Workbook ought to come as something of a shock to those who'd grown accustomed to the distortion-drenched hit-and-run style of Husker Du. The record's meditative tone is set by its opening track, a soft-as-a -whisper guitar instrumental called "Sunspots;" for that matter, the album is several minutes old before the first hint of distortion dares reveal itself, leaving Mould's urgent, resonant vocals as the sole point of identification. But by no means does Workbook soft-pedal the emotional intensity that Mould perfected with Husker Du - if anything, the stakes are raised, and lyrically, the record is as harrowing a mix of serenity and savagery as anything since John Lennon's notorious post-Beatles bilefests.

quiet product of a full year's reflection by Mould on the breakup of Husker Du and on his own future, which for a while, looked likely to exclude music.

But the most important move for Mould was to divorce himself from his past, at least for the time being. "When I left the group, I was pretty tired of music, generally," he says. "I just wanted to write for myself. I just thought I'd sit up at my farm and write some songs for myself, and maybe someday I'll play 'em. So I was just writing things that I wanted to hear."

"Immediately, everything was back on our shoulders," says Mould. "A lot of the problem with Husker Du was that claustrophobic attitude where nobody from the outside could get in. So now, not only did the only person 'in the band' who was not in the band die, but now we've gotta go back out on the road and keep doing it. The whole thing didn't hit me until June when we were in Europe. I just went into a black hole. I thank the Lord that I quit drugs and drinking two years before that, and that I could hold onto my sobriety through all that, because it wasn't real easy. All I could think about was, 'If this is what it's come to, I don't know if I enjoy it anymore.' It was killing all of us in one way or another - slowly, quickly, spiritually, or physically."

Husker Du's last concert was on December 12, in Missouri. "It was just a really bad show," Mould recalls. "Things were not right in public and I don't put up with that. People can call me an asshole and a dictator - Goddamn right. I'm not getting up on a fuckin' stage with all that shit on display. When people are having problems and you're not enjoying what they're doing, you don't do it in front of people, period. It's not fair to people who pay money to see a band. I thought it was miserable, Greg thought it was miserable, Grant didn't know what to think."

"To me, the only thing holding the group together for the last two or three years was the music. We just all grew apart, and people can say it's because of girlfriends, or because people are assholes, or people have drug problems, or whatever. Bands break up all the time - the truth of the matter is we grew apart as people and we had nothing in common but the music, and when that ceased to be an enjoyable thing, we had no reason to be with each other."

After the disastrous Missouri show, the band cancelled their last two gigs and came home. Warner Brothers, for whom the band had recorded only two of a contractually-promised seven albums, urged them to try to straighten things out. "We were supposed to go into Paisley the second or third week in January," Mould recalls. "I'd spent a lot of time with Grant at his folks' house trying to talk through all the problems, and at that point it wasn't important for me to keep the band together - it was important to me to see Grant get better, and just for everything to get resolved. I thing Greg was more frustrated; he was like, 'Well something's gotta happen...' Then one day, I just woke up and said, 'I know what's gonna happen.'"

"My analogy for the band at the time was that it was a runaway train," he says. "Everyone was trying to steer it and keep it on the tracks. Finally we went all the way up the big hill and all the way down it, and when the train got to the bottom I had to get off. I wasn't proud of the band when it ended. But I'll tell you, friends run tapes by me all the time and say, 'You've gotta hear this tape - it's like a Husker Du steal!' And a lot of these bands really have that sound down, and more power to 'em, 'cause it's a great sound."

gives off the chilling effect you get when you see something you know you shouldn't be seeing. Some of the songs, like "Brazilia Crossed With Trenton" and the brutally frank "Poison Years", don't require much analysis before they reveal themselves as purgings of old demons: "The more I think, the less I've got to say /I don't remember you no more/About these poison years: it's just a memory."

Indeed, listening to parts of Workbook - especially considering the naked privacy in which it was made - gives off the chilling effect you get when you see something you know you shouldn't be seeing. Some of the songs, like "Brazilia Crossed With Trenton" and the brutally frank "Poison Years", don't require much analysis before they reveal themselves as purgings of old demons: "The more I think, the less I've got to say /I don't remember you no more/About these poison years: it's just a memory."

"That's a hard song," Mould admits about "Poison Years". "It's about a lot of things I can't talk about any other way. Even the engineer, while I was recording it, was saying, 'This one's a little strong, don't you think?' And I just said, we're gonna keep upping the ante on this one until it's right.

It should come as no surprise that many of Workbook's most affecting songs hearken back, however obliquely, to Husker Du; as the band's self-appointed archivist, Mould still keeps a mass of band posters, reviews and tickets stubs, just to remind himself that there were some great times.

But the record was still essentially a product of self-imposed isolation. "I think a lot of what I was going through was in being torn between going to the press and running my mouth about what had happened, and just cooling it," Mould says. "I thought, it's really not fair in a historical sense to add fuel to the fire that had been going. I just thought, 'Well, I'll just sit and work this one out myself.' And there were some songs I wrote that would not be appropriate to put on a record, some things that were really personal."

Mould knew he would need some goading to get the songs heard; enter Anton Fier, sometime session drummer (Herbie Hancock's "Rock It"), bandleader (The Golden Palominos), and producer (Joe Henry's new album, Murder of Crows). Last summer, Mould renewed a long friendship with Fier by indicating that he might be interested in recording again. After Fier pledged to help, he spent time at Mould's farm, listening to hours of material and talking about who else should round out the band. Around Thanksgiving, after sifting through dozens of offers, Mould decided to record for Virgin and alerted Fier that work was about to begin. A longtime Pere Ubu fan, Mould told Fier that he'd like that band's bassist, Tony Maimone, to join in; within fifteen minutes, Maimone had cancelled his engagements for the following weeks and called Mould. Acclaimed cellist Jane Scarpantoni was added, and in Mould's words, "It was like, instant band."

Mould found that not only had his playing skills been dulled by endlessly performing the same music on the road, but that his mettle as a producer and arranger would receive its first real test with the seasoned pros he'd assembled for Workbook. "When everything's turned up loud, and you're jumping around and everybody's going nuts, it's really easy to play three chords," he says. "But these people... I mean, everybody paid so much attention to detail - like the hi-hat should come in here, and be miked this way - it was like, let's see how much of a producer and arranger Bob is, 'cause these are some badass players, and they're calling my shit up. So it was really challenging."

The time elapsed from the start of sessions for the basic tracks to the day the master tapes were delivered to Virgin was just over two months, an incredibly swift pace by latter-day standards. "It was mostly a matter of a lot of 20-hour days," Mould says. "We pretty much locked the door and stayed in there until it was ready."

The overriding reason for the breakup passed around among insiders focused on drummer Hart's substance abuse problems, but Mould, Hart, and bassist Norton all realized that it was time to step of the merry-go-round. (Neither Hart nor Norton could be reached for this story; Hart released an EP, 2541, last summer, and has played some well-received shows at 7th Street Entry, and Norton is reportedly out of the music business.) Although he realizes it's a story he'll have to tell a hundred times in the coming months, Mould still gets choked up when discussing the band's dissolution.

"I was the one who called Greg and said, 'I've had enough. I quit,' and I finally tracked Grant down a week later and said, 'I can't take this anymore, its killing me. It's killing all of us,'" Mould remembers. "Nobody can really take the credit or the blame for it. It had just disintegrated to the point where someone had to stand up and make it formal. When you're in our position, there are people who have to be called, like lawyers and record companies; contracts have to be dissolved. Nobody seemed to want to do that while everything was tumbling, so I just took the initiative and got it over with for everybody's sake."

Another function of Mould's year off was to assert himself as a producer (for the Zulus, whose album is due for release on Slash, and for Hoboken's Friction Wheel) and record company magnate. Last year Mould co-founded SOL (for Singles Only Label) as a reaction to the escalating policies of major labels of phasing out the seven-inch, two-song single. "It just seemed like something to do," he says. "I mean, I grew up with singles-- my dad would bring jukebox singles home from the store when I was six years old. I hate to see 'em go, because not only did they seem like a big part of my life in '65 and '66, but also in '77 and '78, because then, you felt like you were really helping a band by buying their single, even if you'd never heard of them."

back that's for sure. I was a fool to think I could ever stop."

"And one thing I'm really proud of on this record is I finally feel like a writer writer, because I think I was able to do what good writers do traditionally in the romantic sense of the word: They force their work to come out of their environment, and that's what the record signified to me. It was a proud moment for me, because I finally feel like not a songwriter, but a writer."

feelings, but as time goes on, I don't have any feelings at all about it."

Odds are, Mould's next solo work will be a touch more conciliatory in lyrical tone, even if he decides to crank it up musically. But he sees himself as truly possessed by what he does, and his records will likely always reflect that intensity. "Getting that stuff down on paper is nice, but I don't have any choice," he says. "It's not always something I enjoy, but it's something I do every day. Somebody asked me once why I just don't go see a therapist, and I said 'Because it would kill me.' That would destroy my work. The stuff on this record is heavy, but sometimes I wish it had been heavier, and had taken people to where they couldn't get out of it. But not this time; maybe with the next one."