Bob Mould recently returned to Australia after an hiatus of eleven years. Mould built his reputation with such seminal bands as Sugar and Hüsker Dü. On tour to promote his solo album Silver Age, TOM tracked down industry legend, and massive Mould fan, Graham Ashton, and asked him to do the honors and chat to Mould about his work. Here are the results.

Graham: Hello Bob, how are you?

Bob: Hi Graham, doing well. How are you, today?

Graham: Very good, thank you. Welcome back to Australia.

Bob: Great, thank you. It’s good to be back. It’s been another 11 years. Seems like every 11 years I’m here.

Graham: Am I right in saying this is the first time you’ve toured with the band in Australia?

Bob: Yeah, that’s the headline on this tour, definitely.

Graham: It seems like I’m a life-long fan of all of our incarnations. And it seems to me that certainly in the last few years you’ve reconnected with the electric guitar. Am I right in saying that?

Bob: Well I think a lot of things conspired to make Silver Age the record that it is. But I think other than the electronic period at the beginning of 2000s I don’t think I ever really put the guitar down. But I know what you’re saying, yeah.

Graham: I guess with the Silver Age line-up and the band that you’ve been touring with lately, how does that compare to the classic Sugar line-up or the Hüsker Dü line-up as far as your musical connection with the other guys?

Bob: The thing I keep hearing from people over the last year and this year, everybody seems to be saying this is the best three-piece I’ve ever been in. It feels like it to me, but it’s been interesting to hear it be sort of the talking point. It’s nuts.

Jason [Narducy] and I have known each other over 20 years, going back to the ’90s. I’ve produced the Verbow record, which was Jason’s band back in ’96. So he and I have a shared musical language. Jon Wurster, I’ve known his stuff through Superchunk and now playing with Jon for five years. We’ve really clicked well together. I don’t know; using the word magical would be a bit much but it’s a pretty awesome three-piece. We really don’t have to think much about what we’re doing.

Graham: I was lucky enough to see the SxSW show that you guys played I think at Mohawk last year, doing Copper Blue. That was the thing that really impacted on me, the connection between the three of you. It was like looking at a band that had been playing together for a decade.

Bob: I appreciate hearing that. It’s only gotten better since bringing the Silver Age stuff in, and going back to some of the Husker stuff and a couple solo songs here and there. Now that we can really round the set out and not just stick to Copper Blue, it’s exponentially more fun and way more open as far as what we can do with it. I appreciate hearing that, though.

Graham: I imagine it’s been a pretty amazing time for you since the tribute concert. I’m just wondering, how it felt at the time for you. I was wondering how something like that — how you connect with something like that emotionally, looking back on it months later.

Bob: The tribute thing was a pretty great experience. I had been a player for a number of tribute shows at Carnegie Hall in New York City. I’d got asked to do a Dylan tribute, an R.E.M. tribute, and a Who tribute show. I understood the theory and the mechanics of those shows. When I found out that Disney Hall in LA was interesting in doing something like that for my songbook, at the time it was pretty overwhelming. At the time I was sort of like “Oh, does this mean that I’m supposed to retire now? What does this all mean?” I didn’t really know.

Then the show came together and I had input on the artists, and it was great. Right before the show we put a film crew together and then now 13 months later we have the documentary finished and did the Kickstarter thing. I’m still processing it. It’s a big milestone, I guess obviously, to musicians who I respect: Britt, and Craig and Margaret, and the No Age guys, and Ryan… to get people like that together is really very touching. It really meant a lot to me.

The majority of Silver Age was written immediately after that show. The show was in November ’11; I wrote most of Silver Age in December of ’11. Jason and Jon and I started recording on January 2nd of 2012. You can connect the dots there with what happened.

Graham: It sonically seems to make sense, a natural inspiration, and I guess a lot of people would say that Silver Age is the next one in the step of Copper Blue, that follows on as a beautiful next album for Copper Blue, but just many years later. How do you feel about those comments?

Bob: When I started writing the book in ’08, I stopped writing music. As 2012 was approaching, I’d not been writing music for about a year and a half at that point. I thought to myself when I get back to writing music it’ll be nice to maybe revisit that template that I used for Copper Blue, the sort of short, loud, guitar pop songs. I didn’t want to write a similar record, but I wanted to use the same blueprint. I got lucky that in December ’11 when all those songs started falling out, one after the other, I was just lucky that they were in that style.

Playing with the Foo Fighters for a lot of 2011, that had a lot to do with it as well. Environment is so important to the whole thing. Getting up and playing a couple of songs each night with those guys, it’s pretty natural. It all makes sense to me now.

Graham: I guess with not wanting to keep looking back in the conversation, but just with the book [the autobiography See a Little Light], I imagine that’s a similar kind of feeling to the tribute concert, being a real milestone. Again as time’s passed, wondering how you were feeling about that and how the feedback you’ve been receiving from people on that has contributed to your feelings on it?

Bob: I’m real proud of the book. It was a lot of work. It was not second nature to me. For most of my life, I’ve written in three-minute slivers, and to take 48 years and have to tie it all up in a nice package, that was a lot of work. I learned a lot from doing it. Emotionally, it was tough at times. I was never one for looking back, so once I did, when Michael Azerrad started helping me see the themes and the threads and the commonalities and what my story really was, a lot of it was sort of upsetting, not so much in the terms of regret, but just in terms of the person that I used to be. It was nice for me to be able to reconcile some of that stuff, if not only for myself, but with a lot of the people involved.

Now as I get more distance on the book, it’s nice. I think it’s a real interesting story. I think it’s a very simple story. I don’t think it’s complicated at all. So many people I know who express their lives through music, they had tough childhoods, they were smart kids that maybe didn’t fit in or maybe didn’t know where they were supposed to go with the ideas that they had. I think I have a unique story, but it’s not unique to me. I know a lot of people who have similar stories.

I think as far as for fans, I got a lot good feedback from people in terms of the stories, how religion and family and alcoholism and recovery and learning to heal yourself. That was nice. That meant a lot to me, that people could come and share their stories after reading mine. Coming and saying I had a tough dad, I had problems with alcohol or drugs, and learned to get over it. It’s nice to be able to tell those stories and then have people connect with that.

I’ve always gotten people coming up to me saying your songs mean this to me or mean that to me. But to share the gory details I guess, and still have people identifying with that, that meant a lot to me. I didn’t see that coming. I actually didn’t even think about that when I was writing it, that it might affect people that way.

Graham: The big surprise for me with the book was how funny it was in parts, as well. I didn’t expect to go into reading that book and get as many laughs as I got.

Bob: I’ve got a pretty dry sense of humour. It’s my secret weapon. I show it more as I get older.

Graham: The one thing I really wanted to talk to you about was your fans: it’s not a fleeting thing to them. They seem incredibly committed, and life-long, and I guess with the songs it seems to bear quite a serious importance on their lives. Do you agree with that? Do you have any kind of concept on how that is different with your mates or your peers in other bands and their fans?

Bob: With my fans I think you’re right. They definitely have a very strong emotional attachment to it. I think for me, beyond the individual songs, or the individual albums, I think one thing that the book illuminated, and it’s something that I’ve always kept in mind, is I’ve always tried to explain to people where I was coming from with the records, and where I was going after making the record. I think with my story I’ve always been aware of a narrative, that there is an ongoing narrative, and that there’s always going to be change. Sometimes there’s going to be extreme change.

And I think I’ve always been pretty good at letting people know ahead of time what’s coming next is going to be really different. I have a sense of it. So I think people trust that I give them a good roadmap, so maybe that’s why they stay with me for so long. I could be presuming a lot there, but I do try to keep people up to speed when there’s about to be a change or why things change. I think people understand the narrative. Maybe that’s why there’s a longer, more ongoing connection.

I can’t really speak on my peers and why people stay with them. I know people like Ryan Adams, this incredible devotion to his work and people obsess over every word. He has a different kind of following than I do. Then there’s people like Dave and the Foo Fighters and where the spirit of his work is a little different than mine, and I think people connect in a different place. Maybe it’s even more every man than my stuff. I don’t know. I’m hard at parsing other peoples’ audiences. I should stop now.

Graham: That’s fair enough. With the touring at the moment, am I right in saying that you’re touring more with this band and Silver Age and Copper Blue than you have in a while? There seems to be festivals popping up all over the world, and lots of opportunities. I guess I want to get a sense on how you’re feeling about being back on the road so intensely.

Bob: This is the most I’ve been on the road probably since either ’98 or ’02. I was on the road for the Modulate tour and that was a very different way of touring. In ’98 with Dog and Pony there was a lot of touring but as far as sustained touring with festivals and such, the only time that I’ve toured this hard would have been ’92, ’93 with Sugar.

This is very reminiscent of the Copper Blue/Beaster era, the campaigns. It almost mirrors those campaigns as far as the initial burst, the reaction to the record, the strong initial touring, and then the victory-lap touring, where you get the festivals, and you get people wanting more and more. You do as much as you can. This year feels very similar to ’93 in that sense, when Beaster came out and we were doing a lot of the bigger festivals in Europe. It’s very comparable to that, so it’s amazing. I didn’t see any of this coming 16 months ago when I was looking at finishing up a record.

Graham: Is morale in and amongst the gang as high as it was, or is it still pretty high, considering all of the touring that you’ve been doing?

Bob: I think morale with the three of us right now is the highest morale that I’ve ever seen. Higher than when Sugar was at its peak. With Hüsker DüI think the high point to me would have been late ’85-’86, the “Flip” recording and touring on Flip Your Wig. I think that’s really the high point of that band. It’s comparable to those two eras. Me, Jon, and Jason, we love to play. Honestly, I’m 20 years older than when Sugar was doing it, so it’s a bit harder on the body. I have to take that into account. I don’t want to put myself in the ground too soon. Trying to find the right balance, but morale is definitely all-time high.

Graham: That’s exactly what I and a lot of people were hoping you would say, and would that mean we can hope or expect another record from the three of you together?

Bob: Yeah definitely. That’s the idea right now. It’s working. It’s working for the fans, it’s working for us, it’s working for me. It’s pretty effortless, so that seems to be the right path to go. I’d like to keep this going as long as everybody’s enjoying it and it’s working.

Having said that, I’ve still got Blowoff my DJ gigs. That’s been 10 years of working with Rich Morel and touring all over America with our parties. I’ve got that outlet as well. I’ve got a pretty good clutch of depressing acoustic songs too that I could unleash at any moment.

Graham: Excellent, we look forward to hearing those too.

Bob: Oh my God, don’t say that. I have to play them then.

Silver Age is out now in Australia through Shock. Graham Ashton will, once again, curate this year’s Big Sound conference.