Makeup For The Silence

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20 Plays
She Floated AwayHusker Du

Hüsker Dü - She Floated Away

I found my way to Hüsker Dü in the mid-90s by way of vocalist/guitarist Bob Mould’s later alt-rock project Sugar, but it’s apparent that by the verge of their demise (the band disintegrated while in the beginning stages of preparing a follow-up to 1987’s Warehouse: Songs And Stories) co-leader/vocalist/drummer Grant Hart’s songwriting talents were beginning to outstrip Mould’s*. The McCartney to Mould’s Lennon, Hart’s songs tempered Mould’s bristling rage with sweetness, pathos and a knack for killer melodic hooks.

She Floated Away isn’t Grant’s best track on the album — that would be either She’s A Woman (And Now He Is A Man), which features the finest lyric Hart composed, or You Can Live At Home Now, though perhaps credit on the latter goes to Greg Norton’s incredible funky bass hook. But it’s a damn fine song, with a lilting melody that begs to be sung in a brogue and a drum line that perfectly sums up Hart’s approach to his instrument, the punk speed crossed with a jazzy flair that drags just a hair behind the beat, always feeling on the verge of falling apart but somehow hanging together, much like the characters he so frequently wrote about.

Since the demise of the Hüskers, Grant has soldiered on both with a project called Nova Mob and as a solo performer. His album Good News For Modern Man, in particular, is pretty great; as much as I love Bob, it’s a shame Grant’s latter efforts haven’t had the same sort of visibility. His most recent, Hot Wax, features some of the best songs Grant’s written to date, and though I have some serious quibbles with the production, it’s worth checking out. He still tours, often with little advance notice or advertising. I finally caught him for the first time last year, and it was well worth the wait. Somehow, he keeps hanging on.

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According to some wackjob with highly questionable math skills, today is supposed to be the day of the Rapture as foretold in the Christian bible. There are a number of different takes on how the Rapture is actually supposed to play out; one commonly accepted interpretation is that Jesus will call the faithful to him, and they will quite literally float up through the sky to gather in the clouds.

*Mould, ultimately, would benefit greatly from the band’s dissolution; freed from Hüsker Dü’s punk framework, his writing talents exploded in a number of disparate directions which I will no doubt write more on at some other point. I’ve long been a Bobophile; I’ve seen him upwards of 10 times in concert, I’ve been a (mostly lurking) member of the Sugar mailing list since the mid 90s, and his various guises have been a heavy influence on my musical taste for more than half my life at this point.