Michael Bland shares his incredible stories...

Discuss any aspect of Soul Asylum, their music, and the band's members.
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irreverentsoul
Runaway
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Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 11:10 am

Michael Bland shares his incredible stories...

Post by irreverentsoul »

http://blog.thecurrent.org/2017/06/mich ... -and-more/

MPR: What song do you think we should start off with?
MB: Well I don’t mean to draw a direct link right away, but you had me thinking about some of the recording sessions I did at Paisley and one of the ones I did in more recent years was for an album that Prince released called Lotusflow3r. But it didn’t start out that way; it started out that I walked in and he says, “I heard that Soul Asylum song.” He said, “That’s a great song, why wasn’t why wasn’t it a hit?”
Which song?
“Stand Up and Be Strong.” And what’s weird is that at the time when Dave [Pirner] wrote it, a couple of people in the organization were like “Nah.” They didn’t think that it was the right sort of single to lead off the record. I was like “Dude, why aren’t we doing this one?” and Dave was like, “I don’t know, the camp’s not really into it.” I was like, “Well I’m into it,” and he went “Okay!” So me and Dave just kind of pushed it through and it ended up being the first song on the record and Silver Lining actually turned out to be a real fan favorite. I remember we ran into Eddie Trunk somewhere and he was like “Hey, that Silver Lining record is great” — the Trunk endorsed it straight away. And Prince was like, “That was supposed to be a huge hit, what happened?”
Then he says, “Well, can I cover it? I wanna record that song.” I said I imagine so, and he said “Well will you call Dave right now and ask him?’ I said sure, so I stepped out of the studio and I got Dave on the cell phone — which is hard enough to do anyway and he just happened to pick up — and I told him, “Prince wants to cover ‘Stand Up and Be Strong’ but he doesn’t want to do it without your approval, he doesn’t want any problems later on.” Dave was like, “Yeah absolutely man, I’m honored.” So we cut a version of it that’s in the vault somewhere, but I remember that was kind of a point where a world that I was just entering into, and a world that I was still dabbling in, kind of collided. So I think it’s appropriate that we lead off with that. Also Dave is joining us for the tribute. He was a great fan of Prince’s music and Prince clearly liked what Dave was doing too.

Closer
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Re: Michael Bland shares his incredible stories...

Post by Closer »

I never liked 'Stand Up And Be Strong' that much either to be honest. It's an alright song, but there are far more catchier songs on The Silver Lining that probably would have been more successful as a first single.

mystic_spiral_3
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Re: Michael Bland shares his incredible stories...

Post by mystic_spiral_3 »

I really liked hearing that story from Michael Bland. However, there are other songs (that did or did not make the record) that I like more than "Stand Up." I DO like the song in a live setting when folks pump their fists for the "fight!" lyric.

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