Bob Mould says he has lightened up. In fact, he emphatically insists upon it.
After nearly three decades of hearing Mould play frosty, downtrodden, bitter-pill music — going back to the Reagan-era angst and aggression of his fabled band Husker Du — fans probably aren’t expecting or even hoping to find any humor on his latest album, “District Line.” But he’s not lying — it is there.
It’s there in the jangly, midtempo rocker “Who Needs to Dream?” when he sings, “The shape shifting, weightlifting/Hope the presentation will catch his eye” (likely a self-deprecating line about his own recently slimmed-down build). And, as he points out, it’s right away in the opening track, “Stupid Now,” which includes the line, “Haven’t I been enough of a fool for you?”
“‘Stupid Now’ is just a hilarious track to start the record with,” he said. “I was hoping people would suddenly realize it’s not a downer at all.”
Humor aside, “Stupid Now” is one of many songs on “District Line” that should immediately sound familiar to fans of his best-known solo work and especially his ’90s albums with Sugar.
“It’s strictly a guitar-composition record. That really makes it a lot more familiar and comfortable right off the bat,” Mould said.
“District Line” is one in a series of unique record deals that essentially licenses the album to a record company for a limited time, in this case Anti-Records. But Mould owns the master recordings. It’s a deal he insists upon after well-documented problems getting paid by SST Records, the fabled punk label that was home to Husker Du’s early albums.
Talk of the band’s SST catalog being recaptured and reissued has gone nowhere, thanks to ever-prevalent non-communication between Mould and ex-bandmates Grant Hart and Greg Norton. This past January marked the 20th anniversary of the band’s split. Mould commemorated the occasion by proudly posting a copy of his original, lawyer-penned resignation letter on his Boblog.
“Like a lot of great decisions, that’s one that should have been made sooner than it was,” he said.
Mould doesn’t discount his years in the Huskers, though. In fact, his 2005 return-to-rock tour was the first time he played his old songs with a band since the ’80s. His tour that hits Chicago on Friday features a similar game plan and band.
“It wasn’t the scenario that I imagined,” he said, “which was that I’d be playing those songs and they would take me back to the time and places where they were written. That didn’t happen. It was actually really fun.”
