INTERVIEW: Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner Remains a Poetic Rock Force (INTERVIEW)

Back in April, Soul Asylum released their twelfth studio album, Hurry Up & Wait. Preparing to take the new songs out on the road, a national pandemic had other plans and the band had to readjust to the new circumstances of life in America without music venues being open. So they did what other musicians were doing and brought their songs to their fans via social media. And now that experience has turned into a 4-song EP, Born Free, released in October and featuring acoustic versions of “Here We Go,” “If I Told You,” “In The Beginning” and “Got It Pretty Good.”

A punk band in the very beginning, Soul Asylum eventually morphed into a new breed with popish melody hooks while retaining enough of that punk spark to be cool with the kids. By the time Grave Dancers Union reared it’s vinyl head in the fall of 1992, they had pretty much found their niche sound. “Somebody To Shove” hit right off the bat with it’s busy bee guitars and Dave Pirner’s spazzing butterfly vocals. But nothing compared to what would happen once the video for “Runaway Train” took residence on MTV in the summer of 1993 and blasted the Minnesota band into the stratosphere. Appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in August, then-drummer Grant Young put it simply: “Dave is good at vocalizing what we’re feeling.”

A dizzying couple of years followed as Soul Asylum rode their asteroid through massive tours, more radio hits, MTV Unplugged and Saturday Night Live appearances, the tragic death of Karl Mueller from cancer in 2005 and the inevitable momentum slowdown. During it all, Pirner kept writing, weaving everything from emotional wounds to societal frustrations and inner happiness into musical poems. Hurry Up & Wait is no exception. Glide reviewer Jeremy Lukens called it, “melding rock intensity with sing-along melodies while lacking much of the raw riff-heavy sound of the band’s 1980s work.” They haven’t lost their edge, they’ve just refined it. “I always thought punk rock was folk music,” Pirner told Rolling Stone. “But when I started singing, there was no monitor, it was a million miles an hour, loud as all fuck. Everything got screamed. That was the only way it could fit. And that feels great. But it gets old. You have to start figuring out how you’re going to express other parts of your personality.”

I spoke with Pirner recently about music in the time of coronavirus, retaining a punk rock heart, his love for New Orleans and the evolution of Soul Asylum. 

So Dave, what’s happening there in Minneapolis?

Not a whole lot. It’s snowing and that’s about it (laughs). It’s very strange because the sort of hibernation thing is coming into play. Everybody’s been kind of isolated already so it’s going to be an extra long winter. It snowed two weeks ago, which surprised the shit out of me and I thought that was a fluke but now it’s been kind of coming down for the last four days or so.

You lived in New Orleans for almost two decades. What did you love about that city?

I’ve got lots of love for New Orleans. We would schedule a day off when we were on tour every time we came through that way, cause my tour manager was very clever about that, and we’d end up spending two or three days there and that’s when I first got the bug. It was the rhythms and stuff, the second line thing just kind of turned my head upside down and I started listening to The Meters constantly. The more I got into the music, the more I realized that, you know, you almost feel like you’re listening to something from another planet or another time or another something and I just had to be there, wanted to be around it. 

They told me that you can’t really play New Orleans music if you weren’t born there, that was the impression I was getting anyway, so I had a kid in New Orleans (laughs). You know, it’s the whole culture that just blows my mind. There’s none like it in the world and I’ve been a lot of places. And the food’s not bad (laughs). But mostly, it was just a music thing and lo and behold that’s kind of what it took. I was there for, I think, eighteen years and I produced some records by some of my favorite New Orleans artists, Henry Butler and John Boutte’ and a few other people. 

Really, I just listened to music constantly and that kind of was the big attraction, just sort of the intimacy of music in a small place with these musicians that are unbelievable, to be immersed in it and to be able to get so close to it is, again, a really unique thing about New Orleans. There’s just nothing better than that for me musically, to be able to sit so close to the band that you can feel and see and hear every nuance. As a trumpet player as a kid, I realized, growing up a trumpet player in Minneapolis is really different, cause I would hear the players in New Orleans and go, “Oh, that’s the way a trumpet is supposed to sound!” I mean, I didn’t really have that growing up, where there were amazing trumpet players everywhere you looked. It’s just one more of many things that made me fall in love with the city.

Did you guys ever play Jazz Fest?

I played Jazz Fest as a solo artist but Soul Asylum has never played Jazz Fest. And that was fifteen or twenty years ago, whenever my solo record came out. But that was another big factor in what drew me to New Orleans. I had started going to Jazz Fest regularly before I’d lived there and the thing I really started to notice was that a lot of my favorite performances were locals. I was like, Oh my God, these people are here all the time! And it was as much going to after Jazz Fest shows and seeing what else is going on and really just letting it sink in that was what I was enjoying. There’s so much great music at Jazz Fest, and for me personally, the more rock & roll it gets, the less interested I am. I mean, I like the international music and I love the Gospel Tent, love that kind of music. Just another big thing for me where I went, Man, I’ve been missing this my whole life! It was that kind of thing.

When you went back to live in Minneapolis after all those years, did it still have a musical spark to you? 

Yeah, it interests me a great deal. I’ve known these people for so long and they’re friends now and that part of it is pretty special to me. If I’d grown up in New Orleans, I would have a bunch of musical heroes from my childhood there but what I had here all happen to be rock & roll people, you know. But people are still around, people still play, people are available to talk to. It’s one of many things that, besides the fact that my parents are here and they’re getting along in their days, I have old friends and family here. It’s kind of a different angle. I think I was sort of trying to escape everything in a way when I went to New Orleans. Now it’s fucking winter so it’s hard for me to sit here and go, It’s so great! (laughs)

Since we’re shut down and music venues can’t do anything, Soul Asylum did some quarantine shows for the fans and that’s what led to this new acoustic EP. Why put it down for posterity, especially since you just had Hurry Up & Wait, come out in April?

I think that part of the, I guess, part of the process of seeing basically our tour cancelled the day the record came out, really just screwed everything up. You put out your record and you go out and you tour it, that’s my job, that’s what I’ve been doing for fucking I don’t even know how many years. So there is this incomplete feeling. Anyhow, yeah, I think the Born Free thing is sort of to keep having output and keep people interested and aware that we’re trying to work as hard as we can. We just did a livestream that I think was pretty good. But I’m a lover of live music and playing to devices, recording devices and cameras and things, isn’t really the real deal. But you know, I still play a lot of music, you just have to have a phone to listen to it (laughs).

Why these four particular songs and not say something like “Landmines” or “Freezer Burn”?

Probably cause they lent themselves to the acoustic thing the best. We probably played a bunch of tunes and thought, oh, these seem to work. I don’t know, I just record stuff constantly. I don’t even know what half of it is for.

“Landmines” seems to have a rockabilly feel to it. Was that your intentional vibe with that song from the beginning?

I don’t think I ever like sort of aim for something when I start working on a song. I mean, it’ll have a feel and it’ll have a tempo and a vibe to it and stuff but if it sounds like something, if it sounds like rockabilly to you, it’s rockabilly. I totally understand what you’re saying, it makes sense, but there wasn’t any part of me that was like, hey, I want to make a rockabilly song! It just sort of comes out that way (laughs).

As a songwriter, do your songs tend to change much beyond their original conception? 

That’s a good question. The longer the band has been at it, the more the songs are able to translate from what I’m hearing in my head to the band. Michael Bland is an amazing drummer and once he gets a hold of it then the sort of band sounds start to take shape. Often I make a fully flushed-out kind of demo where I’m playing all the instruments but you can hear what I’m looking for and then he will take that and play it like a real drummer. I just sort of, you know, get the feel and I get the loops right and I get the whatevers right. My drumming is, I don’t play a lot of fills or hit a lot of cymbals or any of that stuff so that’s kind of up to him (laughs). But often the bassline will sort of be determined and you try to shape it into something that is interesting sounding. But yeah, sometimes the translation from an acoustic version to the band version is fairly similar. It’s obviously the same song but for me personally it’s more fun to play with a band, it’s more fun to listen to.

Is there a song that you’ve written that has changed dramatically in it’s meaning to you; like what you wrote about originally has come to maybe mean something else?

That’s a good question. In a way, I think the best things that I write sort of stay relevant to me so when I’m playing a song that I wrote thirty years ago, it still feels like it’s my take on something, it’s my emotion on something, and whether it was thirty years ago that I had this reaction to whatever it is that I’m singing about, I could still just go, yep, that’s me and that thing and that’s still how I feel about it. 

I have always tried to sort of take on more timeless kind of topics, I guess. I have this song, which I wrote it a very, very, very long time ago, and it’s called “Black & Blue” and it’s about police harassment and lo and behold the George Floyd thing happens and I’m like, Oh, we should play that one. It seems like I wrote it for the times even though in reality it’s kind of trite because I’m bitching about cops coming to break up our house parties and our warehouse parties. The first time we played a gig, the cops came and pushed everybody around and were very mean. They were always coming over and fucking up your good time and all that. However, the lyric reads like I could be talking about anything. 

I hope things remain relevant to me and yes, they do morph into sort of addressing these times that we’re in, if they’re written well, and I wrote them twenty-five years ago of what I believed to be an accurate portrayal of any certain situation. Sadly, it doesn’t change that much. I mean, I’m bitching about the same things I was bitching about thirty-five years ago.

Is there a song that still hurts if you think about it too much?

Yeah, but thankfully sometimes it’s only a four minute experience. I can get sucked right into the emotion that I was feeling at the time I wrote something and yeah, those emotions come back and I start to remember the time where I was when I wrote it and who was around me. Sometimes I get super sad when I sing a super sad song (laughs). Hopefully, there is one right after it that I’ll have to sort of switch my demeanor for, you know. That’s the nature of a songwriter.

“Runaway Train,” the song itself and nevermind what the video became about, has a very lost feeling to it. Was that real Dave or Dave filtering someone else’s pain or emotions?

No, that’s me (laughs). The video is it’s own creation. It came later than the song and the concept for the video was more or less Tony Kaye’s brainchild. So people have this association with the song being about runaway children but if you look at the lyrics, it’s not.

Did it help your psyche writing and performing that song?

Yeah, I guess so. It still is what it is and people have their own personal reaction to it but I can often sort of look out into the crowd and see that it’s having a similar effect on the people that I’m playing it for, because they recognize it and they associate it with whatever it is that they personally associate it with. That it makes a connection is very reassuring in a lot of ways cause I think what makes the song work is people can relate to it and it’s a personal thing and it’s something that not everybody likes to talk about and it’s an understanding that I have between me and my listeners.

What is songwriting like for you?

I don’t know, there is sort of this thing going through my head that’s either a bunch of words or a bunch of notes and then I just start whistling and then it sort of comes out and then I go, hmm, that was interesting. Or, I’ll fill up a few pages in a notebook and go, hmm, I like that part. So it’s kind of a constant process. I have had days where I’m like, God, why does this happen to me all the time? I mean, it’s a good thing but it’s just weird, to just always be working on a song. It’s just kind of what my brain does.

You published a book earlier this year, Loud Fast Words, and it centers around your lyrics.

Yeah, it’s every record and it’s in order of when the records came out and it’s all the lyrics from every album. Each one has a preface to it that I wrote to try to explain what the sort of process was. But at the same time, you have to understand that it’s like looking at an abstract painting. People identify with certain parts of songs and it means something completely unique to that person. So I’m not telling people what the songs are supposed to be, you know, how you’re supposed to react to them or what exactly is the proper reaction. It’s just more kind of talking about what was going on at the time, sort of what got me to the place where I decided to follow through and finish certain songs. I don’t want to mess up anybody’s interpretation, because whatever works for you, works for me and I think that’s what art is. 

Grave Dancers Union was a huge album for Soul Asylum but there’s a song on there called “April Fool” that is a little bit different.

Yeah, it covers a lot of ground as far as styles and things in music that I find to be amusing and this notion that rock & rollers want to be cool and I was born in April so it all kind of comes together as far as, it has a playfulness to it, I think, and it’s kind of funny and it’s got elements from heavy metal. It’s fairly typical of how I like to play around with music. There’s supposed to be something funny and fun about that song and it’s a gas to play. It’s still really fun to play and it still kind of cracks me up.

When you guys were like nauseatingly huge, did you get sick of yourselves?

Probably (laughs). Yes, in a way that you’re doing a lot of photo shoots and answering the same questions every day, to that effect, yeah. On the other hand, we were so busy that there wasn’t any time to contemplate – I mean, there was plenty of time to bitch and moan about everything – but there wasn’t a lot of time to sort of just take it all in and get, I don’t know, too self-loathing about the whole thing. You kind of got to do what’s at hand and there was always something going on. There wasn’t a lot of time to sort of sit around and pat each other on the back or sit around and try to make it different or anything other than what it was and what it is and what it can be. It’s all just fucking attitude, you know. So yeah, some days I was extremely sick of myself (laughs).

You started off a punk guy and that first Soul Asylum album was punk. On the second album, there’s a lot of punk sounds but it’s a little bit different, like you’re starting to transition. Why did you not see the punk band all the way through? Other bands did, they stuck with punk their whole careers. What caused you to want to start changing?

Just boredom and always being interested in all different kinds of music. I think the punk rock thing was essential as far as we were kids that didn’t know how to play and that’s how we learned how to do it. Once we learned how to do it, it was time to figure out what else we could do and that’s just my nature. I’m not a purist by any means but punk rock is always there, it’s still a big foundation of the band and the attitude and the writing. It’s all kind of coming from a trumpet playing kid saying, fuck all this, I’m going to be in a punk rock band cause it’s too hard to play the trumpet! (laughs)

You did some songs with Victoria Williams back in the day. Have you done anything with her lately?

No, the last time I saw her was in the Chickie Wah Wah in New Orleans and it was great to see her. I just love her so much. I do one of her songs and, oddly enough, cause we were talking about this a little while ago, singing her song evokes her to me and makes me feel like I’m checking in with her or something. But, you know, it’s not easy to see people. You’re always on the road but we used to play together whenever we could. I’d sit in with her and she’d sit in with me. But she got sick and she was married to a guy from the Jayhawks for a while so we’d go over and hang out at her house and blah, blah, blah. So yeah, I miss her. 

Who was the first real rock star you ever met?

I’m going to go with Curtiss A. Meeting Curtiss A when I was a little shit was as exciting as meeting Kermit Ruffins, when I met Kermit. He’s a local legend basically and he was a rock star to me. I had been seeing him play a lot locally and now I know Curt and he actually dressed me for the Prince tribute we did (laughs). It was hilarious. He was like, “Come over to my house!” and he starts giving me these purple clothes to put on and when he got me all dressed up in a purple outfit, he goes, “Okay, now I’m going to go put my outfit on.” It was like two girls dressing up. It was hilarious! (laughs). 

When I found out there was a local music scene and how vibrant it was in Minneapolis, all my attentions sort of shifted from people that you would have posters on your wall to people that were playing in town. That’s when I kind of got to meet some of those people. I’ve pretty much forgot if I met somebody before that (laughs). 

What was the first song you obsessed over as a kid?

“Smoke On The Water.” We were just at practice the other day and I said, “Let’s play it,” and everybody is kind of laughing and then we started kind of playing it and I went, “Oh my God, it was bound to happen.” (laughs)  I don’t know, that’s what is so great about music to me. It’s like we’re all laughing but we’re actually playing the song and we kind of can’t believe we’re actually playing it. Then there’s a piano sitting there and I sat down at it. I used to drive my mother crazy with that. I’d just go (singing those opening chords) on the piano all day and I did it at the piano at practice and it was just like I suddenly transformed back into that nine year old person. It was funny.

What was the first big band you went to see?

That’s an easy one: Alice Cooper. I was like fourteen or thirteen and I was like, Oh my God, the stagecraft; not only seeing that it was completely over the top but also seeing it in real life and going, Oh shit, that’s a guy in a gorilla suit, or whatever (laughs). It’s live theatre and you can see it’s made by hand and they have to carry all that shit around and all that sort of stuff. And he comes out, I think it was the encore, and he’s playing “School’s Out” and somebody detonated a can of tear gas in the St Paul Civic Center and everybody ran screaming from the gig. That was the first time I ever got tear gassed (laughs). So it was strange cause I was kind of back a little bit further, and this was a huge stadium, and the whole crowd comes running in my direction. I said, What the fuck? I couldn’t figure it out and then the tear gas hit me and I was like, Oh God, I’d better run whichever way they’re running. It was terrible. 

I think maybe four years ago I was in Spain and we ran into Alice Cooper at the airport and I said, “Alice, can I give you a hug?” And he said, “Of course you can.” He couldn’t have been sweeter and we talked about it. He was like, “Oh yeah, I’ll never forget that gig. That was fucked up.” It was one of those things that the few people that were there, like fucking Woodstock or some shit like that, “You were at that gig?” No one forgot about that gig. That was crazy.

What Soul Asylum song do you recall as being the hardest to get right in the studio?

(laughs) There’s so many of them from back in the day. Everything was an arduous struggle for us for so long. I think the better we got, the better we wanted to get and then we reached a certain point where you either had it in you or you didn’t and that’s when, you know, fucking drummers heads started to roll. But there was a song, I believe we did sixty-seven takes of and I distinctly remember that number so that’s probably way up there as far as just the producer going, “Do it again. Alright, do it again. Alright, do it again.” He probably said one more time at around thirty takes (laughs). The song was a song that Danny Murphy, my guitarist, had written called “Gullible’s Travels.” It had like a 6/8 feel to it and Steve Jordan, the producer, was hellbent on having it feel just right and we just didn’t.

Are you happy with it now?

Oh sure but I never listen to that stuff (laughs). There was a lot of playing over our heads. I would have ideas and come up with a song and some of it was music we didn’t necessarily know how to play and those things have all changed now, it just comes with experience and learning and being around more music. But yeah, we would struggle when things didn’t sound right and part of it was just lack of natural ability.

Do you think you are still a smart-aleck punk at heart?

Yes

No hesitation

None whatsoever, no. I mean, somebody just sent me a clip of none other than Eddie Van Halen sort of blowing off the accolades that the interviewer was laying upon him and he just said, “I’m just a punk kid.” Somebody sent me that clip and said, “That reminds me of someone I know.” (laughs) But yeah, all that sort of angst and political sort of awareness and kind of just being a little irritated and feeling outcast and not wanting to work for the man and beating against the system, all that stuff hasn’t changed.

And what happens next? 

I have this theory that punk rockers just turn into curmudgeons (laughs). That was always interesting to me, punk rock was. The producer I worked on with my solo record, he looked at me one day and he goes, “What is punk rock?” And I went, “What?” He was like, “Well, Nirvana, is that punk rock?” And I was like, “Where the fuck were you? You’re not that much younger. What were you listening to in high school and stuff?” And he was like, “The Gap Band and Earth Wind & Fire.” But he was born and raised in New Orleans and he just kind of missed it completely, which sounds fascinating. 

So what is happening for Soul Asylum next?

We’re just trying to stay positive (laughs)

Portrait by Laura Lee Buhman; live photographs by Leslie Michele Derrough