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Modest Mouse changed everything for Kaley Puckett. 

When the Renton resident saw the band perform at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre when they were 15, they were already a dedicated musician honing their craft through jazz band and after-school piano lessons. But at this show, music started looking less like merely a creative outlet than something worthy of pursuit in the long-term. They hadn’t yet experimented with drugs and alcohol, Puckett said, but their tranced response to the concert was, from an adult’s vantage, comparable. Eyeing other audience members, Puckett noticed that that reaction wasn’t the exception but the rule.

“I realized, like, oh wow, Modest Mouse on stage is the thing getting us all into the same brainwave,” Puckett, who uses she/they pronouns, said. “I remember being in the band room the next day and being, like, ‘actually, I don’t think I can be a marine biologist. I actually need to do this — I actually need to be a musician.’”

Read the full feature on 425.