Interview: Soul Asylum [Part I]

by John Davidson
3 August 2006

DAVE PIRNER is literally the voice of SOUL ASYLUM, a band he started with his friends DAN MURPHY and the late KARL MUELLER. His gravelly voice and unexpectedly poignant lyrics made “Runaway Train” a pop smash in 1993, and it gave his band a very surprising ride on the rollercoaster of fame. He left the Minneapolis scene for New Orleans nearly a decade ago, but he will forever be associated with the great bands of that scene. The new album Silver Lining is a great return to form, one that will please the fans of the pre-_Grave Dancer’s Union_ years, as well as the ones who joined up in the 1990s.

Sounds like you had a pretty good time making the new record.

DAVE PIRNER: Yeah, what’s the word…professional! We were really seasoned to all the pitfalls and pratfalls, so we kind of knew what to do. We kind of went into it saying, “We’ve done this a million times. What can we possibly do right?” You’re essentially trying to be spontaneous in a controlled environment. I think we kind of had an advantage of being in a low pressure situation; we pretty much controlled the reins all by ourselves, all the way from putting up our own money to picking the places in Minneapolis instead of going the route of the past dozen years. Goin’ to L.A. or New York, set schedules, set expectations that were sometimes very elusive.

Was Karl sick when you guys started to work on the album?

DAVE PIRNER: [I don’t know if] I keep answering this question wrong or not, but it’s such a foggy, hazy, sad scenario. It all seems like this surreal set of events that led up to when we were tracking, and he was diagnosed and put into chemo. I think that sort of the way it went was that as soon as MICHAEL BLAND agreed to go ahead and make the record, we were good to go. We decided to do it, we had our songs all sorted out. And then shortly thereafter, Karl was diagnosed. There was never any doubt in anyone’s mind that he was going to pull through, but at the same time, we were really trying to accommodate his heroic efforts in a horrible situation of testing and surgeries and different kinds of radiation. It’s just such a sad situation that it’s really hard to think about.

Were you living in New Orleans at the time?

DAVE PIRNER: For all practical purposes, I was there fulltime about ten years ago. I think I made sort of a lame attempt to say that we could record in New Orleans, but at that time, we sort of knew we had to be in Minneapolis because of Karl’s situation. It was the most cost effective way to make the record by a long shot. It all kind of worked together well.

Were all of you friends with Michael? Is that how he got involved?

DAVE PIRNER: I’ve known him for years, as long as I can remember. And I’ve always been a fan. He’s an incredible musician. The funny side of the story is that I’d traveled all over America trying to find a drummer. I auditioned drummer after drummer, and part of the reason I ended up in New Orleans is because I figured the world’s best drummers must be there! It’s such a rhythmic place, you know? But Michael worked out perfectly. He grew up in Minneapolis, so as he likes to explain it, “I grew up listening to the same crappy radio stations you did!” It’s just kind of funny to me that he was right under our nose the whole time. The first time he sat down to play with us, it was a no-brainer.

Did you brings songs to Dan to get things going?

DAVE PIRNER: Well, I’d been down in New Orleans, just writing songs, basically. Once I’d finished my solo record, it was all about making another Soul Asylum record. I was trying to write songs for a Soul Asylum record in a way that I’d sort of let go of in order to write my solo record. So, it was kind of getting things back again, kind of writing the write kind of material for the band. There’s a really high standard and kind of a particular thing that the band looks for that I can only hit on by trial and error. I bring stuff to the practice space and listen to tapes over and over and over until somebody says, “Oh, that’s something that might sound like Soul Asylum,” and we play through it. You would think that whatever I write, since most of it ends up on Soul Asylum, will work for Soul Asylum but that is definitely not the case.

With you down in New Orleans, how did the songs get finished then?

DAVE PIRNER: It really depended on the tune. It happened differently; I would come up and we’d spend four or five days working out stuff and then we’d go record them and demo them. Another way it worked was that I had a bunch of songs and Danny came down to New Orleans and we worked on things with a couple of guys from a band in New Orleans; that was after Karl was sick. I also made a bunch of acoustic demos, which were just me singing the songs with an acoustic guitar, and I sent those up and the fellas listened to them and picked ones to do with the band. I was just auditioning song after song, and they made it onto tape in various ways. Oh, and I had a bunch of stuff that I wrote on the computer, and when I played it for Danny, he was like, “What the f*** are you doing!” (laughs) I was trying to reinvent the wheel, trying to come up with some fantastic new presentation of what the band could do. The record is what we can do, and all the rest of the songwriting was just me flailing.

Was that process excruciating to go through, or was it creatively satisfying?

DAVE PIRNER: It was excruciating to go through because the farther along you get, the more sh*t you’ve already songs about and the more styles you’ve already tried. You start to realize your limitations, that narrow pass that you have to find where everything works for everybody. It was also excruciating as hell because of Karl, it was so emotionally out of control to have our main guy in such a state.

He sounds like an indelible part of this record.

DAVE PIRNER: Yeah. At times it’s sort of shocking and awkward and at times it’s so intensely sentimental. Many songs just evoke different times of my life with Karl. I mean, I’ll think of him on a newer song because it was the last time we played together. I’ll think of him on an old song because that was when we were in Japan and I remember playing it with him. Or I remember how much he liked it or the way he used to play a part of it. There’s all kind of weird emotions connected to it.

[Parts II and III to follow]

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