OKLAHOMA CITY — Age hasn’t blunted Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner.
While most of his punk and alt-rock contemporaries from the 80s and 90s are either mostly retired, sadly departed, or content with making softer singer/songwriter fare, Pirner and the band he launched over 40 years ago are still cranking their amps and attitudes on stages across the country.
They’ll be bringing that unyielding energy – along with an open disregard for trends and a back-to-basics ethos – to the Tower Theatre on October 18th, touring on the heels of the band’s thirteenth album, “Slowly but Shirley,” a stripped-down, straightforward collection of rock tracks.
“The shows have been great so far,” Pirner told OKC Free Press by phone from the band’s tour bus in San Francisco. “The audiences have been very, um, ’emotional’ I think is the word I would use.”
It’s not surprising considering the recent groundswell of bleeding heart rock and 90s-style grunge that’s spurred a resurgence for bands of their ilk in the past couple years, with multigenerational crowds turning out young and old for acts like Gin Blossoms, Dinosaur Jr., and more.
That 90s period when emotional radio rock reigned was inarguably Soul Asylum’s heyday, seeing the band break big with singles like “Misery,” “Black Gold,” and the Grammy-winning smash “Runaway Train.”
But for someone who never really left the stage or took time away to lick the wounds of changing fads and styles like plenty of others from that time, it’s tough to tell when the interest waxes and wanes.
“I don’t really notice it, you know, because this is just what I’ve been doing for the past forty-some years,” Pirner said. “I’m like, ‘great!’ I mean, if it’s just nostalgia, it’s not that great, but if it’s because people want to hear music being played and sung for real, I think that makes a certain amount of sense.”
In Pirner’s estimation, if there’s a renewed love for the kind of raw, raucous rock he and Soul Asylum make, it’s because listeners are bound to get hungry for the real, human touch after they’ve had their fill of mechanical, digitized music.
“It’s going to go in a cycle,” he said, “and when everybody’s just playing computers, that’s going to get boring, and you’re going to have to sort of reevaluate why you want to go out and see live music because you want to see some people play some music.”
It’s the naked emotion of Soul Asylum’s songs – and in particular, of Pirner’s songwriting – that’s endeared loyal fans to the band for decades, and that’s something that he doesn’t think can be replicated by push-button backing tracks and locked-in beats.
It’s also something that Pirner knows he has to connect with anew each night on stage to bridge the gap across decades and to keep resonating honestly with the songs after all these years.
“It’s pretty strange,” he said. “Sometimes I’m jumping from a song I wrote thirty years ago to a song I wrote five years ago to a song I wrote fifteen years ago and it’s kind of like I’m in a time machine the whole time I’m on stage. It does have a funny effect on me, like ‘oh, things weren’t great when I wrote that song.'”
Pirner is still mining some of the darker things on his newest songs, pulling from experiences like divorce, aging, and the loss of his mother on songs throughout “Slowly but Shirley.” But musically, the album is a return to a more communal, reciprocal sound, with most of the tracks recorded with the band playing live in one room together.
To capture that energy, Soul Asylum once again called up drummer extraordinaire (now the backbeat of The Rolling Stones) Steve Jordan, who produced the band’s 1990 effort “And the Horse They Rode In On.”
“The last couple records weren’t as live,” Pirner said. “This time, what we were going for was the same thing that we were going for when I worked with Steve Jordan in 1990. So I knew exactly what his aesthetic is, and it’s ‘just play, play the music, record it and make it real.’ And that’s what this album is.”
The goal of this tour, then, is to bring that same kind of raw energy and live-in-the-moment rock-n-roll to the stage, to remind the longtime fans of the attitude that first caught their attention, and to show the new fans just what this whole rock resurgence is all about.
But mostly, it’s just to keep doing things their way, with the same no-frills, no gimmicks ethos as ever.
“It’s not an old-time thing or anything like that,” Pirner said. “It’s just a different way of approaching it, which, for lack of a better expression, doesn’t involve a lot of bullshit.”
Soul Asylum hits the stage at Tower Theatre on Friday, October 18th, supported by Juliana Hatfield Three. For tickets and more information, visit towertheatre.com.
The new album “Slowly but Shirley” by Soul Asylum is available everywhere now.
For more, visit soulasylum.com.
You can find out about local music and performance happenings in the OKC metro weekly in this music column by Brett Fieldcamp. | Brought to you by True Sky Credit Union.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.