Bob Mould: My Life in 15 Songs

Hüsker Dü had been around for about two years, and Land Speed Record was recorded in August of 1981 at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis. We'd just finished the first national tour we'd ever done, and this was a pretty amazing homecoming gig. The first set was completely crazy. We were showing Minneapolis what we'd seen in those three months [on tour]. In Minneapolis, the hardcore scene was good-natured, nice hardcore. In Northern California, there were less rules and the drugs were harder.

"Guns at My School" was one of those little hardcore gems I probably wrote in two and a half minutes. The particular inspiration, I can't recall, but it could have been somewhere on the road in San Francisco or Vancouver or Seattle, and maybe I saw something on the local news after a school shooting — which in 1981 would have been very, very rare as opposed to now. It's one of those crazy blind-rage hardcore songs I could write every half hour at age 20 if I needed to.

Title song of a fine little record that was made in two evenings. Such a prolific band at that time. Creation was happening all the time. Lots of ideas and trying to push things forward. During that time I was writing, writing, writing. This song wasn't a reflection of a specific event. It was just one of those "keep writing" songs. It seems simple to me when I look back on the words: Keep hammering the title, keep hammering the title.

Musically, it was very, very catchy but also very complicated chordally. Some of those chord changes were pretty far beyond anything I'd written before. When I hold it up against the other songs on the record, it really stands out. In a way, that song — a sunny melody with a darker lyric — is something I do to this day. I should probably think about revisiting that one on this tour. It's more complicated than some of the songs I'm writing at the moment!

I don't remember what fanzine it was, but if you go back to [1983's] Metal Circus, I said, "The next record will be even bigger. Something nobody in hardcore has ever done before." I said that not knowing what the fuck I was saying or what we were doing. Then you say it, and it just happens. There were no board meetings or PowerPoint presentations for Zen Arcade. It's just shit you do: "Oh, let's make a concept record! Let's create some fictional characters and have an arc." It's a less structured version of a Broadway musical.

Zen Arcade was pretty bold. I was tired of all the fucking rules everyone made. I said, "I'm going to go over there with my Byrds and H.P. Lovecraft albums," which I was finding at Goodwill stores at the time. As personal and autobiographical as people like to make Zen Arcade out to be, there was also a lot of playful psychedelic gibberish on there that gives it color and texture that was not in a lot of people's music in 1983 when we recorded it.

By this time we're years deeper into our journey. Touring all over the U.S., constantly. Down to Texas and Oklahoma and getting a deep sense of American regionalism. Being on the road with open long stretches from Phoenix to Austin or something, I would look out a window and see these big buses coming by. And instead of a city bus with a destination on top, it would say "Chartered Trip." I said, "Oh, that's a bus full of I don't know who, but they're going somewhere together on this journey and it has nothing to do with the journey I'm on. I wonder if it's more fantastic than in this van, and where do they stop to eat?" Simple stuff.

Hüsker Dü flew under the radar until Zen Arcade, and all of a sudden we were way up on the radar, and people would say, "Wow, this amazing piece of work — how will they beat this?" That's a great problem to have, but it does create a different kind of self-awareness. For me, it was: Do I keep doing the same thing that people like? Do I challenge myself? Do I go off the grid? You get a little more self-conscious.

Zen Arcade was our coming-of-age record: "OK, I'm an adult now." With New Day Rising, with "Celebrated Summer" and "I Apologize," I was coming to the end of my drinking time and was realizing I wasn't the easiest person to be around at times. I could be a fully functioning yet contrary alcoholic at 23 or 24. So songs like "I Apologize" are clearly me feeling like a bad young man, like I should apologize globally for something I probably did but was not fully aware of because I was drunk a lot. "I Apologize" is a very simple, domestic apology about not taking out the trash and being a little rage-y when I drank. I sang, "I said I'm sorry, said I'm sorry," and it's not so hard to sing it every night. It was the best I could do at the time.

Flip Your Wig was my favorite record from that band. It was the best times, the best camaraderie. The songwriting was at an all-time high. No outside producer. It was named after a Beatles board game! [Laughs] People speculate it would have been much bigger if it had been on Warner Brothers [instead of SST, the band's earlier label], since it was more pop than Candy Apple Grey.

"Makes No Sense at All" sums up all the aspirations I had as a songwriter at that point in my life: "How do I continue mining this somewhat pessimistic outlook on life? How bright is the color of the ribbon that wraps this fabulous wrapping paper around this beautifully dark package? How far can I take this thing?"

It's a super simple song, and I play it every night still. It's one of those handful of songs in my catalog that has so far stood the test of time, and I never get tired of paying it. People in the crowd never get tired of singing it back to me. What a cool song. It's fucking weird to say that about my own stuff, but there are a few where I say, "Wow, I like that one!"

The lyrics are very literal. It's a very clear picture of a family and mortality in its different forms — family who pass away and how one handles it when it happens. My parents didn't even mention my grandfather's passing to me for months, for whatever reason. Presumably it would upset me.

I play this song almost every night, and it's completely different now that all the characters have passed. Not too often do people have to change the tense of a song. So every night I play that song, I have to pause as the third verse goes by, because there's no longer a question of what will I do when my parents die. It's such a volatile little piece of information to me each night. It takes on all these different shapes when we play it live. Sometimes I play it dead quiet, sometimes it's insane fireworks, some nights it's a dirge.

I was clearly feeling some kind of pain somewhere to come up with an idea like an entire bed of nails as opposed to a few nails and pieces of wood — I was obviously amplifying some kind of suffering. I had quit drinking, but it would be fair to say the song was a reflection on the end times for the band. It's also definitely a harbinger of end times with my primary personal relationship at the time. I doubt I wrote it with any hopes of reconciliation! Isn't it funny how we can laugh about that now? "Oh, my God, how bleak was that?" [Musically] there's a bit of Neil Young in that song — no hiding that.

The split [in Hüsker Dü] had already happened in its own way. The only time everyone was in the room together for that album was to approve mixes for songs. Grant [Hart] and I would come and go, and [engineer] Steve [Fjelstad] was trying to paste it all together. So, no particularly bright memories. The most memorable, positive one is staging the landscape for the cover and how Grant was enjoying painting all the pillars with a flashlight and floodlights. It made for a great album cover. That's the happiest memory of that record I can recall.

This just fell out of the sky. Coming out of the breakup of Hüsker Dü and a year on the farm [in Pine City, north of Minneapolis], writing nonstop mostly by myself, that was one of the brighter moments of that writing process. I don't know if it was inspired by a sunny day or one of the chickens on the farm. But what an optimistic song given how isolated I was and how shocking life after Hüsker Dü was for me. I was living a singular, solitary existence. I wouldn't say my relationship at the time was hopeless, but it was pretty far out of reach that anything positive would come. So I'm seeing a little light. Not a ton! [Laughs] Just a glimpse of hope.

A positive chord structure, and the chorus is so up, so jangly and bright. I was messing around with alternate tunings. A bright moment on an otherwise fairly overcast record.

I remember making that video. Such a beautiful song and such a cheesy and expensive video. No offense to the filmmakers, but my God. It was like, "Wardrobe, what's that?" "Hair stylist? What?" "That'll be $5,000!"

Black Sheets of Rain is a very dark record, one of the darkest I've ever made. I was right on the edge of the end of my first long-term relationship. Life is not always a party, and all parties come to an end at some point. I guess the sentiment "Stop your crying" was not that I shed literal tears over the end of that relationship. I didn't sit around crying for weeks on end. It was all over, and I jumped in a car and moved to Hoboken. I didn't miss out on a whole lot of life when the relationship was over. It was about moving on. This is a strong and personal song, and a really fun song to play. I like the cadence. It's like a hilarious funeral march party, where everything is over and you're sort of laughing in a way.

With Sugar, I went from a three-piece to a three-piece to another three-piece. But it didn't feel like Hüsker Dü, and it didn't feel like Anton [Fier] and Tony [Maimone, his rhythm section on Workbook]. Anton and Tony were world-class players, and I felt like that's what they wanted. It cost me a lot. Sugar was back to a more economical approach to things, to get back to working with a bass player and drummer who were good with sleeping bags on the floor and touring around. Sugar showed me it was OK to call it a band, even though I was the principal writer.

I brought Dave [Barbe] and Malcolm [Travis] this stack of 30 songs, and at those sessions we did Copper Blue, and then we came up with this suite of songs that was much heavier and much more self-flagellating. A very self-destructive motif as opposed to Copper Blue, which was pessimistic with shards of brightness. Beaster was definitely darker, like in "JC Auto" — Jesus Christ autobiography. File under: "Listen to this if you like 'Bed of Nails'!" It's definitely autobiographical. It touches back on a lot of the less restrained, more self-destructive part of my life. But it's a killer riff. It kills and never lets up.

This was the beginning of me feeling, "Shit, man, this thing is getting tired." In the wake of "Teen Spirit," what happened? It was pretty much subpar variations on the same theme. I will spare anybody the names, but all you have to do is take a look at modern rock in 1995 and you can guess. It was like, "Fuck!" One band got it so right that the whole world changed, and in four years, everyone flogged it to death. In '95, when I wrote this song, there were a lot of bands where I thought, "I fucking hate this band and wish they would go away." The original title was, "I Hate Fucking Alternative Rock and Wish It Would Go Away." It was a little long, so I shortened it.

The "hubcap" album was such a fun record for me because I was enjoying people like Sebadoh who were following their muse without any regard to commercial success, making records at home and incorporating any kind of loose idea on tape and sticking it into a song. Having a little bit of fun was the consolation for that record for me. I don't think the record sounds like Sebadoh or Folk Implosion or Guided By Voices, but that's what was keeping me excited about music in the otherwise bland, flat, colorless landscape of modern rock. I hate to be so damning, but I was sick and tired of it. To name my next album The Last Dog and Pony Show was telling everyone I'm walking away from this thing. So this song sets the theme for what's to come.

I'd had a great time in Austin [where Mould moved in the mid Nineties], but it was time to go back to New York. I went back in the late Nineties and embraced my gay life. Electronic music was the soundtrack to that new life. The first time out with [2002's] Modulate, I was a little naive, a little underwhelming. I didn't know what I was doing. But that didn't discourage me. I was just learning how to make electronic music. In 2003, when I moved to D.C., I went deeper into electronic music. I got to be a good DJ and met thousands of great folks. It was a completely different universe, and it was at times more important than my guitar gig. I understand it's not guitar, so people have a problem with it. I get it. But no instruments and DJs, 1,200 people dancing their ass off all night — that's an amazing sight, and to be the conductor of that party is pretty damn cool.

"Paralyzed" touches on the end of my second relationship, my 14-year relationship with a fellow. Body of Song was meant to be the third album in the trilogy with Modulate and the LoudBomb project. What I like about Body of Song is that not only was it back to the guitar, but I carried on my fascination with electronica and tinkering with extra colors in songs. Putting a lot of bells and whistles underneath to express my interest in progressive house.

One of my favorite songs I've put together. I started it on keyboard and moved to the guitar to finish it up with a lot of synthesizer. Lyrically, it's not the most personal song. It doesn't hold a lot of super meaning inside the words. But every time I hear it or think about it, it resonates a whole lot deeper than some of the other songs we've touched upon.

I was living in D.C. at the time, and I had a routine every week. Every Thursday, I would meet up with my friends and we would go out. Before I went out, that was the song I would put on — the song where you go get ready to be fabulous. It's like that scene in Hedwig, with the wig in a box. I'd put on "Shelter Me" and listen to it and say, "I want to go out and have fun with my friends. I'm trimming the beard and getting ready to go out and have a good time." It's about one of those moments in my personal life. Not enough distorted guitar? I don't know. I don't care. It gave me a "get out and have fun" thing.

I had started my book in the fall 2008 and it came out in 2011. It was a crazy time for me. I was doing readings, and there was a crazy amount of love coming at me from all directions. A period of reflection had begun with [2009's] Life and Times. A lot of looking back. It was in the same mindset as on Workbook. There was a lot of reflection in 1988, and now it was 20 years later. I forced it a little bit in hindsight, but it wasn't a coincidence that it was 20 years.

Silver Age came together very quickly with a lot of love and energy. But it didn't stop me from being defiant in "Silver Age" or "Star Machine." Being grateful to make another record, but still being a smart-ass. "Silver Age" [in which Mould sings, "Stupid little kid wanna hate my game/I don't need a spot in your hall of fame"] is about any hall of fame, any kind of legendary-status thing. There are plenty of people in front of me in line for that. It was making fun of myself and poking a bit of fun at a process of, "Who are we to decide these things?" It's a real fuck-you song, a sort of, "Fuck all of it, whatever!" You think, life is short and I can't worry about things I can't affect, whether it's a hall of fame or any stuff like that.

Living in San Francisco right now is like living on some indistinct precipice. It's fucking insane. California's always been a gold rush, but now it's data mining instead of gold mining. It could fall apart at any time. In the past, there have been earthquakes, and things can change very quickly when something like that happens. Relationships can start and end at any given point. There are days when my mind wanders into places where, "What happens if it does fall apart, so to speak? What if everything collapses?" And I also like the idea that people walk around and say, "Oh, it's the Internet of things." This whole new protocol — smartphones and stuff like that. And I thought, "How about the end of things?"

It's a really cool song, and it's got the space between verses so I can get off the microphone for two and a half seconds when we play live and stretch my legs a bit and jump around. And much like "Makes No Sense at All" or "Everything Falls Apart," when I'm singing, "It's the end of things, the end of everything," you can't beat that for darkness. But I can't make it much catchier than the way I sing it. It's the current epitome of the contrast I use in my work. It's the brightest chorus with the darkest title. Of course!