He had been Husker Du's live sound engineer for the last three years of the band, and I had used him for the basic tracking of Workbook. Did you feel a certain comfort zone with him? You had worked with the album's producer, Lou Giordano, before. I had played the material a lot in various settings, made some pretty elaborate home demos, so when it was time to go into the studio and make a record, I was very prepared.' The songs were probably more melodic and immediate than on the other solo records. Sugar wasn't even a band in my head at first. In my mind, I was going in to make the third Bob Mould solo record. In going into Copper Blue, did you have a different mission statement than on previous albums? Mould with Sugar, early '90s: bassist David Barbe (center) and drummer Malcolm Travis (right). I played new songs live before I recorded them, so I could see what was working for people.

Prior to this, I had spent a lot of time in Europe, toured all over, and I was writing a lot. The spring of '91 found me back to square one in many ways, business-wise and record company-wise. My second one, Black Sheets Of Rain, came out in the fall of '90, and it was a darker record, a little bit heavier. My first solo record, Workbook, had come out in 1989, and it was very well received. You kind of always are, really, but in my case, at the beginning of 1991, I had left Minneapolis and moved to New York City. What kind of musician you were back in 1991-'92, when you recorded the album?

It was a good-sounding record then, and I think we made it better now.' I could widen the stereo feel and bring the bass out down the center. So when I put the tapes back up and listened to them sort of flat again, I thought, Wow, mastering has come a long way! We can do a lot more to this now. We were trying to fit a lot of information into a stereo mix. 'Just how long it took us to get the mixes right. In doing so, what struck you about its original sound? After you write a book and dredge up all the stuff in your life, doing something like this is something of a relief.' Compared to that, going back and extracting one album out of my body of work, and an album that I really like, that's not a problem at all. The nearly three years I spent revisiting my life when I wrote my book, that was hard.

Dredge Up Eventide