Sat. March 27 

 If you mention Husker Du, the pioneering post-punk band of the ‘80s, most fans immediately think of Bob Mould. He was its singer-guitarist and he’s had quite a visible career since the band’s 1987 breakup.
    Less so, Grant Hart. He was the Minneapolis-based Husker Du’s drummer-singer and shared the songwriting with Mould. Hart has made five studio solo CDs or EPs and two CDs with the band Nova Mob. But there was a decade-long gap between releases, which ended late last year with a terrific psychedelic-garage-pop disc, “Hot Wax.”
    Hart comes to the Arts at the Armory Café in Somerville Saturday March 27 at 8.  It’s a solo show, just voice and guitar. We spoke with Hart before his last area appearance at the Middle East Up for a Boston Herald story. Excerpts from our chat here: 
    That was a long stretch between discs. People wondered where you were.
    Hart: I’ve played Cambridge at least once every 18 months. But I started sneaking things into my life that I sacrificed very early on. It was the idea of having a hobby that fed the other side of my brain. When you live off your creativity, every day you wake up with a blank canvass. To balance it out, I took on some projects where there was one specific way something had to be put together in order for it to operate. Much of my time has been spent with automotive restoration. I wanted to be able to let my hands do the work, instead of my mind and a dictating machine.
    It’s unusual for someone to step off the music industry merry-go-round like that.
    It’s something that’s not going to be co-opted into my pop life. I was learning to leave the house with a destination that wasn’t career related. To this day, I have difficulty traveling over 100 miles without there being a gig at the other end.
  Is there a connection between your life as a musician and your non-musical life?
    I still find ways to incorporate friction and tension into about everything I do. I’m an iconoclast by nature. But I try to be a gentleman.
    There’s the general consensus, that with you and Bob sharing Husker Du songwriting, you provided the more melodic pop end. True?
   Oh yeah. Basically, my consciousness of music is if it doesn’t have a melody, maybe it’s something less than a song. I’ve always experimented with more atonal, un-melodic things, but as far as something that I’m recording, I’m always doing singles.
    And on the new record you’ve got organ, trumpet and strings. The band Godspeed You! Black Emperorcq help out, too. But live, it’s just you.
      The songs have origins in me with one instrument. Everything else embellishes it. There’s a lot of costumes in my trunk. In the studio I can be painstakingly looking for a precise blend of instruments. Live, it’s stripped-down and pumped-up.
     You and Bob had a pretty noisy fallout. With all the reunions of ‘80s bands going on, is there any possibility of that with Husker Du?
    It’s such a complicated issue. I’m fairly paranoid. I already went through one breakup of Husker Du and from the way that worked out, it’s not something I would embrace repeating. There’s a perception that I’ve re-entered music again and people think the drum roll is already sounding for that event. But, where people think the biggest hurdle would be getting Grant and Bob together in the same room, another relationship that’s not being put into the math is with [bassist] Greg [Norton]. Greg has distanced himself from music. I love the guy, but I don’t think there’s much he’s done in the last 20 years that would make him deserving of being involved in a reunion. And there’s something to be said for the bands that don’t.
Tickets: $10.

191 Highland Ave., Somerville, 617-718-2191 www.artsatthearmory.org