Reading the tea leaves, plugging in your guitar, appreciating your legacy without revisiting it
LIKE so many, national arts reporter Geoff Edgers has been grounded by the coronavirus. So he decided to launch an Instagram Live show from his barn in Concord, Mass.
Every Friday afternoon, Edgers hosts an hour-long interview show he calls “Stuck With Geoff.” So far, that has included musician David Byrne, actress Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Nye “The Science Guy.”
Recently, Edgers chatted with musician Bob Mould. Here are excerpts from their conversation.
Q: When we started this show, we were listening to your song “American Crisis” on your new album, “Blue Hearts.” It feels like you wrote it last week, but I know you didn’t.
A: “American Crisis”was written in 2013 when I was living in Berlin. It was one of those songs where I just started writing and five minutes later, I had all these words and was like, “Oh, that’s good enough.” You know, it was written to be on the previous album, “Sunshine Rock,” a happy record. But “American Crisis” didn’t really fit. So I put it in my back pocket and it’s out there, smoldering, smoldering. And around a year ago, I started to get this feeling of deja vu that we can dig in a little bit deeper about how the third year of Trump was feeling a lot like the third year of Reagan. And “American Crisis” speaks about what the 1980s were like to me as a young gay man.
Then the song was supposed to drop on June 1 this year, but my publicist said, “Oh, my gosh, they’re going to announce record store day on June 1. Why don’t we move it to June 3?” I thought, “Yeah, whatever. Two days. No problem.” And of course, June 1 was Donald Trump’s Bible walk. And this is after Breonna Taylor and after George Floyd.
Q: That’s amazing that you can write a song about any moment and suddenly it’s applicable to the moment that just occurred.
A: The tea leaves. It’s the Magic Eight Ball. As journalists, as writers, as artists, you just write what you know, you take in the world around you. A lot of topics are timeless. How did that song happen? I guess the short answer is it’s about the 1980s. It’s about me, as a 17-year-old kid growing up in a farm town in northern New York state where there were no people of color. Everybody was the same. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity. I was very lucky to get an underprivileged scholarship to go to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Immediately, it was a whole new world of many races and creeds and cultures and identities. And I had to get up to speed real fast. I got in a band. I was gay.
Q: Does it bother you when a record comes out and someone writes, “It’s his most Husker Du-like album since 1986.” Do you shy away from sounding like your former band?
A: I think the biggest break was 1988 when I left Husker
Du. And for the year and a half following that, between leaving Husker Du and releasing “Workbook,” my first solo album, I made a real conscious effort not to be that guy. Like, why would I leave a band as well-known and revered as Husker Du just to have another record that sounds just like it?
Q: You went to a farmhouse in Minnesota to reinvent yourself. And then we got “Workbook.” What was going on there?
A: It was just not denying my own natural language as a musician. I started working a lot with keyboards. There were hours and hours of orchestral music that I was trying to write. Then I started listening to a lot of world music. I had a friend who worked at Nonesuch and they sent me boxes of all this Celtic music and Appalachian bluegrass, and that started to shape the way I was looking at my writing. I was writing a lot of short stories and poetry, and the way I was folding words and music together was completely different than anything I had done before.
Q: Were you ever offered huge chunks of money to put Husker Du together again?
A: There were one or two occasions where people made nice gestures to try to get the band back together. But why would anybody in their right mind take a chance in changing that band’s legacy by doing something that looks less than what people remember?