Grant Hart: “I don't really head off in a particular musical direction with anything I do”

“I wish I knew why; if I knew what inspired me to do something, I’d do it every day. It just seemed like an interesting concept that I knew I could tackle.”

Grant Hart has had rather a chequered musical history; starting out as the drummer and co-songwriter in one of the most influential rock bands in history, Hüsker Dü, his output since the group’s dissolution in 1988 has been erratic. A couple of initial solo releases were followed by the formation of Nova Mob, a band that seemed to fizzle out just as they were getting started. Hart’s solo releases since have flown under the mainstream radar, a far cry from the recent success enjoyed by his former songwriting partner Bob Mould, who has collaborated with Foo Fighters, released an acclaimed autobiography and performed at a star-studded tribute to his work in the past few years. Hart, instead, has continued to venture into ever more esoteric territory, with the concept for this year’s sprawling double record, The Argument, sparked by a chance encounter with William S. Burroughs’ unrealised take on John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost.

“I was visiting a friend of mine, who’s a literary executive for William Burroughs. I was flicking through some of these unpublished works, and read the treatment that Burroughs had written – it was a very short thing, actually – for his own version of Paradise Lost. I was just inspired to head off in that direction for my next record.”

Clocking in at over seventy minutes, The Argument hardly seems like the kind of record that’s been subject to harsh editing, but Hart insists that a double album actually represents a miserly return on his original vision. “Well, you can’t do Paradise Lost with an EP,” Hart laughs. “The problem I actually had was condensing it to only two records; we were pretty much running the maximum as far as fidelity was concerned with just the two records. Twenty songs is the equivalent of ten books in the original. I knew that I’d be able to save a lot of room by excising a lot of material that’s repetitive in the poem, stuff that’s available elsewhere and wasn’t crucial to what I was trying to produce.”

Hart seems reluctant to discuss specific musical influences on The Argument – it’s a cross between eerie, organ-driven slow burners and breezy, guitar-orientated pop songs – and is convinced that the concept was key. “I guess I don’t really head off in a particular musical direction with anything I do,” says Hart. “I just concentrated on the subject matter and then, as I was improvising with different instruments, I found that different musical ideas tended to come in tandem with the lyrical ideas. That’s the way I tend to operate.”

The Argument is a solo record in pretty much every sense of the word; the vast majority of its twenty tracks were recorded exclusively by Hart himself. “Well, the first thing is just the high cost of analog recording, and the necessity to keep the costs as low as possible,” Hart related. “I did bring in a bass player for a couple of songs, but everything else was just me. If you’re at all competent, there’s not much you can’t rehearse or do yourself. ”

“I’ve often been tempted to bring in somebody who might sound more melodic on the guitar, for example, but it’s not really what I’m about.” Hart is, though, excited by the prospect of playing live shows with his new, all-Irish backing band. “It’s quite a joy playing with them live. I guess the only difficulty is that we’re living thousands of miles apart. We’re going to be back out later in the year; we’re putting a very limited run of UK dates together as we speak, likely for October.”

As much as Hart is fairly clear about the fact that he doesn’t set time aside to try to write new music, he does elaborate on his usual songwriting process. “It’s about accepting that you’re not going to feel inspired every single day. Usually, the inspiration comes along with the basic idea for the chorus. You can’t have a chorus if you don’t have a general idea of what the song is gonna be about. A lot of times, the actual verses themselves are just a detailed telling of a story that you’ve addressed in the chorus.”

Lyrically, The Argument uses Paradise Lost to frame Hart’s own experiences; he’s had a tumultuous couple of years, with the loss of both parents and a house fire that hospitalised him and robbed him of priceless possessions. “The original poem is basically a framework for my reactions to it, and my insights and own personalisation of it too. Otherwise, it would just be a literal retelling – you’d be adding a melody to what’s already there, really.”

Reflecting on his formative years in Hüsker Dü – a band who acted as a towering figure of influence in the years following their split, with both Nirvana and Pixies having admitted to taking their cues from the Minneapolis trio – Hart is keen to point out that his sonic divergence in the intervening years is not an indicator that he’s dismissive of the hardcore scene from which he hails.

“I don’t have that much interest in performing it, but I wouldn’t switch off immediately just because a band played that kind of music. Most of the hardcore thing is just a pose by now – it always was, really. It constantly needed things to be interjected to keep it afloat; skateboarders or radical politics or whatever else. That was how it came to embrace anything that was fast and inaccurate.”

Hart’s relationship with Hüsker Dü’s catalogue, and the nostalgia it tends to evoke, is clearly a point of discomfort for him, nixing any faint hope of a reunion in the near future. “I can’t really get away from those songs because they represent something I’m very much known for, but there are people who have to be shaken out of their midlife crisis or what have you,” says Hart. “People need to realise that all that was a while back and that they can’t expect to overrule the demands of the rest of the audience by demanding that and nothing else. Occasionally, you do get these people who haven’t seen anything I’ve done since 1984, or at least it seems that way.”

“They’re stuck in this little time trap that they don’t even allow themselves out of; they don’t even bloody listen to anything that they’re not already familiar with. How you can sit at home with the TV remote and live that kind of life, I’m not sure. I just wouldn’t ever want to make my life and my expression a duplicable event like that. I wouldn’t ever want it to be wake up, have a cup of coffee, eat half a grapefruit, play a thirty year old song, and so on. It’s not interesting at all, and I’m not inclined to do anything that doesn’t interest me.”

Mould’s recent live shows have seen around a third of the set dedicated to classic Hüsker Dü material, but Hart is convinced that his former bandmate likely feels he would rather be pushing ahead with new material; after years of trading swipes through the press, their relationship remains icy nearly a decade after they last performed together.

“I think Bob is probably in a similar situation. He’s forced into playing some of those songs from the past when I’m sure he’d rather be doing something new. Look at it this way; when an audience gets bigger, it doesn’t necessarily get smarter, or more attentive to what’s being expressed by the artist. You’ll always have people behaving like they’re at a football match, yelling out the names of old songs and expecting the artist to play them like we’re some kind of time machine. If the conditions are right, I’ll walk those people down memory lane, if that’s what they’ve paid to see, but I feel like, at this point, I’m only ever going to give what I did in Hüsker Dü part of my attention.”

The Argument is available now via Domino.