Bob Mould

It was the beginning of 2004, and Bob Mould hadn’t played much electric guitar in five years. The man who pretty much defined the thickened, melodic guitar attack later marketed as grunge and taken to the top of the charts by Nirvana, had grown so weary of the instrument that he hardly ever picked it up. The frontman who had led two legendary rock power trios, Hüsker Dü and Sugar, had plunged himself into the world of dance music, taking a regular gig as a club DJ, recording a dance album with collaborator Rich Morel and crafting dance remixes of favorite indie-rock songs.

But he found himself growing tired of sitting for hours in front of a computer monitor and clicking and dragging sound samples. He looked around his apartment in Washington’s U Street Corridor and spotted a long-lost partner. The reunion led to Body of Song, the best solo album Mould has ever made.

“I saw the guitar sitting in the corner of the room and I picked it up again,” he remembers. “It was like reconnecting with an old friend; you find you have a lot more in common than you thought you did. A guitar is like a bike; you don’t forget how to play. It took a little time to get the muscles back in shape, but after that it was like I’d never left. After all, I’d spent most of my life with it.”

Nonetheless, something was different. The years Mould had spent in the dance-music world had forever altered his approach to writing and arranging. Where once he’d thought of making music as a linear process—you begin the song and you keep playing till you reach the end—he now thought of it as a series of building blocks that could be swapped or shifted around at will. It was the difference between recording to tape and recording digital.

And where he’d once thought of tempo as something that ebbed and flowed at the whim of the musicians, he now thought of it as the unchanging architecture that everything else in the song reacted to. The steadiness of the groove gave his songs an unprecedented sexiness and provided the geometric structure that allowed him to add textures to four bars here and four bars there, and to shift those bars around if he liked. Now, however, he found that many of his favorite textures came from his old guitar, the wild card that lent an emotional unpredictability to the proceedings.

“I rediscovered the directness of the guitar,” he explains, “how easily it translates feeling into sound. I love melody, but my sense of melody is different from most people’s, because I don’t consider myself a good singer. So I tend to put less melody in the vocal and more in the guitar. I’ll find a couple notes I can sing very well, and then I’ll surround those notes with all those interweaving guitars and modal changes to compensate for my inadequate voice. The sound gets so overdriven that you’re hearing a wash of harmonies—big pieces of glass flying at you—with the melody buried inside.”

Mould sits at the polished table of an upscale café/bar near his home, nursing a coffee. With his yellow polo shirt, blue jeans and neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, he’s friendly in a polite, reserved way, willing to answer any question but reticent to volunteer too much. He seems years removed from the enfant terrible who barnstormed through the nation’s punk clubs in the ’80s, but the moon-like face betrays brief flashes of the exasperation and vulnerability that have always informed his songwriting.

“I have the best of both worlds now,” he continues, “because I can draw from both rock and dance music. On a song like ‘Always Tomorrow,’ for example, I started with a stock rhythm loop and laid new beats over it. Once I had the new beats, I got rid of the original loop and added keyboard bass. Then I just sat in my apartment jamming on the guitar to the rhythm track. I recorded track after track of guitar until I had four or five that I really liked and I threw out the rest. Because I was recording to a click track, I could move those guitar textures around on the computer grid so the sounds appear, disappear and reappear. Then I replaced all the mechanical parts with a drummer who has a personal feel.”

That may sound clinical, but the results on the new album are anything but. On “Always Tomorrow,” Mould cries out, “Doesn’t matter how hard I try.” His romantic overtures have been rebuffed. His exasperation is captured in a dirty, descending guitar figure, but his stoic acceptance is reflected in the swirling synths and sustaining guitar motifs. The vocal is caught between these two impulses; you can hear not only the undiminished desire but also the melancholy realization that the hoped-for relationship won’t happen any time soon.

Whatever the technical limitations of Mould’s voice, it’s always been a terrific emotional conduit. Even in the early days of Hüsker Dü, when Mould was howling in a maelstrom of fast-loud-hard punk rock, there was a yearning quality to his vocals, an ache of never quite getting what he wanted. This ache seemed incongruous in the aggro world of punk, and it seems incongruous today in the glazed coolness of dance music. But that melodic ache—and the way it collides with bristling guitars or thumping beats—makes Mould one of the most interesting pop musicians of his generation. And the ache is more obvious than ever on Body of Song.

Many of the tracks are about relationships that have just ended, are in danger of ending or can’t get started. Sometimes the frustration is released in a galloping rock ’n’ roll guitar riff, such as on the catchy “Paralyzed.” “You wouldn’t let me near you,” Mould sings; his disappointment tangled in the fuzzy power chords, and his lingering affection released in the clean, piping lead-guitar lines. Just as catchy, just as ambivalent, are rockers like “Best Thing,” “Underneath Days,” “Missing You” and “Beating Heart the Prize.”

But the album also contains two songs best described as hymns. On “(Shine Your) Light Love Hope,” Mould warbles four prayer-like lines over and over through a watery electric vocal filter and above a psychedelic-rock track. On “I Am Vision, I Am Sound,” he uses both treated and untreated vocals to chant “I melted when I met you” over a vaguely Indian melody and noisy rock ’n’ roll. These songs suggest what acid-house remixes of The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” or Hüsker Dü’s “New Day Rising” might sound like.