Hüsker Dü co-founder Grant Hart will release a new solo album, The Argument, on July 22 via Domino Records. The double album will feature 20 songs inspired by John Milton’s 17th Century epic Paradise Lost. As the label explains, actual words from the poem, which regards the Fall of Man, are “rarely quoted directly [but] all of the menace, pain and devotion of Milton’s best loved work are here found.”
Hart was evidently inspired by reading an unpublished William S. Burroughs manuscript called Lost Paradise, which recast the Bible’s fallen angels as alien life-forms and God as 33rd President Harry S. Truman. As the album consists of two distinct halves, Domino has seen fit to share a song from each. First up is the melancholy “Is the Sky the Limit?” which could feel perfectly at home on Blur’s lovely 2003 LP Think Tank (had Graham Coxon been around to man the guitar). Then we have “Letting Me Out,” a rollicking rock’n’roller sung from Satan’s point of view.
The man and his band, the Burn/Burning, will tour extensively behind The Argument, accompanied by some sort of conceptual presentation. “We hesitate to use the phrases like rock opera or modern dance, but you get the idea,” Domino says. Sounds promising.
Grant Hart, The Argument track list:
1. “Out of Chaos”
2. “Morningstar”
3. “Awake, Arise!”
4. “If We Have the Will”
5. “I Will Never See My Home”
6. “I Am Death”
7. “Sin”
8. “Letting Me Out”
9. “Is the Sky the Limit?”
10. “Golden Chain”
11. “So Far From Heaven”
12. “Shine, Shine, Shine”
13. “It Isn’t Love”
14. “War in Heaven”
15. “Glorious”
16. “(It Was a) Most Disturbing Dream”
17. “Underneath the Apple Tree”
18. “The Argument”
19. “Run for the Wilderness”
20. “For Those Too High Aspiring”
