Divorce, relocation and re-integration have a lot to do with Soul Asylum’s new album, Hurry Up and Wait — as a whole and particularly on the track “Social Butterfly,” premiering exclusively below.
Co-founder and frontman Dave Pirner, whose divorce sent him from his adopted home of New Orleans back to his native Minneapolis, tells Billboard that “Social Butterfly” chronicles his journey back into society after becoming “isolated” amidst marriage and fatherhood. “That was kind of the antithesis of why I moved (to New Orleans) in the first place,” Pirner explains. “I love the communal kind of thing that goes on there. I loved that feeling ‘We’re all in this together’ and you can go out and see great music every night. Then I had a kid and didn’t leave the house after awhile…which happens to a lot of people, I think. So it’s a song about getting back out there. When I got divorced, I had to reintegrate myself back into the world outside.”
Pirner doesn’t hide the fact, either, that most of Hurry Up and Wait — due out April 17 — was inspired by the end of his marriage. “I mean, that’s what was going on,” he says. “Some of it was written before everything fell apart, but if I look at the previous record (2016’s Change of Fortune) I was more in the thick of just being in New Orleans and living there and embracing it. And this (album) is kind of trying to let it go, coming full circle a little bit.”
Pirner and Soul Asylum recorded Hurry Up and Wait with producer John Fields, who also produced the band’s three previous studio albums. The group returned to Nicollet Studios in Minneapolis, where Soul Asylum recorded some of its earliest records. “(Fields) moved back to Minneapolis from L.A. and into a studio that just happens to be where we recorded (1986’s) Made to Be Broken and a bunch of the early Twin/Tone Records,” Pirner says. “That studio is the only building in the neighborhood that’s the same; The rest of the place is completely different. But it was extremely comfortable, and it was really great to get to go home after a session and not to some hotel room in New York or L.A.”
Soul Asylum has been previewing songs from Hurry Up and Wait on the road this year and will headline its label Blue Elan’s showcase at South By Southwest. For Record Store Day, meanwhile, the group will issue a vinyl version of the album featuring a bonus 7-inch with a cover of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “We 3” from 1990’s And the Horse They Rode In On, which was also featured on the Chasing Amy movie soundtrack. Pirner also recently published Loud Fast Words, a lyric book that includes an essay he penned about each of Soul Asylum’s albums, via the Minnesota Historical Society, which had him dealing with both present and past while he was making the new album.
“They’re two (separate) things,” Pirner says. “The thing that was odd was working on new material. It’s kind of crazy to go from, ‘Here’s one from 1984’ to ‘Here’s one from two months ago,’ just kind of bouncing around. It’s a weird process to go through my memory and try to remember things I either don’t care about or I look back on fondly, and then I know that it wasn’t that great at the time — but at the same time always wanting to move forward and always wanting to be wrapped up in the music I’m making right now.”
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