Working on an article for another publication, I got the opportunity to interview Bob Mould. I've been a fan of his for nearly half my life, starting out with Sugar and then working backwards into Husker Du and forwards into his solo material.

The article turned out to be one of the easiest things I've ever written, but space constraints kept me from being able to include several interesting things Mould had to say. Here is the transcript of the entire interview, which ranged far and wide over his past, the state of the music industry, and what makes a good guitarist.

It's worth noting, too, that the subsequent show in Minneapolis was easily the most energetic Mould performance I've ever seen.

KP: Hi, Bob.

BM: How're you doing?

KP: Good. It's an honor to be able to talk to you.

BM: Thanks! I'm glad we could make this work. If you hear road noise, it's because I'm driving.

KP: Looking at your tour schedule, it looks like you guys just got back into the US.

BM: Yeah, we just got done with Europe. We're actually heading to Chapel Hill today to start up the US tour.

KP: How was Europe?

BM: Europe was great. It went really well. We were over there for a couple of weeks, for the first eight shows of the season. It went really well. We played a festival in Dublin to start, and then went on to London, and then on to the continent. It went real well. The band is sounding quite good.

KP: Excellent.

BM: By the time we get to Minneapolis, we should be just about on fire.

KP: Awesome. I was surprised to see on your blog that you're driving from show to show. I figured you'd be--

BM: Why not? We can go 90 miles per hour. It's better than being on a bus. Over the years, I've figured out that this is the easiest way... stay separate from the crew schedule as much as possible, because they tend to have to be there much sooner than the band.

KP: Maybe this will be different in the US than it was in Europe, but what age range have you been seeing in the crowds so far?

BM: What kind of age range? Some young people who are new getting into the stuff, you know, from the name-dropping by other artists-- you know, Green Day or the Foo Fighters or whoever. And then a lot of guys in their thirties or forties, either with their drinking buddies or their girlfriends or wives. Doing that thing.

KP: Do you try to replicate the vocoder effects from the new album live?

BM: No. I have a box that does that, though.

KP: Like the old Peter Frampton talk box thing?

BM: Yeah. It used to be Peter Frampton, until Cher did it. Now it's me.

KP: Every generation's gotta have their vocoder champ.

BM: Yeah, every generations got to get some vocoder.

KP: What songs are turning out to be the crowd-pleasers at the shows?

BM: You'll have to wait and see. You'll have to tell me at the end of the show which ones you thought were the best.

KP: Sounds good.

BM: It touches on all periods. There's Husker stuff, there's solo stuff, there's a lot of Sugar stuff. The focus is on the new record, of course. it's a good show. Everyone I've talked to who's been to the show has been ecstatic. They all have one or two songs they'd liked to have heard, but that's a good problem to have if I can't address all the songs that people would like to hear in a given night.

KP: How long have the sets been?

BM: About an hour and a half.

KP: What it's like for you to come back to the Twin Cities?

BM: It's a blessing and a curse, especially with First Avenue. You know, I helped build the stage in the Seventh Street Entry many years ago. Sort of grew up playing music in there, especially on the big stage as the years went on. It feels like home; and I think with any of us, when we go home, it's a mixed thing.

But it's good. Shows in Minneapolis always seem to turn out well. Sometimes it's a little harder on the guys in my band, they're like “Oh shit.” But I think all of these guys have played on that stage before, so it'll be fine.

KP: Did you have them with you when you played at Taste of Minnesota? I was out of town and missed that show.

BM: No, Taste of Minnesota was a solo electric show. I just flew in with a guitar in a bag and went up and played a lot of the new record solo electric. Which was enjoyable... it was nice that the songs held up like that.

That was a fun show... I've done Taste a couple of times, and it's nice that they always ask me back.

KP: I was bummed to have missed it.

BM: It was good. But I'm sure there'll be more solo shows in the future.

KP: Actually, I wanted to ask you about a solo show of yours I saw in the early 90s... You'd blown your voice out, and--

BM: That's the legendary show, you saw it.

[note: at this show, Mould's voice was shot from an over-the-top performance the night before, and he could barely sing. Hoping to salvage the show, he had another mike set up and started inviting people onstage to sing with him. A couple of people really sucked-- like the frat guy who sang “Hoover Dam” and made sweeping hand gestures to illustrate the points of the song-- but some other people were excellent, like the kid who came up and knocked “Makes No Sense At All” out of the park. Probably not the best show musically, but a cool thing to have seen]

KP: With people coming up onstage...

BM: That was a great show.

KP: It was a wild thing to see.

BM: Someone sent me a tape of that, and it's really funny to listen to. That was a really special night. You were asking me about playing at First Ave... that's the one I always think of first, because it was so hilarious and I was just so lucky it worked out.

KP: Has that ever happened to you any other time?

BM: Not to that degree. I mean, I blow my voice out a lot, because i sing pretty hard. But never like that. That was rough.

KP: You looked like you were in pain up there.

BM: It's like that every day on the road, my friend.

KP: How disruptive is it to be on the road?

BM: Well, the voice thing, it's hard. You know, as I get older, I think my voice is probably getting a little bit weaker with every passing year, and I've done a lot of damage to it. You try to take care of it, and try not to do too much press on the road, and go easy on it. It's a fragile thing, between that and the hearing. Everyone's heads are ringing by the end of the night, so there's another occupational hazard that we all put up with. But whatever. You do what you do.

KP: Let's move over a little bit and talk about Body of Song as an album. How long were these songs gestating?

BM: “High Fidelity” was the oldest song. That's been around since '95. I just never got around to recording it until recently. Some of the stuff was written in 2000, alongside Modulate and Loudbomb; Body of Song was meant to be the third piece of that trilogy. At the end of '02, I didn't feel like I had a solid record's worth of stuff. “High Fidelity” was good, “Gauze of Friendship” was good, “Circles” was good, “Missing You” was good, and there's a couple of songs on the deluxe edition that i thought were good. But I shelved the project for about a year, and in '04 wrote the lion's share of the record that you've heard, about two thirds of it. I spent a lot of '03 just DJing and working a lot with loops and doing bootleg remixes of other stuff, just messing around with a computer. When I picked the guitar back up in '04 and started making guitar loops and mashing that with some of the electronic stuff I had, it started to take shape. And then I got together with Brendan, and breathed a lot of life into it, and made it sound a whole lot better, and different from what I thought. But a great record. It really came together well. A long way to get there, but it's a good record at the end of the day.

KP: When you're putting a record together, do you approach it differently now that everything's about downloading singles and things are moving a little bit away from the concept of an album as a sequenced unit?

BM: No, I try to still look at the album as a large art statement, where you're trying to capture a period in time or tell a series of related stories. I know it's probably pointless to do that, but i like to think that my core audience is of that age where they still value the album and the long form as well. I also recognize that in this day and age, people have an attention span of about twenty seconds when it comes to a pop song... I don't really try to accommodate that mentality. I look at what I like in records, and I do like records that flow start-to-finish, whether it's mine or the new M-83 album. You know, people who put time into making an album sound like a piece of work.

KP: As you were talking, it occurred to me that it's hard to imagine Beaster working without the exact sequencing it's got.

BM: yep, exactly. That's the idea.

KP: Stepping back a little bit from that, do you think that technology, especially recording technology, is affecting the music industry? Do you think there'll be a big shift in the structure of the music industry?

BM: I think if you look around you're already seeing it. Y'know, MySpace has aspirations to be THE record label website. They want to be the record company. They want to be the distributor. they want to be the place that people find out about new music. And you've got iTunes, they want to be the purveyor of music. You've had Amazon for years, they've been the purveyor of online music. So you've got that model, which is taking the traditional record companies out of the game once and for all, with people being able to record music at home.

KP: Do you think this swings some leverage back towards artists?

BM: Well, we're going to be inundated with music. There's probably ten times as much music being made and distributed now. Do I hear ten times as many good songs? Nah. I think it's about the same amount of good music. So what i think we're seeing is a lot of mediocrity, a lot of sub-par music being made. And I think that's great-- I think music is a beautiful thing. It's a form of expression, and it's nice that it's become accessible to everybody. But I think that at the end of the day, there's only going to be so much quality music.

And i think the ways that people find out about it will be completely different two years from now than they are right now, which is really different from the way we found out about things two years ago. Mp3 blogs were maybe just starting out two years ago... it changes so fast, now.

KP: It's tough to keep up with, really.

BM: Yeah, it's a full-time job, trying to keep current with all of the different ways to get people to see and hear your work.

KP: Speaking of blogs... how did you get started with your blog?

BM: It started close to two years ago. I had friends who were doing it, and I'd read their blogs. I thought it was interesting.... At the beginning of '04, i don't know if it was writer's block, or what, but I'd been spending so much time on the computer, I wasn't really working on words a lot, and i saw that as a way to reach out to people, meet people, and share a little bit of what my life is like. That's something I'd never really done much of before, at least not specifically. people could glean through my work what kind of person I was, but that was it... it's been fun. It's a fun thing, I look forward to it every day. Even a lot of my friends are like “Oh, I can just read your blog and know you're ok.” And then, also, because I'm a public person, I guess there are people who read it to find out about my work, and I'm guessing there are people that are stalking me that I haven't met yet.

It's nice to self-publish. That's sort of how I started out the whole thing, putting out my own music. It seems to make sense.

KP: there's also an interesting parallel; most of your songs have a first-person confessional approach where you or a character talking, and that's pretty much the same structure as a blog...

BM: Yeah, the blog is really just me telling stories. The mundane parts of life, the who/where/when questions.

KP: When you were first starting out with Husker Du in St. Paul, did you have any idea that in 25 years you'd still be doing this?

BM: yeah. I did, actually. I mean, really, this is all I do. I have been in music my whole life... I don't think I foresaw in 1979 when i was going to school at Macalester College, I don't think I saw the future as specifically as i do now in the moment, but I sort of had a clue that I was going to be doing this. I didn't know in what form... But I knew. It's my life's work, and I had a passion for it. I've been grateful, and lucky, and fortunate, and all that stuff. It just makes sense.

KP: Did you ever envision that you'd have a stint writing for the WCW?

BM: '99 was an interesting year for me personally. I made a lot of changes in my personal life, and then had a professional change there for seven months where I got to live out a fantasy. I took advantage of that, and then went right back to music. I was lucky.

KP: Given how big the Daily Show has gotten, do you feel pride in contributing the theme song?

BM: Absolutely. Liz Winstead, another Minnesota folk, was one of the two co-creators of the show, and asked me if I had any music kicking around at the time. That was actually a song that would have made the eponymous record had it not been used for the Daily Show. I'm very proud to have been part of that in the early going. It's a nice thing.

KP: Have you heard anything about the Minnesota Historical Society's efforts to collect artifacts and oral histories to document the Twin Cities music scene from the 80s?

BM: I may or may not have heard from them, but nothing's ever come of it. But I'm happy to hear that somebody's doing that, that somebody's keeping track of artifacts and things like that. It's real important. Did you go to the Minnesota Music Awards last night?

KP: No, I couldn't make it.

BM: Somebody else was telling that they'd just happened, and I remember participating in that in 86 or 87. So I'm happy to hear that that's still going on as well.

Because yeah, the music scene is a big part of the Twin Cities' and of Minnesota's history. It had a lot to do with making downtown vital and an important place, well before block E and all that other stuff.

KP: Yeah, it kills me that there's a Hard Rock Cafe sitting right across from the Seventh Street Entry.

BM: It's pretty much a failure, isn't it?

KP: I've heard of crime problems down there....

BM: They should've listened to Steve McClellan. He tried to tell them for years...

KP: I liked it better as a parking lot.

BM: I liked it better as, what was it, the Mann Theater? But you can't stop progress.

KP: One last question: I remember reading a long, long time ago an interview where you said that you felt that your guitar technique was really limited. Do you still feel that way?

BM: yeah, I think so. I mean, I think there's a lot more I could be doing. Maybe at this age, I'm not going to get there, but... I think I'm a better rhythm guitarist than lead guitarist. I've never thought of myself as a great lead player. My analogy has always been that it's like a sports team. I think that one of the unappreciated spots is rhythm guitar. You can always find someone who's flashy and has all kinds of chops, but at the end of the day, a good rhythm guitarist is a hell of a lot better than a flashy lead guitarist. I think that if you go back and look at any of the great bands of the 20th century, you'll probably see that's the case. There's Townsend, although he had to carry the whole share. My technique is so-so... Other people use it a lot, it seems, though, so I guess there's something there.

KP: Somebody likes it.

BM: Yeah, somebody must.

KP: I think that's pretty much it for questions that I had. I've been reading all of the interviews you've been doing, and I'm trying not to duplicate. It seems like the press has been working you pretty hard.

BM: yeah, it's work season. But I'm really grateful that people are still interested. I think that especially for Minneapolis, by the 28th, barring any kind of kooky situation, I think it's going to be a really special show, and should be really fun. I think people will be really happy to hear some of those songs for the first time in many years. The band is tight and we're having fun, and it's a rock show, man, what can I say?

KP: Hope you're having a good time.

BM: I am having a great time.