Bonus Material
When I interviewed Danny Alexander, author of Liner Notes, over e-mail in January this year, he was kind enough to provide me with so much material and insight that it proved impossible to fit all of it into an article. The following is a collection of quotes that either weren't included in the finished article or were shortened for various reasons.
On The Silver Lining
"It's such a beautiful album. It never sounds pretentious but hits hard as hell on everything at the same time. It's so clear that the War in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and Karl's death inform every note of that record in one way or another. And that's where Americans in particular having been living lately in this spiralling tragedy we're a part of--the geopolitics, the collapsed infrastructure, and personal losses we've all experienced, not eased one bit by the sad health care coverage we have in this country.
"I love the way the album starts, with "Stand Up and Be Strong" giving a swift, loving kick in the rear to all the mopey, even whiney, bands that tend to dominate the rock charts these days. Then it tears into "Lately," which is this wonderfully catchy love song to a soldier's girlfriend and the soldier himself.
"Like I said, the war always seems to be there. One of my favorite lines is in "Crazy Mixed Up World," when Dave sings "Jet fighters streak the air/And where they're going, nobody seems to care." I live in the middle of the country near a base that sends Stealth bombers to the Middle East and back in a day. The war plays out right over our heads, and we just keep operating like people aren't dying.
"That's what's so great about Dave's songwriting. He finds a way to personalize everything, and so he never really preaches or overreaches. Even in that last song, the hidden track on the record, where he talks about people praying to Jesus that would have cheered the crucifixion, he doesn't come off preachy--just direct in his observation. And in the end, that song, like the album, finds a kind of hope in the fact that people are imperfect and do let you down but keep trying to find our way out of this mess despite insurmountable odds.
"It's a beautiful record, with this incredible climax, "Standing Water," that seems to capture the American tragedy, and the moment that pulls it all together for me, "All Is Well," which I imagine as a postcard to Karl, or my own lost loved ones. I don't know if that's what it is exactly, but I can't help but hear it that way, and there's this really poignant irony that Dave's the one in hell with the rest of us.
"This record goes so deep into the darkness, and then it offers up a song like "Good For You," that seems kind of hapless but still manages to celebrate our best intentions and those little moments of grace that keep us going. I think that's what's great about Soul Asylum in a nutshell. They've never taken refuge in cynicism, and they've never oversimplified anything. They make music that sounds like life."
On His Interaction With the Band
"I was lucky, around the same time [referring to the very beginning of the work process], to get an interview with Dan and Karl for the Kansas City alternative weekly, New Times. I knew about the book by then, and I made sure to ask some of the kinds of questions I knew would be hard to answer otherwise.
[…]
"I couldn’t get an interview with the band specifically for the book, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. So, I interviewed them for the New Times and the unsourced comments come from that interview. Although we have mutual friends, Dave Marsh being one of them, I never talked to Pirner until after the book was published. He was playing a club in Lawrence, Kansas with a side project called the O’Jeez (he played drums), and I walked up to him at the bar and introduced myself. He laughed and told me the friend to his left had just been bitching about my book, and he was defending me to him. I don’t think that friend ever came right out and told me what he didn’t like about it, but my book was sure to upset longtime fans for any number of reasons. I do remember Dave’s argument with him being that I didn’t write it for that guy. And that was probably about right. Even more to the point, I sure didn’t write it to make that guy happy."
On the Band's Peak of Fame
"This was a band representative of a certain impulse in a certain time and place that struggled for over a decade in one form or another before hitting it big. Aside from the “hitting it big” part, it was the story of a whole generation of bands I knew. What made them uniquely interesting was the way Soul Asylum, rather than self destructing, tried to make the most of that moment in the limelight. Dealing with all of the same kinds of ethical conflicts that tore someone like Kurt Cobain apart, they embraced the moment in a way that affirmed the dignity of their new teen fans without compromising their own integrity. That’s why I hear Let Your Dim Light Shine as a triumph, even if it felt like a betrayal to their cult audience and didn’t do well enough (i.e. didn’t trounce Grave Dancer's Union) to maintain the increasingly fickle interest of the music industry."
On the American Underground Music Culture
"I would assume a lot of it is universal, but the U.S. no doubt has its own distinct character in this regard. I did and do feel a certain kinship with the band for its reverent covers of songs like Lulu's "To Sir With Love" or Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" to keep placing its music in a larger context. This was an important part of much of what was happening in Minnesota at the time, but Soul Asylum seemed to challenge preconceptions of what is and isn't important in a fresh and unmistakable way. Even when they tried to be somewhat ironic and spoof the morose aspects of their own movement, with a song like "Misery," they'd find the pathos in the moment and make it real and moving."
On His Early Years In Writing
"I didn't start off writing about local music. I actually started writing about music as a correspondence with Rock & Rap (Roll in those days) Confidential (RRC), the music newsletter Dave Marsh started around the time he left Rolling Stone magazine. Marsh had been my favorite writer at Rolling Stone since I was a teenager because it felt like he spoke for me as much as to me, like he was trying to break down the walls that separated music fans from each other as well as between musician and fan and artist and fan. Not surprisingly, the newsletter sought to, as it still does today, create a dialogue between musicians and fans around the issues that tie them together. The first thing I had published in the newsletter drew a connection between the racial segregation of radio formats at that time and the racial conflicts on my campus in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
"When I got out of school and moved to Kansas City, I immediately got with some friends I'd met through the newsletter, and we made our own local version of RRC, called A Sign of the Times, and most of us wrote about music for various local outlets. For about eight years before I interviewed Soul Asylum, I had been a staff writer at our alternative weekly, and an occasional contributor to the daily paper. I'd also become an associate editor of RRC, and I wrote about all kinds of music for all of those formats on a regular (it seems a little manic to me today) basis."
On Students Recognizing His Work
"Rarely do they recognize me in terms of my music writing, although a handful have known of or owned the Soul Asylum book."
On Writing A Volume In A Series
"David Cantwell, who was the author of the George Strait book, was and is a close friend of mine, and we were living in the same city working on the same deadline, but I don’t remember feeling we had to follow any strict guidelines or that we were influencing each other’s approach."
On Writing As A Career
"Aspiring journalists should know that career opportunities are terribly limited. You can get in at many papers, ground level, writing about music, but it's hard to make even a good part time wage doing that. If you work long and hard enough at it, an editor's position can pay off, but for music writers like musicians, the real world strongly suggests that it's a passion that requires a day job (for most people, that is).
"Still, it's amazingly fun and exciting work. Writing is a ticket to go where you want to go and talk to just about anyone you want to talk to and learn as much as you want to about your passions.
"My only real advice to a writer is that you write to discover something new and share it with others. Be honest about what you think, and do your best to express it as simply and directly as possible. It can certainly lead to that examined life that's well worth living.
"Also, find a community of writers who will support you and help you accomplish your goals. Writers tend to be such fierce individualists, but to be as good as we can be, we need the honest feedback of others. Writing itself is a great way to build just such a community."