“It was me digging in and lightening up. Cheap Trick’s In Color was a big touchstone for that record”: His first band inspired Nirvana but sold no records. His next band finally gave him the success he deserved

Sugar posing for a photograph in the early 1990s.

A mighty waterfall of Beatle-ish melodies and grunge dynamics, Bob Mould’s finest power-pop anthem arrived out of a clear blue sky, plopping into the former Hüsker Dü frontman’s mental inbox on some jingle-jangle morning in the summer of 1991.

“It was this dream song that just turned up as I was waking up one morning,” Mould recalls. “It came to me fully formed, and then it’s just all the baubles that make it that crazy baroque band thing. All that was pretty much in my head too, but you have to sit down and make these baubles shine. That’s the production stuff.”