Grave Dancer’s Reunion

Dave Pirner says he’s tired of making music out of misery. He’s slouching in his chair in the back of the Uptown Green Mill—he met me here for both the convenience (he lives only a few blocks away) and for the low-key privacy it affords him (so let the man eat his diablo wings in peace, please). It’s two in the afternoon, and he’s nursing a coffee and a glass of water like a man who had to get up at 6:30 a.m. with a hangover.

New Orleans, was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, forcing him to evacuate to Minneapolis. (The Bywater house where he lived with his girlfriend survived, but his two-and-a-half-year-old son’s habit of sticking his hands in his mouth made Pirner especially concerned about the city’s piled-up garbage and toxicity levels.) Pirner acknowledges that it’s been a “real shitty year,” though despite the tragedy and disruption, he and guitarist Danny Murphy found a replacement for Mueller and a new drummer and managed to complete the first Soul Asylum studio record since 1998’s Candy from a Stranger. They are now preparing to tour in support of the new album, The Silver Lining.

At forty-two, Pirner is still rocking the grunge look. He rolled up in a banged-up 1989 Toyota Tercel and walked in wearing a Sun Kil Moon T under two unbuttoned oxford shirts. His baggy Levi’s sag like a teenager’s, and his greasy dishwater-blond hair pokes out from under a ski cap. Despite the vintage getup, there is something grown-up and solid about him. He’s wearing his hair shorter, and, though his sideburns are wispy enough to evoke adolescence, the epidermis on his baby face seems to have thickened. There are a few more crinkles to his squinty smile. He’s still long and skinny, but his midsection looks soft.

It’s not surprising that Soul Asylum’s sound has grown softer too. Pirner says he still tries to write songs and make music that lives up to his “punk rock ethos,” but most of the new songs are melodic pop ballads and anthems. There’s less of the old low growl in Pirner’s voice, and Danny Murphy’s guitar tone and intensity mostly stay within a mainstream rock range, straying into punk rock thrash on only a couple of tracks. The sound may have softened, but they still sound like Soul Asylum.

As a sixteen-year-old living in White Bear Lake in 1992, I was among the millions of suburban kids around the country who bought their triple-platinum masterpiece, Grave Dancer’s Union. We couldn’t get enough of “Black Gold” and “Runaway Train” on the radio or MTV. For a good stretch, Soul Asylum was right there in the grunge pantheon with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Our college-age siblings and the older people singing along with “Cartoon” at the live shows might have looked down on the band’s adolescent legions, even going as far as labeling Soul Asylum “sellouts,” but we didn’t care. My buddy’s older brother said I should buy Hang Time, one of Soul Asylum’s early albums, but I didn’t until I went to college. He turned out to be right: Hang Time is a great record. But, still, it’s no Grave Dancer’s.