Leaving is an American tradition. Like baseball and truck stops, the unexplained early-morning departure—preferably performed in worn denim and a day-old beard—is a solemn celebration of all that is restless, noble, and probably pointless. We dream of waking with the sun, leaving short but heartfelt notes for those who dress the windows of our perpetually romantic landscape-artist lives, and rattling closed-mouthed out of town—but we don’t actually do it much, and when we do it’s in smaller, less obviously cinematic ways: we usually have an embarassingly practical idea of where we’re going, and a few more neatly packed suitcases than we’d be comfortable showing Jack Kerouac. Which is why it can be nice, while we’re driving our relentlessly preplanned route in our disgustingly functional cars, to put something on the stereo that’ll make us feel more spontaneous.

Bob Dylan’s loping masterpiece “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is, like a lot of the really good Dylan songs that don’t show up in health-care ads or Vietnam movies, buried halfway through a mediocre album: 1978’s “Street Legal”, a haze of weirdly thin vocals, shambling, overstuffed song structures, and hyperactive platoons of backup singers belting out Dylan’s lyrics like chorus girls in a posthumous tribute musical. With “Señor,” however, Dylan slows down, tightens up, and trims the gargantuan folds of newfound fat from his music. Spare and momentous, the song evokes endless travel with an aching confusion that turns gently but inexorably to majestic portent, a change foreshadowed in the first line: “Can you tell me where we’re heading? / Lincoln County Road or Armageddon? / Seems like I been down this way before…” The imagery and deceptively specific Americana references are as thick here as in anything Dylan had written since he was subsisting entirely on acid in the mid-60s, but the song never gets cluttered; it just builds, takes its time, clatters down ancient railroad tracks and past brief flashes of lyrical illumination—painted wagons, gypsies with flashing rings, trainloads of fools bogged down in magnetic fields—until Dylan, having made ready for yet another unavoidable departure, concludes the penultimate verse with the weary intonation “I’m ready when you are, Señor”. It’s one of the best-delivered lines in the man’s canon, but it gets nudged down a spot when the last verse rolls around and the arid majesty of the music joins with a sudden, unfailingly hair-raising wail: “Let’s overturn these tables / Disconnect these cables / This place don’t make sense to me no more! / Can you tell me what we’re waiting for, Señor?” It’s stark, weary poetry, and it’s fantastic.

Modest Mouse’s chaotic seven-minute semi-jam “Other People’s Lives” is as different from “Señor”’s desert-dry rattle as you can get, and Isaac Brock’s paranoid histrionics, sounding like he’s afraid the music might swallow him whole, are nothing like Dylan’s ancient, wandering pronouncements. But the trailer-park-born Brock’s nervous, Day-Glo poetry comes from the same place as Dylan’s, however polluted that place might now be with discarded styrofoam and fast-food wrappers. Built around a gasping two-note pulse of guitar, “Other People’s Lives” opens with the kind of pithy mantra that bookends a lot of Modest Mouse’s more lyrically hyperactive songs: “Other people’s lives seem more interesting ’cause they ain’t mine”. It’s an overture for the narrative, which really begins with Brock’s declaration that “I’m fed up and I need to go / Out of existence, or just down the road forever” and cuts, immediately, to “later that night by the side of the road / I’m out of gas and I should have known better”. It would be difficult to essay restless bravado’s frequent failure more succinctly or wryly than this. Brock’s verse is scattershot and disjointed, and the band plays shrinking circles around the melody, converging on an unintelligible section of multitracked mumbling from which, as we strain, an escalating chant emerges: “on the road / goin’ down / out of gas / out of road / out of car / out of everything at last”—a spare, pitch-perfect evocation of American Zen that Brock and company spun out from a less memorable song on 1997’s “The Lonesome Crowded West”. It was worth reusing.

Dylan and Brock are very different songwriters, and the bands playing on “Señor” and “Other People’s Lives” are very different bands. But the songs share a sense of forward motion—more, of COMPULSIVE forward motion, of an inexorable restlessness that, met with reluctance in Dylan’s song or petty disaster in Brock’s, cannot but overwhelm its hosts. Both singers understand and narrate American departure, and even if the Baby Boomers’ poet laureate and the aggressive frontman of “The O.C.”’s second-biggest success story don’t meet that often, when they do it’s after leaving a place that don’t make sense no more, it’s with the harsh comfort of knowing you’re out of everything at last, and it’s absolutely sublime.

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