With a show coming up Saturday, Dec. 27, at First Avenue, longtime Minneapolis rock band Soul Asylum visited The Current for an acoustic set and a conversation with host Mac Wilson.

It feels like an annual tradition: longtime Minneapolis rock band Soul Asylum visit The Current studio near the end of the year to share what they've been up to recently, and 2025 is no exception. Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner, Ryan Smith and Jeremy Tappero reflected on the late stage manager from First Avenue, Conrad Sverkerson, and the place he holds in their hearts. Soul Asylum also talk about what it was like when their song, "Somebody to Shove," was used on a several-day loop by another radio station when it was switching its format.

Watch the music performances above, and find the full interview video below, with an interview transcript beneath that.

Interview Transcript

Mac Wilson: Hello. My name is Mac Wilson from The Current, and it's my privilege to welcome the band Soul Asylum to The Current studio today. Jeremy, Ryan, Dave, thanks for coming in.

Dave Pirner: Always a pleasure.

Jeremy Tappero: Thanks for having us here.

Ryan Smith:  Thank you.

Mac Wilson: So you've been in a couple of times over the last few years, it seems like on a yearly basis, whether chatting with the Local Show or otherwise, doing what is sort of becoming a yearly tradition at First Avenue as well, playing this month. So, I mean, I realize that this is sort of an open-ended question, but, I mean: What's new over the last year? The last time you came in, you were chatting about Slowly but Shirley. Anything new in the works?

Dave Pirner: I'm thinking we did an interview with Diane last time we were here, and then she was playing in Tommy [Stinson]'s band, which kind of felt like family in a way. We're working on a new record. We got a gig coming up in a few days. 

Jeremy Tappero: Next weekend, I think. Next weekend, we got a couple of gigs.

Dave Pirner: We're trying to nurse Jeremy back to health.

Jeremy Tappero: I'm back. I'm alive!

Dave Pirner: And, yeah, we've had our first break since the record came out. So that's kind of good timing. I mean, there's been a few Thanksgivings where I was at a truck stop having turkey soup going, "This ain't doing it for me," you know? But, yeah, making new music and hanging out with our significant others.

Mac Wilson: I'm not quite up on the lore. Jeremy, What was — was there an actual health scare?

Jeremy Tappero: Yeah, I mean, nothing — luckily, nothing too serious. But I had a couple of minor surgeries this year that kind of put me on the bench twice in a row, basically. So I had a month off, and then we went out and did some shows, and then we came back after our last little run, and then I had about two months off to kind of heal up, so literally, first time seeing Dave in, like, two months today. So we got practice tonight. We're kind of restarted the band today.

Dave Pirner: It wasn't life threatening. What we're worried about is Ryan's mental condition.

Jeremy Tappero: Yeah, right.

Ryan Smith:  It's pretty serious at this point!

Jeremy Tappero: There seems to be no surgery that can solve that just yet! 

Ryan Smith:  Not from lack of trying.

Jeremy Tappero: But we're looking! Yeah.

Mac Wilson: So Ryan, we've chatted with you a couple of times over the years. We were talking — well, you came into The Current studio, even with Melismatics way back in the day. On your personal basis, do you have anything on your own up the alley?

Ryan Smith:  Up the alley? I mean, there's always something up the alley. 

Jeremy Tappero: Busiest man in show business. This dude is unbelievable. Just ask his assistant.

Dave Pirner: If you want any merch, he's got merch.

Ryan Smith:  Mostly the record label I've been running has been taking a lot of time, but

Jeremy Tappero: Plug the label! High Tension Records, right?

Ryan Smith:  You got to plug it, but mostly working on new songs with Dave for the next Soul Asylum record. That's mostly what our... 

Jeremy Tappero: Yeah, these guys have been — while I've been riding the couch and healing up, these guys have been hard at work, working on a new record.

Dave Pirner: How was the Melismatics' gig at...

Ryan Smith:  Oh, First Avenue? Yeah, we did play there last Wednesday. Thanks for remembering.

Dave Pirner: Did you blow the headliner off the stage?

Ryan Smith:  We love the headliner, so I couldn't say that. 

Dave Pirner: Oh, you went easy on him?

Ryan Smith:  Well, you know...

Jeremy Tappero: Took it easy on him.

Ryan Smith:  We were pretty ... it went great.

Dave Pirner: All right!

Mac Wilson: And my memory is escaping me. Who are you opening up for at that one? 

Ryan Smith:  That was Ike Reilly Assassination.

Mac Wilson: Oh, so that was Thanksgiving?

Ryan Smith:  Yeah, Thanksgiving evening. Eve. 

Jeremy Tappero: They did a really nice tribute to Conrad, right? They hung the Conrad star as a backdrop. 

Dave Pirner: This is my "What would Conrad do?" [wristband]. We lost a very dear, dear, dear, dear friend named Conrad Sverkerson, who was the guy at First Avenue for 30 years, as long I can remember.

Jeremy Tappero: Quite strange going back there.

Dave Pirner: I was just there the other day, going, "It's just not the same without Conrad." Just a beautiful guy. Really, really missed. Really kind of made everybody feel comfortable and stuff.

Jeremy Tappero: Yeah, it's gonna be weird walking in there and having him... I was there, too, recently for a show, and same thing, I'm like, "Man, I can't go by and the spot where he always is, he's just not there anymore."

Dave Pirner: And you'd see him and you'd go, "OK, everything is..."

Jeremy Tappero: Everything is right. Yeah, exactly.

Mac Wilson: In the wake of Conrad's passing a couple of weeks ago, I found it, as a radio host, a little bit difficult to convey his importance to the general public. It's one of those things where, if you're just an audience member, and you're at the show, you don't necessarily notice that he's there. That means that he's done his job absolutely perfectly. So his relationships that he built were with musicians, and then anybody who had to go backstage. It was both terrifying and sobering for me as a radio host to try to get backstage to go and do an intro of it, because I had to go through Conrad first. But everybody who encountered him, they're like, "Boy, he was one of the most terrifying men. I love him dearly, and he'll be missed forever, and that's the impact that he had on everybody.

Dave Pirner: It's incredible. People in bands — I'll be in France, and I'll be talking to somebody about playing at First Avenue, and they'll go, "Oh, how's Conrad doing?"

Jeremy Tappero: Exactly. Yeah.

Dave Pirner: Or, like, every band that has played there more than a few times, kind of befriended him and counted on him to be there. It's just when we saw him, we knew everything was under control. And he also had that effect on the staff — which now my nephew works there. Conrad got him a job, actually.

Jeremy Tappero: He was the captain of that ship. There's no question about it.

Mac Wilson: I'd say that, since you're playing at First Avenue again this fall, like, what would be different about it? That's a notable thing there, for as however many times that you've played at First Avenue over the years, this is a very unique and different instance now.

Dave Pirner: It is. And we're very, very lucky to have Tommy [Stinson] who has opened for us the last three or four times.

Ryan Smith:  Yeah.

Jeremy Tappero: This will be another three now, I think.

Ryan Smith:  This will be the third, yeah.

Dave Pirner: It has a bit of a, you know, a family kind of a feel to it. And yeah, we're gonna try to — we always try to mix it up. And then Michael [Bland] said to me, "Dave, every time we try to mix it up, no one cares." And I was like, "Well, is that true?" So...

Jeremy Tappero: We care!

Dave Pirner: Yeah.

Ryan Smith:  We care.

Jeremy Tappero: Yeah, we care. I like mixing it up.

Dave Pirner: So we might do a couple different things. We might have Fancy Ray there, but I don't know if that's gonna work out. And we might do ... There's a lot of "mights" right now.

Jeremy Tappero: Don't give away too many secrets now. You've got to keep them guessing a little bit.

Dave Pirner: Might have a guest or two.

Mac Wilson: Well, speaking of which, I saw, Dave, that you were a guest at The Hold Steady when they were doing their Separation Sunday shows. You did come back to do "Chillout Tent," so that was cool to see.

Dave Pirner: I did! It was really fun to play on that last song, because they're like, "Just come up there and put on a guitar and just follow us." And sure enough, it was really fun and easy. So it was kind of a nerve-wracking thing, but I was like, "I got this." And I was looking at the guitar player playing, and he goes, "Just stop playing when the singer is singing." And I'm like, "Good idea!" Anyways, those guys are great. Love them.

Mac Wilson: Another thing that was different for you this year, maybe something that you haven't experienced before, when our friends across town at KQRS, when they tweaked their format a bit earlier this spring, they decided to stunt it by playing "Somebody to Shove" on loop for days at a time. Were you consulted at all before that? Or did you find out, like everybody else, that this was happening?

Dave Pirner: No, it came as a really hilarious, pleasant sort of surprise. And I remember some local station, and I don't remember which one, they played, "Here Comes the Sun" for like, three days, because they were changing their format. And I thought that that was fascinating. Would I ever guess that someone would be doing that to me? So I got in my car, and I was like, "Oh, wow, they're playing 'Somebody to Shove.'"

Jeremy Tappero: This is really happening!

Dave Pirner: And then it starts over, and it kind of ends the way it starts. And I was like, "Hmm." I kept driving. Yep, there it is again.

Jeremy Tappero: I kind of wondered how long it would take to start kind of pissing people off. It only took me about three or four rotations.

Dave Pirner: I did not know that was a thing.

Mac Wilson: Yeah, evidently, it's "stunting" — the idea that when a radio station is on the imminent verge of a format change, rather than, like you said, "pissing people off," they just drop straight into the song and play it over and over again, and then they come back on the other side like that. So I'm sure it was sort of an honor to be chosen for that.

Dave Pirner: It was pretty cool. Yeah, it was great. I called up a friend and went, "Turn on KQ right now!" And he's like, "No." I'm like, "Wait, they're changing." "They're changing to that?" "Yeah, they just play us over and over."

Jeremy Tappero: It's the "Somebody to Shove" channel!

Mac Wilson: I'm kind of curious, as KQ is kind of a community institution in its own right, where they stuck to the same playlist for a long time. I'm curious if Soul Asylum ever did break through at any point, whether you knew if you got played there at any point? Like, did they even, like, drop "Runaway Train" in, like, once a month, or anything?

Dave Pirner: Not really, you know? They just kind of avoided ... well, local music, for sure.

Mac Wilson: Oh, sure. I think as contemporary as they got, they'd drop in, like the Black Crows, and that would be about their contemporary.

Jeremy Tappero: Or maybe like a Foo Fighters song would sneak in there once in a while.

Mac Wilson: And maybe some new U2, but that was about it.

Jeremy Tappero: Right, right, right.

Mac Wilson: But now they've tweaked it up quite a bit. It made me think back to the way that, like, even, like, we're recording this right now, I'm looking at the camera right now because we're taping this. It'll air on thecurrent.org, and we'll chop it up, too, for any number of social media channels. Like Dave, thinking back to when you were active in the early '90s, like, how you would have promoted the music that you were putting out then thinking of it like, "OK, how do I talk about 'Misery' in a 15-second clip that would go out to Instagram?" Is that something that's like, interesting? Like, "Huh, how would I have handled the grind of promoting music 30 years ago"?

Dave Pirner: Ugh, I don't know. I still don't know. I try, you know. I go, like, "Just go be yourself." And I'm like, "Well, which self do you want? The guy that swears a lot and makes jokes all the time?"

Jeremy Tappero: How much of myself can I really ... ?

Dave Pirner: Or the guy that has to say, "Buy our new record, because it's awesome!" That guy.

Mac Wilson: Right.

Dave Pirner: That's the one they're looking for. Here's 15 seconds on a three-minute song.

Jeremy Tappero: Now I say that stuff live, so he doesn't have to.

Dave Pirner: Yeah, actually, I give that job to Jeremy.

Jeremy Tappero: He's like, "Hey, Jeremy, sell 'em the record while I take a quick drink and wipe off my face." 

Mac Wilson: So I know you're in the early stages of working on the new record. Anything that we can expect from it? Any details that you want to divulge? I feel like you're able to take it at your own pace, which is nice.

Dave Pirner: It's going to be different. And so far — so far, it rocks more than I even thought it would. But there's a lot of sort of broad swipes at different kinds of things. And Ryan seems to think it's kind of funny, and I'll wait and try to get it more tweaked as we're talking about ... I'll bring it to the band, because there'll be a couple songs that it'll be like, "What are you trying to do, Dave?" "You just got to believe in it. It'll sound like Soul Asylum."

Mac Wilson: We are in The Current studio with Soul Asylum. Wanted to thank you again for taking the time to stop by.

Dave Pirner: Thank you.

Mac Wilson: And looking forward to the show at First Avenue and to the new music on the way, and most of all, for you to continue doing what you do. It's great to have, really, an institution of Minnesota music after four-plus decades visit The Current studio, so thank you for taking the time today.

Dave Pirner: Thank you.

Gallery: Soul Asylum in studio

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Songs Performed

00:00:00 Misery
00:03:42 Freeloader

Song 1 is from Soul Asylum’s 1995 album, Let Your Dim Light Shine, available on Columbia Records; song 2 is from Soul Asylum’s 2024 album, Slowly But Shirley, available on Blue Elan Records.

Musicians

David Pirner – lead vocals, guitar
Ryan Smith – lead guitar
Jeremy Tappero – bass

Credits

Guests – Soul Asylum
Host – Mac Wilson
Producer – Derrick Stevens
Video – Megan Lundberg, Eric Xu Romani, Will Keeler
Audio – Evan Clark
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor

External Link

Soul Asylum – official site