Bob Mould preview
Though it hasn’t quite been 20 years since Bob Mould departed Hüsker Dü and made his solo debut, he has certainly been away from his past long enough to be mentioned without the modifier. Why do we do it? Because there are bound to be surprises during these half-electric, half-acoustic shows hopefully drawing on the whole of his career.
Mould’s last album, Body Of Song, was originally going to be an attempt to cap a trilogy (complementing Modulate and Loudbomb), but actually ended like a career sampler, boasting the power pop of his days in Sugar, the electronic laboratory of Modulate, and the singer-songwriter who brought Workbook. That this tour could touch on all only speaks to reason.
Mould told our David C. Eldredge in August, “You know, it’s funny! I saw Garbage a couple of months ago. And they didn’t have any amps. They used tracks. They played a click. You know, the show is very synchronized, very sequenced, very exact. I did that three years ago with those damn films. And I’ve been doing that. But now this will be the, uh, just the very visceral presentation of those refined ideas . . . Pretty much the tempo is going to be how the drummer counts it off!
“You know, I am what I am. With Modulate, I was determined to get as far away from myself as possible and,” he pauses a bit in somewhat painful recognition, “with mixed results. So I had to write around this record a couple times to get it to where it felt comfortable. And ’04 was a good year; ’04 gave me some good songs. And I knew, I knew by about July of ’04 that I had the record. I knew I was missing a couple of key pieces. I knew I was missing a closer [“Beating Heart The Prize”] and I knew I was missing, you know, a real machine-gun puncher-pop song that “Best Thing” was. And those were the two that finished the deal. And then it was a record.”
“Think about [Sugar‘s] Copper Blue, how that record went one-two-three-four-five? That’s what this is. You know, I just said, ‘O.K. people liked that. People like when there’s like five strong ones in a row. Why don’t I do that again?’ And you know the trick is — the part when I’m shuffling and I’m pulling songs out [and] extracting — you know, there were 14 on the album at one point. And I had to drag a couple out because conceptually, thematically, they weren’t working for me. One was not a relationship song — it was about urban development, which really wouldn’t have fit with this record ’cause these are all love songs.”
— Steve Forstneger
Click here to download “Paralyzed.”
Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly
