Interview: Dan Murphy of Soul Asylum

July's featured artist, Soul Asylum has just returned to the music scene with The Silver Lining.  In a recent conversation with founding member and guitar player Dan Murphy we talked about not only how the industry has changed, but how it's effected their music as well as Karl Mueller's losing battle with throat cancer.

The Silver Lining is your first release in eight years. What was it like to come together after such a long break?

We've actually seen each other in the interim over the years. We've got together for a few shows. I've been down to New Orleans to see Dave and do some demos down there and we'd see each other maybe two or three times a year and play the odd show in Minneapolis or whatever.

But, at that point, we really needed a break. We were just pretty sick of the whole dog and pony show. It was just the whole cycle we needed a break from. We'd been doing it since the '80s – putting out records and touring just as quickly as we could. We were all physically tired and sick of each other. You lose some inspiration after awhile, like you're in that movie Groundhog Day. Every single day is exactly the same, only we never learned how to fix the cycle, unlike the movie.

In that case, who or what was it that made you decide the time was right for another Soul Asylum album?

We had, you know, four, five or six, demos we liked quite a bit. There were songs like "Oxygen" and "Slowly Rising" and a couple other things we liked and thought were strong enough material. I went down to New Orleans and did some demos acoustically with Dave in a little studio he has down there.  "Lately" and "Crazy Mixed Up World" came out of that. Then it started to seem like we were getting a record together.

We booked the studio, that was actually kind of funny. It was in Minneapolis, it was the old Flyte Tyme which used to be Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and they were going out of business. They were selling the studio and we just kind of snuck in while it was on the market and recorded this record. It was really a cool way to record, because there were no distractions.

We were originally going to go in before that, but then Karl got diagnosed with cancer. It was a major set-back and none of us at the time… we new it was serious, obviously, and we knew it was life threatening, but we believed Karl would pull through. So when the initial cancer when into remission and had recovered from the chemo and the radiation, it really lit a fire under us. Karl really wanted to record, so we started as soon as he had recovered sufficiently.

It must have made it difficult to record of the second half though (after his passing)?

Article Author: Connie Phillips

Wife, mother, aspiring novelist, and music editor at BC Magazine, Connie Phillips spends most of her time in a fantasy land of her own creating. In reality, she writes about music, television, and the process of writing, when she's not cheering on her kids at equestrian events. …

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