A lot of people have mistaken Seattle’s Boat for a joke-rock band. Perhaps Crane’s plain-spoken lyrical style and hand-drawn album illustrations—not to mention his charmingly incompetent falsetto and Boat’s bouncy stage persona—don’t help combat the notion. But for all its clever, Malkmus-esque one-liners, Setting the Paces is a bit of a heartbreaker. It’s a diatribe against the aging process, a foe that can’t possibly be beaten. “Everyone I know who is my age is not real excited about hitting 30,” Crane writes via email. Not that it’s all bad. “I bought a house, got a new teaching job, moved to a new town [Tacoma]…I guess I am really happy.