Bob Mould's Personal Best
Bob Mould pioneered alternative rock with Hüsker Dü and continued to define it through his prolific solo career. To celebrate new album Here We Go Crazy, he de-archives a handful of special songs to help narrate his story to Hayden Merrick.
"Okay, let’s get to the albums part here – discog – let’s scroll down,” Bob Mould murmurs under his breath, pulling up his Wikipedia page midway through our conversation.
I’m sure there are people who can tell you that District Line came out in 2008 and Life and Times in 2009 – not the other way around – and the name of track eight on the former and track nine on the latter, and so on and so on. But Mould’s back catalogue is voluminous – so how can he be expected to keep track of it?
With Hüsker Dü, whose influence on alternative music is surpassed by only a handful of artists, Mould made six albums in four years – including a near-perfect run of three albums, Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, and Flip Your Wig, that they managed to cram into the fateful 1984–1985 window.
Rising like a phoenix after Hüsker Dü’s chaotic combustion, Mould graduated to a prolific, varied solo career. And nobody is forgetting about Sugar, the short-lived fan-favourite project he helmed in the ‘90s – songs from which he still bolts through every night.
When an artist has been creating work for such a prolonged stretch of time, little moments of kismet naturally arise, like how The Simpsons keep accidentally ‘predicting’ the future. For instance, as Mould tells me from his home in the California desert, “The intention with Blue Hearts was, in my magical thinking mind, ‘I’m like, ‘92 Copper Blue and we got Bill Clinton, so maybe if I make another blue record in 2020, we’ll get a Democratic president. And we did. It worked again. In my magnificently magical, minuscule mind, it all worked out.”
Of course, it didn’t all work out.
Blue Hearts, released in 2020, was a furious condemnation of the increasingly mainstream alt-right, its brazen contradictions (“pro-life, until you make it in someone else’s wife,” he barked), and the “American Crisis” in general, which has only deepened in the five years since, bubbling over into one intent on upending everything from historical alliances to the environment to the safety and autonomy of minority groups.
For Blue Hearts, Mould tapped into a familiar, decades-old rage, looking “backwards in time to the fall of 1983, which was three years into the first Reagan administration, and thinking about who I was then, what the world was like then, what did I have in order to affect any kind of change, or who I was at that time with very few resources,” he explains. “I brought that feeling as best I could to the material.”
It’s pretty damning that the anger he felt at the height of trickle-down selfishness, when homophobic government policies entrenched the AIDS epidemic and killed thousands – that this rage comes back so easily, as the world today refracts darkness and cruelty in frighteningly familiar ways. “We were marginalized and demonized / I watched a lot of my generation die,” he roared five years ago on “American Crisis”.
Mould’s new album, Here We Go Crazy, steers out of the skid. The title seems to give us an eye-roll, or a shrug, while the title track itself keeps a tempo akin to a reclined sigh, finding Mould “lost on a mountain,” where “no one can find me.” Elsewhere, he’s safe inside his “breathing room,” and later, finding a spot of shade or a “little swimming pool, you can do your laps all day.”
Here We Go Crazy suggests that it’s okay to hide under a blanket now and then, its central premise to take care of each other and find comfort in simplicity. You can’t keep up the fight every single day. You’d go crazy.
To arrive at this epiphany, the album follows a hero’s journey arc. Mould compares the opening song, “Here We Go Crazy”, to “Sgt. Pepper’s” – a sort of overture. “It’s like, here we go, here’s what it sounds like, here’s the characters, and here’s a handful of icons to hold on to as we go through this,” he says.
Around the album’s midpoint, the darkness and cabin fever set in, but in the final act comes resolution. Our hero – and the listener – surges out of the darkness, and we end with a euphoric, tear-jerking, everything-makes-sense-now ode to love. “That’s the bright part,” Mould tells me, “the bright finish. If ‘Here We Go Crazy’ is a good soliloquy, then ‘Your Side’ is a wonderful little epilogue to the whole 32 minutes.”
With the first song from his Personal Best, Mould spins us around and removes the blindfold on the darkness of 2025. But gradually we reverse through forty years of music – tracing confident, feel-good highs and poignant lows – before concluding in Hüsker Dü’s tumultuous wig-flipping days on the road.
“Lost or Stolen” by Bob Mould (2025)
BEST FIT: Your new album, Here We Go Crazy, is divided into three acts: control versus chaos, cabin fever, and then lifting out of the darkness. This song is in the middle, before the light. You’ve chosen one of the darker ones as your pick from this album.
BOB MOULD: Specifically, that’s the period where one ideally gets up – after the two-minute drum solo – and you turn the record over. That’s sonically a bit of a reset, inside act two.
It’s funny, “Lost or Stolen” was written after the band left. I was messing about with stuff out in the live room, with vibes, the grand piano and a studio guitar that I put in a strange tuning, and the riff sort of appeared. It’s a riff that’s structurally on the guitar very similar to some of the other songs.
In my records, I come up with technical motifs for guitar that people wouldn’t know unless they play guitar or they watch how I do it. But it’s a motif that goes through the record that I touched a couple times already.
The emotional content of it: it’s addiction. I’m 64, so I’m an old guy, and I grew up in that era where my dad didn’t know any touchy-feely therapy. And to me, addictions were visible addictions: alcoholism, drug abuse. Back then, that was addiction.
Now we move forward, and you and I can’t perceive other addictions as clearly. You and I could be sitting across a table from each other, looking at our phones, and you or I could be a day away from killing ourselves because we just lost everything through some kind of online gaming app, or you get so deep into conspiracy that you act in a bizarre way that might lead you to the end sooner than you should get there.
To me, the further I get away from the song, the more I see that message laced in.
And this ended up being a favourite from the new album – is it one you think you’ll enjoy playing live, too?
It may not get played live, because it requires either an extra guitar on the road or a minute and a half to retune everything. But it was the bonus song for me, because everything had been recorded with the band, the band went away, then this song appeared, and I had to record it. So I had to do everything on it. I didn’t see it coming.
I get those from time to time – “The War” on Beauty and Ruin was like that. The good news was it was 11:30 at night, Jon and Jason had gone to bed, I was up with Beau [Sorenson], my engineer, and the whole song appeared in front of me out of nowhere. I had to grab Beau: ‘I need a click track at 150, just let me lay down a bunch of guide guitars, and give me a rough mix so I can put it in my headphones when I go to bed, so I can listen to it all night.’
And then I wake up in the morning, I go to Jon and Jason and say, ‘We’ve got another song to track. Here’s how it goes.’
“The War” by Bob Mould (2014)
BEST FIT: My dad bought me this CD when I was 17. This song as well as “Fix It” and “I Don’t Know You Anymore” were my first entry into your work, coming out of a Green Day obsession. What was going on for you in 2013/2014?
BOB MOULD: I sort of set up this one accidentally, being a bonus song, where the distance between the inspiration of it and the execution is less than 24 hours. Songs like that take on a real wild vibrancy, because I don’t have time to consider it as it’s happening, I’m just trying to capture it. That one sort of came out of the vapour.
Late 2011, I wrote a lot of Silver Age in a hurry, I got lucky. That came out, Copper Blue turned 20 and there was a lot of touring. My dad passed away, he was the person who brought music to me and kept bringing it to me. When I was a child, he played saxophone in the military. He bought me all the jukebox singles when I was kid, so when my dad passed during the Silver Age campaign, it was a lot.
I had gotten good time with him maybe a few months before he passed. Anyways, [“The War”] was me thinking about my relationship with my dad and all the things that he brought to me as a child, and not only music and the love of music – that became my passion, it became my distraction from the tougher parts of my dad: the alcoholism, the violence, the chaos. Having been able to reckon that with him and understand that it was more complex than I remembered… it’s all on the song, right?
And then maybe getting a better sense of how to take the things that I’m good at, or things that come to me that I can share with others. Whether it’s little bits of magic – just healing, you know, things that you can bring to the conscious mind and share with others for good. I’m no mystic. It’s just being aware of what you can learn and what you can apply and share with others.
I feel like that’s a throughline of your work though – compassion and generosity and self-reflection. And this is a trivial question in comparison to what you said, but I was curious, because this is always your opener when you play live, what makes it the best song to open with?
It’s an easy one to play, right? It’s a great song to warm up with. It’s like terra firma. If I were to go out and start a show with something incredibly complicated – I’m an old guy; it takes me a few minutes to get warmed up. It’s in first position G. It’s not a lot of high notes to reach for. It’s right in my zone. It’s a comfortable landing on a stage and easy to get moving from that song.
This is also the first song that you’ve chosen that Jason and Jon play on. Did it feel back then that ‘this is the lineup now’ – some kind of crystallizing of your approach?
I think so, yes. This is the only song of the six that would be with Jon and Jason because “Lost or Stolen” was all me after they left. I’ve known Jason and Jon for a long time – as friends, as musicians, as colleagues. Jason and I had done a lot of stuff together in years past. Jason came on board as the bassist in ‘04, ‘05, whenever Body of Song [came out] and the touring resumed.
In 1998, I stepped away from rock guitar touring, I came back years later, and Jason started as bassist with me. We were out on a tour, I think it was ‘08, Jon had just finished up a tour with A. C. Newman. We all talked, the original drummer stepped off the tour, and Jon quickly jumped in and learned everything at soundcheck at the first show.
And that was it: we just clicked.
“Who Needs To Dream?” by Bob Mould (2008)
BEST FIT: You mentioned ‘08 – that’s the year of your next song. There’s a line on here – “I don’t want to dream about the future / I only hope that I can make it to tomorrow” – that is very Here We Go Crazy (2025), I think. It’s the same sort of message: shrinking your world.
BOB MOULD: That was my Washington, D.C. time from ‘02–’09. I moved there with a partner, quickly ended up single, had to get resourceful and rebuild myself and my singular life.
So this was my get-ready-to-go-out-on-the-town song. I’m living in D.C., I’m single, I’m going out to have a life, be with friends and meet new people, and maybe hook up on the weekends – things that you do when you’re in good physical shape and you’re a single gay man in your 40s in what is arguably the gayest town in America: Washington, D.C. That’s where the Pentagon is; I don’t need to say any more.
I would typically spend that last 5–10 minutes before I’d go out to The Eagle or to the Green Lantern – I’d want to get myself in a groove and get looking good. And this would be one of the two songs that I would put on.
It’s funny because a lot of the story in it – beyond the last lines, which you grabbed – all that other stuff is just my day: ‘Oh, I’m at the gym for two/three hours a day. Oh, I’m meeting somebody in the gym. Oh, what a dud. Oh, what a fun guy.’ That’s like the soundtrack of gay man’s life.
I think I misread this one then. It’s not that Here We Go Crazy messaging – it’s something much simpler, and just a fun time to look back on.
Yes, it’s all this stuff about getting led on, or chasing the one that’s running away while being chased by the one you don’t want. It’s sort of brutal, but that’s life.
There’s a time jump between this and your next pick, from the Workbook album, so I was curious whether you considered any Sugar songs. According to setlist.fm, “Hoover Dam” is the song that you have played the most.
Oh my goodness. Probably so. That and “If I Can’t Change Your Mind”, “Hardly Getting Over It”, and “Makes No Sense At All” – those would be the hits. I guess [for my Personal Best] I picked ones that I thought had colourful backstories.
“Brasilia Crossed With Trenton” by Bob Mould (1989)
BEST FIT: I love the narrative around this first solo album – of you, an acoustic guitar, and an eight-track sequestered in a remote farmhouse away from Dü drama, starting to piece together a new way forward, or a new era. What do you remember from that period?
BOB MOULD: Oh, so much. The last 18 months of Hüsker Dü was tough on everybody. January of ‘88, I’m up on a farm halfway up to Duluth, and it’s a completely isolated life: no friends, I had a partner who was on his way out, and I had to reinvent myself.
I did not want to emulate Hüsker Dü. I didn’t want to trade on Hüsker Dü. I wanted to figure out who I was going to be as a musician. So I spent a lot of time with the instrument – with guitar, with different tunings, new guitars, the [Lincoln] Brewster, the Yamaha APX 12 string. I got a Roland D50 synthesizer. I got a newer drum machine – I think a Roland 08 – and I had an eight-track Tascam that was 388 reel-to-reel on quarter-inch tape. And I just sat and wrote – wrote words and music – for a year.
Was this a friend’s farm? How did you actually come to end up here?
It was a schoolteacher who had a farm listed for sale. It was really inexpensive. I think I did a land contract so I didn’t have get a mortgage; I would just pay rent towards owning it. I did that for about a year and a half, but that year, 1988, was a lot of uncertainty – just a lot of time to learn and listen to other kinds of music, and just writing a lot of short stories, a lot of prose.
“Brasilia” was another [written in] 15 minutes song. The songs that are real gifts are the ones that write themselves. With this one, it was waking up in the morning and having a head full of things that I remembered from dreams. I had one of those Radio Shack portable cassette recorders, I took it into the shower and started saying and singing and trying to dump all the images out before I forgot them. That’s literally how that one came together.
That sounds like a very healthy thing to do, actually.
It was great. Songs take shape, they get to your ears in many different ways. The gift song, where it just reveals itself, almost fully formed, doesn’t happen very often. When it does, you’ve got to catch it.
But “Brasilia” is a great example of the only advice I can really give writers in general and songwriters in particular: ideas are like rain. When it starts to rain, you go out in the rain, you grab a bucket and get as much rain as you can. And as you’re catching the rain, you don’t need to worry about what you’re going to do with the water.
The idea is you catch as much water as you can, and when it stops raining and you’ve got this bucket of water, you can look at it then and go, ‘Right, what shall I do with this water?’
People always come up and they’re like, ‘I’ve been writing songs, and I can’t get to where I want to be.’ I just say, ‘When you’re writing, do not edit. Do not stop in the middle of it and go, that doesn’t rhyme. Don’t get in the way of it.’
The inspiration is the part you can’t think about. When you’re done with that part, you step away and go out, you get some air and you come back, then you can start editing. But don’t edit while you’re writing.
As someone who writes – writes about music – that’s kind of an epiphany for me and something I’ll take forward.
And what’s wild is, I fuck myself. I fucked myself the other day because I was writing something and instead of just hitting selfie video, which is the best way these days, I was doing something in notes, I was putting in some idea that I had, then I typo-ed something, I went backwards, and then I lost the whole fucking thing. I completely lost the plot. Why don’t I listen to my own advice?
I guess this was the album where you landed on that approach and then carried it forward, or tried to?
A little bit, yes. I think it was always there. I think Hüsker stuff used to come in a hot rush. It was more like a volcano goes and the lava flows. The dream songs are – I’m just trying to capture it. Maybe this was the beginning of recognising that advice, which I now give freely and often. But I didn’t really identify how to give that advice until then – it wasn’t because of resilience; more decades of that kind of stuff.
“Too Far Down” by Hüsker Dü (1986)
BEST FIT: Candy Apple Grey is of course the major label album. You’ve spoken not very favourably about it in the past, but I wonder if this song and “Hardly Getting Over It” were really proto-Bob Mould solo songs that, at the time, helped you see a future outside of tumultuous band life.
BOB MOULD: Well, here’s the years-later view on that record. I look at Hüsker Dü and I go, there was all the stuff where we were figuring it out. Then there were a couple of records that were sort of punky/hardcore-y kind of things. And then there were the three records: Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, Flip Your Wig, that really summed it all up, Flip Your Wig to me being the peak of that band.
And then there were the two records on Warner, which I think are great records. I don’t think they’re as good as Flip Your Wig – that to me was like peak songwriting, peak me and Grant [Hart] making this thing together.
But with Candy Apple Grey, I like the record, and it’s funny, now that I recognise the mechanics of it, those were two of Grant’s best pop songs ever: “Don’t Want to Know If You’re Lonely” and “Sorry Somehow”.
I look at the things that had lasting value in my stuff, and it was the two that you mentioned, which were definitely not pop songs. They were not radio songs. They were acoustic guitar-driven dark songs that I still play most nights. So I reserve the right to revise – it’s not so much that I didn’t like it. I guess I now have a different view on it, and I’m like, ‘Oh, maybe that’s a better way to look at it.’
And putting two of these kinds of songs on the album, is that something you either second guessed or faced resistance from the label or from bandmates?
No – Grant had a song called “No Promise Have I Made”, where he did everything himself on it, much like I did with “Too Far Down”, so, if anything, that’s sort of the harbinger of the beginning of the end.
The two of you doing your own things, totally separately, you mean?
Yes, and then sort of putting it inside the band container. Maybe that was setting the stage for the end of it. But who knows? I mean, I’ve still got more time to figure it out. But maybe not in this interview!
Do you remember where you were when you wrote this one? Was it another one that came together quickly?
Probably at home in Minneapolis, off the road. It’s a heavy song. It was pretty visceral – I don’t know if cathartic is the right word. I have pretty solid bouts of depression: then, now, and in the future, I’m sure. I think I figured out that when I’m in good spirits, when life is good, I’m having a good time, it’s a party and I’m getting ready to go out to the bar or something – when things are on that up, I’m not writing songs like “Too Far Down”.
When things are good, just really be with it, be in it, and be good with it. Don’t write “Too Far Down”, because it’s going to come back – whatever metaphorical name people give to depression. I don’t usually write a lot as I’m in the slide, but when I’ve got to get on the ladder and write stuff, try to get yourself out of it and not wait for somebody to come and get you out of it, because then they’re going end up in it, because I’m going to be an asshole and take the ladder with me. No, just kidding!
I think as the years have gone on and I think about my life, and I think about the environment of the ‘80s, and I think about being in the closet with a partner, still fearful of dying or fearful of being marginalized forever by America – it has taken on, over time, a different meaning for me.
Like maybe that grief, or that sort of ‘I wish I could disappear because then everybody else would be happy’ – that’s a lot about HIV and AIDS and that marginalization. At that time, the song fell out, but maybe I didn’t really understand the stew of things that created that taste in my mouth.
“Divide and Conquer” by Hüsker Dü (1985)
BEST FIT: Thank you for sharing that. “Divide and Conquer” is a real kick in the guts way to end. This is a topical, timeless, and angry song. Tell me how you landed on this as the first song from your back catalogue to start your story with.
BOB MOULD: In October of ‘84, Zen Arcade is just out – three months late, by the way: SST was supposed to put it out in June, so there’s some foreshadowing for the future. The band is on tour. If I remember correctly, we pulled into Newport, Kentucky, in the morning. We had a show that night at a place called the Jockey Club. I think the band that opened that night was called Squirrel Bait.
I remember going to a pawn shop and spending maybe 20 bucks on a banjo. I remember sitting on the stoop behind the club load-in door, and that record was written on a banjo. That’s why [the riff] doesn’t change, because that’s the first riff I wrote on a banjo.
Wow. You know what? I can totally hear that. Ba nah diddly duh.
It’s funny that it’s fairly predictive: “We’ll invent some new computers, link up the global village, and tell AP, UPI, and Reuters to tell everybody the news,” blah, blah, blah – all those things that were very 1984, that were right in front of us.
I mean, it’s Marshall McLuhan, right? It’s not original thought. It’s things I’d learned. It’s things I read. It’s thoughts that connected – writing it on a banjo is absurd – and its lessons that were further learned around that time, from being accepted by a lot of the Beat Generation people.
By John Giorno reaching out and getting me together with William Burroughs, which then leads me to meeting Allen Ginsberg, Jim Carroll, Edie Kerouac, and that entire school of city lights / San Francisco / bookstore / beat poetry / counterculture. It’s all that futuristic thinking, progressive thinking – but it’s a bunch of words written on a banjo. In an alleyway.
I love it. And you’re 24 here – the sort of age when people are reading those authors and thinking about this stuff more deeply. But you’re literally hanging out with them, close to it. And, you know, this is a relevant song today, too – it’s quite a reassuring song.
Yes, it’s a good one. It’s a hard one live, because I think there’s 10 verses to it and I always get them mixed up. I’ve handed that one off to some people for the encore, like Damian from Fucked Up. He remembers them all, so I’m like, ‘Sure, dude, if you’re singing it!’
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