He started writing his latest album, Sunshine Rock, toward the end of 2016 while he was in Berlin and had a revelation. “All of a sudden, summer came, and ‘Sunshine Rock,’ the song, showed up,” he says. “Then it became, ‘Aha, this is the key. This is what I need to follow. This is the music, the song that’s really making me happy.'” (...) “The new work pairs up so nicely with the historical stuff with Sugar and Hüsker Dü,” he says. “It just becomes this one big song in a way.
(...)
What prompted you to use orchestral strings on the album?
When I’m writing songs, I typically do pretty elaborate demos with guitars, basses and rhythm tracks. A lot of times, I put placeholder keyboards down for melodic ideas. A couple of weeks before we started tracking, I woke up and was like, “This record needs more melody.” On the demos, I’d written a lot of things with organs or cellos in mind, and I thought, “I’m going to go for it. I’m going to find an orchestra and build these parts out and see what happens.” (...) We recorded our basic tracks, shipped it over to Prague, and they got the strings done in a day. It was so much fun to do.
(...)
Were you thinking of Grant Hart, who died last year, when you were writing any of these songs?
Of course. The three of us were definitely thinking about Grant when we were making the record. Jon was a huge fan. Jason and Grant were friends, as well. So you acknowledge the loss. You try to pay tribute to all the things that you’ve done, whether it’s me specifically with Hüsker Dü or those guys as fans. Of course you think about those things.
Were you able to make amends with him toward the end?
Yeah. [Pauses] How to answer that? We sort of worked together on that Numero Group box for the better part of four years. We weren’t working next to each other in the same room, but everybody in the band and the attorney in Minnesota that was handling everything was working together towards a common goal.
(...)
Well, obviously the band never reunited.
Yeah, and to the best of my knowledge, there was no desire to reunite the band ever. Although … you know. [Pauses] That would have been a difficult feat. I think my stance all along was that everything has its place in time, and everything is of a moment. And what the band did in the Eighties, to try to replicate or duplicate all the circumstances or the emotions or the environment that made it what it was would be pretty tough. And I didn’t want to go back...
(...)
With Zen Arcade and New Day Rising, we were just in the middle of it. It was just so furious and constant that we didn’t really get to take much of it in. We were just putting so much out. So really having the studio to ourselves to craft a record the way we want it, I think that was the creative peak of the band — or the collaborative peak, maybe.
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Да, грустно всё это... Грант умер от рака печени - характерного недуга хиппарей с их токсическими эпытами. Hüsker Dü метеором пронеслись на небосводе и совершенно неожиданно распались. Хотя если подумать, это было правильное решение, ибо каждый из участников занялся исключительно собственной работой.
И я всё ещё считаю, что Hüsker Dü недооценили, или, может быть, недопоняли. Их карьера была слишком стремительной и они чудовищно много разбрасывались...
То есть это нормально и правильно, но, чёрт побери, как хотелось бы хоть на миг оказаться там, где звучали эти изумитульные песни!.. Также повторю ещё раз, что Hüsker Dü - это самая американская группа (естественно, на мой взгляд), именно передающая аутентичный дух Штатов, даже не делая поправки на эпоху Рейгана (это неважно).
