Music & Concerts
‘Blue Hearts’ beating: an interview with Bob Mould
Gay musician brings latest tour to Annapolis
If gay modern rock legend Bob Mould isn’t the hardest-working man in music, he’s definitely one of them. To prove that point, he’s wasted no time in following up 2019’s aptly titled “Sunshine Rock” with the somewhat bluer “Blue Hearts (Merge).” The album is blue in terms of its sexual content (check out “Leather Dreams”) as well as in the liberal political messaging in songs such as “American Crisis,” “Next Generation” and “Heart on my Sleeve.”
As always, the songs are delivered in his trademark crunchy and blazing guitar rock style, with Mould backed by longtime bandmates Jason Narducy on bass and Jon Wurster on drums. I had the pleasure of speaking with Bob about Blue Hearts and the Distortion box sets.
BLADE: Blue Hearts opens with “Heart on my Sleeve,” which begins with the lines, fittingly enough for right now, “The left coast is covered in ash and flames/keep denying the winds of climate change.” The song was written and recorded long before the disastrous wildfire season. How does it feel to you when you listen to or perform that song now?
BOB MOULD: You can’t write this stuff [laughs]. When I started gathering ideas for this record, it was with the idea of being more of a journalist. Trying to make my thoughts known, these are the things that appeared. Specifically, on that line, we’ve been having years of fires out here. Now, it’s just so much worse. They tried to tell people this might happen, but I guess it wasn’t that important to the government to think about climate change until it was too late. So here we are.
BLADE: Has living in California heightened your awareness of the dire state of environmental issues and in what ways do you hope to make an impact?
MOULD: For the better of the last four years I was in Berlin, Germany, where we like to think that Germany and Europe is way more progressive. But even in Germany, coal is such a motivator over there, and the auto industry is so important. They’ve got issues with (gas pipeline) Nord Stream 2 with the Russians right now. I guess being back in California since November of 2019, I think I have a heightened awareness all the way across the board, not only how climate change is affecting the West Coast, but how the sensationalist mainstream news media, news as entertainment, has affected the psyche of the country and created such great division. For me, the juxtaposition is that in Germany, news is mainly still news. It’s not exciting. There’s nothing titillating about it. It’s just news, which is what news should be. Being back here, I think the over amplifying of things here has created beyond an echo chamber, almost canceling out truth, which is nutty to be thinking about at eight in the morning when I can’t even breathe outside.
BLADE: “Next Generation,” which follows “Heart on my Sleeve,” is also prescient, with the lines “Please pay attention/Take to the streets for your rights,” especially in light of the Black Lives Matter movement’s rise to prominence following the murder of George Floyd and others. Would you agree that the timing of the release of “Blue Hearts” is extraordinary?
MOULD: It was a little unnerving. In life and, for lack of a better term, in entertainment and the arts, timing is key to things. When I set out to write the record it was just a general impression, speaking on 59 years on this planet and seeing what we as people actually need to do. Such as turning away from sensationalist force-fed media and talking to our neighbors, getting out on the street, protesting. Being in Germany, I don’t think a single week went by where I did not stumble into an organized protest that would take over the main streets of certain neighborhoods in Berlin. It was accepted behavior. To go from years of that and to come back here, writing these words was sort of a reminder to people that this is what we did in America in the `60s. This is not a bunch of radical, left extremists, who are going to loot Bergdorf Goodman. That’s not the intent when people take to the streets for their rights. What I just described is actually looting, which is different [laughs].
BLADE: It’s ironic, don’t you think, that the some of the people who were out there protesting in the streets in the ‘60s, have now, in their dotage, become so conservative, even going so far as to support Trump?
MOULD: It sure feels like that could be the case. I don’t have hard evidence, but I would suggest you may be right [laughs].
BLADE: It’s frightening, because these are the original hippies who are upset about protests.
MOULD: I think people protest when they feel like they’ve lost their voice or they have no means. Means being that they don’t have a large stake in the stock market, which the president speaks about when he says, “I didn’t want to cause panic.” Meaning panic on Wall Street. I worry, because my job is to observe the world through my oddly shaped glasses [laughs] and just report back on what I remember from being a 21, 22-year-old kid who had absolutely nothing but a band and a guitar and an amp with which to do things. Maybe these people who used to protest when they had nothing, once people get means, once people are invested, maybe they lose sight of the plight of the common person.
BLADE: When I interviewed gay writer David Leavitt about his novel “Shelter in Place,” we talked about the parallels for gay men when it comes to the AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, similarities including Republicans being in power and the undue influence of evangelicals. “American Crisis,” the blistering first single from “Blue Hearts” shares a similar sentiment. Do you think gay men could teach the rest of the world how to survive a plague, both viral and extremist?
MOULD: I think David is illuminating what I think is a historical parallel, which you just can’t deny. Whether America’s ready to listen to older gay men beyond caricatures on network television, I don’t know. If they are, there are things we can tell them. For me personally, as a young gay man in the `80s, it sort of crushed my development, but I realized that I had to protect other people so I had to do certain things for 35 years until PrEP came along. Why was it not a problem for me for all those years, yet when you ask someone why they don’t wear a mask, it’s because it’s their liberty. What if I had been that cavalier?
BLADE: Right. It was such a simple thing for us to realize that to save our own lives, and the lives of others, you put on a condom, you relearn how to have sex. There’s just no comparison to putting on a mask.
MOULD: Yes, because this is just something that everybody’s doing on their face. When you’re asking people to make emotional sacrifices in moments of intimacy, I think that’s a little bit heavier than having a mask on your doorknob so you put it on your face when you leave your dwelling [laughs].
BLADE: The activist aspect of the album is reflected in that you donated the proceeds from the “American Crisis” single to OutFront Minnesota and Black Visions Collective when it was released a few months ago. Why were those two organizations chosen?
MOULD: That was a split choice. I chose the LGBT group in Minnesota because a lot of the record, as you have seen, speaks from an older gay male perspective. Merge Records donated its half to the Black Lives Matter related situation that was going on in Minnesota. We mutually said that this covers all the things we’re trying to say.
BLADE: “Leather Dreams,” which basically struts out of the speakers like a freeballing stud, manages to be both erotic and thoughtful, with its reference to “Tops and their bottoms, condoms and PrEP.” It’s also the sound of sexual liberation, so was it as liberating to write as it sounds?
MOULD: Yeah! I had a three-day sleepless stretch in January, right before going on the road and then right into the studio with these songs. I had the house to myself. I was writing like a madman. That one just fell out of nowhere. It was so hilarious because clearly these are the experiences of someone [laughs]. It’s really riotous. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as out front. There were moments on Modulate, back in ’02, but nothing quite as overt. I think it’s outright hilarious. Who is this guy? Who has this life [laughs]?
BLADE: In addition to “Blue Hearts,” there is the massive CD and LP box sets Distortion: 1989-2019 and Distortion: 1989-1995, respectively. What does it mean to you to have these expansive retrospectives available and why was now the time to release them?
MOULD: I had been talking with Demon Music Group about this project for five years on and off. A lot it was a matter of timing. Back in ’16, Patch The Sky was out and I was doing a lot of touring and I kept that record alive for almost two years and then I went right into Sunshine Rock (in 2019). I thought that after Sunshine Rock wound its way down, I was going to take a longer break. Maybe I’ll take a couple of years. This would be a good time to have the box set. It will be something in between Sunshine Rock and whatever’s next. Then my head started burning with all this new music. Then I was faced with this interesting dilemma of having a current project and a retrospective at the same time. It’s weird because the current record sounds like the music that predates the box set [laughs]. That really aggressive simplistic songwriting style. But the box set is really great. Every time I put out a record, people are like, “Is this your 14th solo album?” and I can never remember; now they’re all in one place.
Music & Concerts
Underdog glorious: a personal remembrance of Jill Sobule
Talented singer, songwriter died in house fire on May 1
I’ve always prided myself on being the kind of music consumer who purchased music on impulse. When I stumbled across “Things Here Are Different,” Jill Sobule’s 1990 MCA Records debut album on vinyl in a favorite Chicago record store, I bought it without knowing anything about her. This was at a time when we didn’t have our phones in our pockets to search for information about the artist on the internet. The LP stayed in my collection until, as vinyl was falling out of fashion, I replaced it with a CD a few years later.
Early in my career as an entertainment journalist, I received a promo copy of Jill’s eponymous 1995 Atlantic Records album. That year, Atlantic Records was one of the labels at the forefront of signing and heavily promoting queer artists, including Melissa Ferrick and Extra Fancy, and its roster included the self-titled album by Jill. It was a smart move, as the single “I Kissed A Girl” became a hit on radio and its accompanying video (featuring Fabio!) was in heavy rotation on MTV (when they still played videos).
Unfortunately for Jill, she was a victim of record label missteps. When 1997’s wonderful “Happy Town” failed to repeat the success, Atlantic dumped her. That was Atlantic’s loss, because her next album, the superb “Pink Pearl” contained “Heroes” and “Mexican Wrestler,” two of her most beloved songs. Sadly, Beyond Music, the label that released that album ceased to exist after just a few years. To her credit, the savvy Jill had also started independently releasing music (2004’s “The Folk Years”). That was a smart move because her next major-label release, the brilliant “Underdog Victorious” on Artemis Records, met a similar fate when that label folded.
With her 2009 album “California Years,” Jill launched her own indie label, Pinko Records, on which she would release two more outstanding full-length discs, 2014’s “Dottie’s Charms” (on which she collaborated with some of her favorite writers, including David Hadju, Rick Moody, Mary Jo Salter, and Jonathan Lethem), and 2018’s stunning “Nostalgia Kills.” Jill’s cover of the late Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” on “Nostalgia Kills” was particularly poignant as she had toured with him as an opening act.
Jill was a road warrior, constantly on tour, and her live shows were something to behold. My first interview with Jill took place at the Double Door in Chicago in early August of 1995, when she was the opening act for legendary punk band X. She had thrown her back out the previous day and was diagnosed with a herniated disc. To be comfortable, she was lying down on a fabulous-‘50s sofa. “I feel like I’m at my shrink’s,” she said to me, “Do you want me to talk about my mother?”
That sense of humor, which permeated and enriched her music, was one of many reasons to love Jill. I was privileged to interview her for seven of her albums. Everything you would want to know about her was right there in her honest lyrics, in which she balanced her distinctive brand of humor with serious subject matter. Drawing on her life experiences in songs such as “Bitter,” “Underachiever,” “One of These Days,” “Freshman,” “Jetpack,” “Nothing To Prove,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Island of Lost Things,” “Where Do I Begin,” “Almost Great,” and “Big Shoes,” made her songs as personal as they were universal, elicited genuine affection and concern from her devoted fans.
While she was a consummate songwriter, Jill also felt equally comfortable covering songs made famous by others, including “Just A Little Lovin’” (on the 2000 Dusty Springfield tribute album “Forever Dusty”) and “Stoned Soul Picnic” (from the 1997 Laura Nyro tribute album “Time and Love”). Jill also didn’t shy away from political subject matter in her music with “Resistance Song,” “Soldiers of Christ,” “Attic,” “Heroes,” “Under the Disco Ball,” and the incredible “America Back” as prime examples.
Here’s something else worth mentioning about Jill. She was known for collaboration skills. As a songwriter, she maintained a multi-year creative partnership with Robin Eaton (“I Kissed A Girl” and many others), as well as Richard Barone, the gay frontman of the renowned band The Bongos. Jill’s history with Barone includes performing together at a queer Octoberfest event in Chicago in 1996. Writer and comedian Julie Sweeney, of “SNL” and “Work in Progress” fame was another Chicago collaborator with Sobule (Sweeney lives in a Chicago suburb), where they frequently performed their delightful “The Jill and Julia Show.” John Doe, of the aforementioned band X, also collaborated with Jill in the studio (“Tomorrow Is Breaking” from “Nostalgia Kills”), as well as in live performances.
On a very personal note, in 2019, when I was in the process of arranging a reading at the fabulous NYC gay bookstore Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, I reached out to Jill and asked her if she would like to be on the bill with me. We alternated performing; I would read a couple of poems, and Jill would sing a couple of songs. She even set one of my poems to music, on the spot.
Jill had an abundance of talent, and when she turned her attention to musical theater, it paid off in a big way. Her stage musical “F*ck 7th Grade,” a theatrical piece that seemed like the next logical step in her career, had its premiere at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre in the fall of 2020, during the height of the pandemic. The unique staging (an outdoor drive-in stage at which audience members watched from their cars) was truly inspired. “F*ck 7th Grade” went on to become a New York Times Critic’s pick, as well as earning a Drama Desk nomination.
In honor of the 30th anniversary of Jill’s eponymous 1995 album, reissue label Rhino Records is re-releasing it on red vinyl. Jill and I had been emailing each other to arrange a time for an interview. We even had a date on the books for the third week of May.
When she died in a house fire in Minnesota on May 1 at age 66, Jill received mentions on network and cable news shows. She was showered with attention from major news outlets, including obits in the New York Times and Rolling Stone (but not Pitchfork, who couldn’t be bothered to review her music when she was alive). Is it wrong to think that if she’d gotten this much attention when she was alive she could have been as big as Taylor Swift? I don’t think so.
Music & Concerts
Tom Goss returns with ‘Bear Friends Furever Tour’
Out singer/songwriter to perform at Red Bear Brewing Co.
Singer Tom Goss will bring his “Bear Friends Furever Tour” to D.C. on Sunday, June 8 at 8 p.m. at Red Bear Brewing Co.
Among the songs he will perform will be “Bear Soup,” the fourth installment in his beloved bear song anthology series. Following fan favorites like “Bears,” “Round in All the Right Places,” and “Nerdy Bear,” this high-energy, bass-thumping banger celebrates body positivity, joyful indulgence, and the vibrant spirit of the bear subculture.
For more details, visit Tom Goss’s website.
Aussie pop icon Kylie Minogue brings her acclaimed “Tension” world tour to D.C. next Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Capital One Arena. Tickets are still available at Ticketmaster.
The show features songs spanning her long career, from 1987 debut single, “The Loco-Motion,” to “Padam, Padam” from her album, “Tension.”
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