. But what would appear to be two disparate pieces, shamelessly thrown on top of each other, actually collect and flow seamlessly as one song. There’s a point in “Lives” in which Isaac Brock and his two cohorts trade twanged acoustic arpeggios and defeatism-sore lyrics for the entrance of quite an unexpected, uplifting, jubilant acoustic chord progression, on top of which Brock philosophizes, “ It’s hard to remember, it’s hard to remember to live before you die,” and following to end by seemingly adding more questions than he answers with a defeated, “ My hell comes from the inside, comes from the inside / Why fight this?” The change in the song’s structure is certainly abrupt and a little jarring.