What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Discuss any aspect of Soul Asylum, their music, and the band's members.

What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

And the Horse They Rode In On
5
10%
Candy From A Stranger
2
4%
Clam Dip & Other Delights
0
No votes
Grave Dancers Union
20
41%
Hang Time
4
8%
Let Your Dim Light Shine
9
18%
Made To Be Broken
4
8%
Say What You Will, Clarence... Karl Sold the Truck
2
4%
The Silver Lining
1
2%
Time's Incinerator
0
No votes
While You Were Out
0
No votes
Other (compilation, single, bootleg, etc.)
2
4%
 
Total votes: 49

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Homesick
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What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Post by Homesick »

I felt like adding a new featured poll, so here's a question for everybody: What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

For me, it was Grave Dancers Union, which seemed like a natural choice. In fact, I wasn't even sure at the time (almost two years ago) that they had released anything else.
Jakob Kallin, webmaster of EnterTheSoulAsylum.com

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Monolith Maniac
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Re: What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Post by Monolith Maniac »

Mine was also Grave Dancers Union; which I bought back in mid 1996. I had only bought the CD due wanting to hear Runaway Train in its entirety. I had only heard just this clip (which I'm sure most of you already know).
Jim Metz, Webmaster of EnterTheSoulAsylum.com

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Re: What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Post by CULater »

"And The Horse They Rode In On...."

Veil of Tears always stuck with me from that one.
"I've learned to accept and not to expect - the respect and neglect that I get. And I try not to forget about what hasn't happened yet.....""

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lune ellise
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Re: What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Post by lune ellise »

Grave Dancers Union

I remembered it was New Year 1994 (I was very young then, I'm still not sure how I remembered all this). Mom just got a computer from her computer. It was a Brother - with a word processor, calculator, clock, and a screen that looks like a brick game. It was the family's first computer so everyone was drooling over it!

Anyway, to celebrate, Mom made it countdown until New Year's Eve. While waiting, Dad played the CD he just bought as a Christmas treat. I guess it was a pretty huge hit because they played the CD full blast, so that the whole neighborhood can listen to it.

After 3 repetitions of April Fool, it was finally 1994, so we went to Church and then visit my grandparents. Since my mom's younger brother loved the band that was so famous at that time (but somehow everyone thought they are Def Leppard), Mom brought the CD along. You can quite guess that the we celebrated the new year with nothing but GDU in the stereo.
"There's no such thing as a man-tamed girl."
My reviews of Soul Asylum albums: http://fritzi.gironella-cdo.com/search/ ... l%20asylum

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Re: What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Post by mystic_spiral_3 »

My first official SA purchase was a cassette single of Runaway Train. The b-side was a live version of Never Really Been. At the time, I could tell my mom wasn't real thrilled with my increasing interest in SA. So while on vacation visiting my aunt, I located the cassette single at Tower Records in Philadelphia, and purchased it.

A few weeks later, the night before 10th grade started, I was at Wal-Mart with my mom. My grandma was visiting and gave me money during the visit. While mom was in a different department of the store, I snuck over to the electronics section and bought Grave Dancers Union with the money from Grandma. I figured that if I didn't like the cassette, at least I wasn't out any of my money, just the extra surprise money from grandma. I hid the cassette in my purse and listened to the first half that night, and the second half the following night. While it was very different from what I'd had in my collection, I obviously ended up enjoying it!

I actually don't have the cassette single of RT anymore. Since I had the songs on other releases, I gave the single to a friend in high school who really liked the song.

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Re: What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Post by inasimplerhyme »

I selected the "other" option in the poll, but my first time experiencing them was actually live. It was on September 7th, 1991 at a club in Madison, WI that's no longer there. My friends had been talking them up, but I had never seen/heard them. (Ironically, I was living in Minneapolis at the time.) So I came back to my home town and experienced my first real club show. My only concerts up to this point had been big, arena rock shows. I was 19 at the time. They encored with "Rhinestone Cowboy", which was so impossibly funny and cool that I almost couldn't comprehend it. A couple of days later I called my friend Jim to talk about the show, and asked him, "There's some song they did that's stuck in my head. I just remember, 'want to be, want to be, want to be....' something." It was "Closer To The Stars", of course. My friend then made me a mix tape and my first actual CD's ended up being Horse and Hang Time.

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Re: What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Post by AlyssaJones »

For me it was Candy From A Stranger. I first heard it back when Napster would let you listen to full-length songs as much as you wanted to. One night I was on SA's page and I just clicked on song that sounded interesting, and it was Dragging the Lake. I really liked it, so I listened to another track from CFAS, and eventually I just listened to the whole album. The next day I went to the used book/music store and bought it. I felt really lucky because used music stores NEVER have what I'm looking for. And since it's the first album of theirs I ever bought I have sentimental attachment to it and therefore get annoyed when people say they don't like it. (Of course people are entitled to their own opinion, it just annoys me)

The second album I listened to was Grave Dancers Union. I probably would have bought it sooner, but I was put off by the cover art. It didn't really bother me too much, but I was afraid my family would make fun of me for buying a CD with that on the cover. (But once I got totally crazy about them I couldn't care less what they thought.)

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Re: What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Post by sheryl »

The first album I ever had was GDU. I'd been listening to them for years but I never bought anything prior. Most of my friends had Hang Time, and that's probably the first record I ever listened to all the way through. But the first one I personally had was GDU.

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Re: What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Post by lucy »

I bought a vinyl copy of Made to Be Broken when it came out a couple of months after my first show (I saw them Oct 85 and it came out Jan 86). I was 16. Shortly thereafter I bought Say What You Will and then ordered Time's Incinerator and the 7" with Long Way Home on the back from a Twin Tone ad in Maximum Rock n Roll and While You Were Out when that came out later that year and well you all know how the rest goes...

I think that coming from the perspective of hearing those earlier albums first, it was different than hearing the newer stuff and then going back and "discovering" the older stuff. When you do that, you have to almost imagine what you would've thought about the albums at the time without the foresight of what was to come. And I remember seeing the changes with each album and it all really seemed like a natural progression to me and like there was never this huge "jump" that some people seem to see from Horse to GDU. I can't wait to see where they will go from here - hint hint hint....

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Re: What was the first Soul Asylum album you listened to?

Post by CrazyLittleWoman »

Let Your Dim Light Shine was the first Soul Asylum CD I ever bought. I heard Misery on the radio and the wordplay and warped sense of humor got my attention. I bought the CD looking for more of the same and found it in spades. I was only halfway through my first listen when I started paging through the liner notes looking for the songwriting credits. By the time the CD finished, I was completely smitten. Then a friend suggested I get what she referred to as Soul Asylum's "first" album, Grave Dancer's Union, and check out April Fool. I did.
lucy wrote:I think that coming from the perspective of hearing those earlier albums first, it was different than hearing the newer stuff and then going back and "discovering" the older stuff. When you do that, you have to almost imagine what you would've thought about the albums at the time without the foresight of what was to come. And I remember seeing the changes with each album and it all really seemed like a natural progression to me and like there was never this huge "jump" that some people seem to see from Horse to GDU. I can't wait to see where they will go from here - hint hint hint....
I'm one of those people who had to go back and "discover" the older stuff -- and it took me years to do so.

I'll freely admit that had I heard their albums from the 80s at the time they came out, I would have hated them. It would have seemed to me like nothing more than off-key screaming over racket. With the exception of Closer to the Stars and Passing Sad Daydream, I still find While You Were Out difficult to warm up to.

But I really enjoy the rest of their earlier work. In fact, I was surprised at how much I like Say What You Will because I had anticipated really hating it. Funny how taste changes over time. And Hang Time and Horse were strong contenders for my favorite SA albums.

During my "discovery" period, I listened to all of the studio releases in release date order. I agree with lucy: the changes in Soul Asylum's sound and material seems like a natural evolution. Grave Dancer's Union doesn't sound like a huge departure because you can hear every element of GDU in some form in the earlier albums. Their songwriting has always pulled in a little of this and a little of that and just kept progressing.

Like lucy, I'm intensely curious to see where they'll take the music next.
"Dave Pirner was the coolest motherfucker to wield a low-strung telecaster who isn't called Keith Richards." -- Ginger (Wildhearts)

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