Rolling Stone Known as Mould

Advocate.com: Congratulations on your new album,
Life and Times

. You just had an album last year; any reason you're so
prolific lately?DistrictLine

was supposed to come out about six months sooner than it
actually did. It was meant to be out in late '07,
and when I switched labels from Yep Roc to ANTI it got held up.
So actually the writing has been in cycle, but the albums have
been out of cycle.

From your Coachella set, it's clear you have a diverse
fan base. How do you describe your fans?

It's an eclectic mix. Going back to Hüsker
Dü in the '80s, that was a very underground,
hard-core punk audience that morphed into what we know as
college rock or alternative music. In the '90s with Sugar,
that music had become so mainstream, and Sugar was a really
popular band that got a lot of exposure on MTV and commercial
radio; that brought a much bigger casual audience. Now I think
the audience is a combination of a lot of the old-time fans,
but there's a whole new crop of people coming in.
Specifically, with the gay and lesbian audience, I have the
bear fans. Go figure.

The music you make has evolved over the years. Are you
currently responding to new genres?

Over the last decade I've been a real fan of the electronic
stuff going on. In the late '90s, when I was living in New
York, that's when I got exposed to a lot of that music;
Chelsea and West Village and that trancy techno that was
everywhere. I got an ear for it and started composing in that
style. Through the rest of the decade I've been moving back
to guitar stuff. Having said that,
Blowoff

is the big DJ event we do [at Washington, D.C.'s 9:30
Club], so I get to have my electronica fix there and my guitar
fix here. As far as stuff I'm listening to,
there's a lot of young bands that are revisiting that
hard-core alternative rock sound from the '80s like No Age
and Fucked Up.