There is something wonderful about Dave Pirner being an obsessive collector.
The Soul Asylum frontman has accumulated so many Hot Wheels that he can no longer put a number on them, certain reissue series require completion and anything green apparently requires immediate purchase.
Spot something overseas that isn’t available back home? That’s probably coming with him too.
“Too many to count,” Pirner tells us when asked how many he owns.
Yet when it comes to the band he has fronted for more than four decades, Pirner seems considerably less interested in collecting the past, that matters because Soul Asylum are finally coming back to Australia.
The Minneapolis alternative rock veterans will return next March for a co-headline tour with Ugly Kid Joe, taking in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, according to Pirner, it will be Soul Asylum’s first Australian visit since somewhere around the mid 1990s.
“That sounds correct,” he says when we put the timeframe to him.
For a band permanently connected to Grave Dancers Union, ‘Runaway Train’, ‘Somebody to Shove’ and the moment alternative rock became enormous, the obvious temptation would be to turn the return into a nostalgia exercise.
Soul Asylum ‘Runaway Train’ video
Pirner doesn’t sound particularly interested.
“I mean, we just put out a record year, year and a half, maybe, and we’re gonna go into the studio pretty soon here with some new tunes and sort of see how that goes,” he says.
“I think it’s what keeps things interesting. I think it definitely allows for the set list to keep you on your toes, and you’re not just going through the motions. And yeah, and the new material is really fun to play.”
Soul Asylum Never Really Stopped
There is a strange distortion that happens when a band has one period of overwhelming mainstream visibility, if you weren’t paying attention afterwards, it can look like the band disappeared when really the audience just stopped looking.
Soul Asylum never disappeared.
Their 2024 album Slowly But Shirley was their 13th studio record, arriving more than 40 years after the band’s beginnings in Minneapolis, and Pirner is already talking about getting back into the studio.
That makes the Australian return slightly more interesting than another ’90s package tour rolling through town.
Soul Asylum’s relationship with their own history appears less reverential than practical: the old songs remain because people want them, the new ones remain because the band needs them.
Pirner’s memories of Australia itself are similarly free of grand mythology.
“What you kind of gather from it is just the general kind of — I mean, my impression was that people really like rock music in Australia, which is always good for me because it happens to be what I’m doing,” he says.
“We’ve had some really good times there, and some nice crowds and cool people, and we shot a video in Australia actually.”
Why has it taken roughly three decades to get back?
“I have no idea, actually,” Pirner admits.
“We’ve always kind of just gone whichever way the wind takes us, and we’ve always liked playing in Australia, and it’s been talked about for a while. So I’m hoping this time it’s real.”
It is, and Soul Asylum won’t be coming alone.
The Strangely Perfect Ugly Kid Joe Tour
Pairing Soul Asylum with Ugly Kid Joe makes immediate sense to anyone whose CD collection survived the ’90s, apparently nobody told Dave Pirner.
“I’ve never heard them. I’ve never seen them play,” he says.
That is considerably more entertaining than pretending the two bands have secretly been best mates for 30 years.
Pirner had, in fact, been trying to figure out the connection himself before learning during our conversation that Ugly Kid Joe came out of California.
“The more I kind of understand it, like it should be — it should be fun, and I’m looking forward to it,” he says. “I hear that they have a big following in Australia, and there’s a lot of surfing in Australia.”
Pirner will not be participating in that part.
“We have 10,000 lakes in Minneapolis, and not a single wave.”
If Soul Asylum and Ugly Kid Joe occupy neighbouring spaces in the public memory, they arrived there by very different routes. Ugly Kid Joe turned irreverence and hard rock into enormous early ’90s singles; Soul Asylum emerged from the Minneapolis underground before Grave Dancers Union pushed them into a completely different level of attention.
Three decades later, the pairing works precisely because neither band needs to pretend 1992 was last week.
Slowly But Shirley, And the Drag Racing Hero Behind It
Even the title and artwork of Soul Asylum’s latest record point towards something Pirner carried forward from childhood rather than a calculated return to the band’s commercial peak.
Slowly But Shirley pays tribute to pioneering drag racer Shirley Muldowney.
“Shirley is spelled like the woman’s name, and Shirley Muldowney was the first woman of drag racing,” Pirner explains.
Her car appears on the album cover, while Muldowney herself is credited with the photograph on the back.
For Pirner, the connection goes back to being a kid fascinated by drag racing.
“I just thought drag racing was really cool, and the design of the cars and just the bizarreness of driving down a straight track as fast as you can,” he says.
Once Muldowney gave the band permission to use her image, Pirner started looking deeper into what she had actually represented.
“I always thought that that was a really cool thing for a woman to be in the middle of such a man’s world kind of activity, if you will. I guess it’s a sport.”
The childhood fascination with cars clearly never left, which brings us back to those Hot Wheels.
Dave Pirner Has a Hot Wheels Problem
Pirner blames parenthood.
“I had a kid, and then I was going to, you know, stores that had Hot Wheels again, and they reissued all the ones that my mom wouldn’t buy me when I was a kid,” he says.
“And then it just kind of — it kind of snowballed into like now I just, if I’m in Germany and I see a Hot Wheel that they don’t have in America, I gotta buy it.”
The collecting rules became increasingly specific.
A reissue range of cars from his childhood became the serious collection. Pirner estimates there were around 30 to 40 cars in each series. He completed the first, only for another to arrive.
“There was a series one, and I thought that was it. I got all those,” he says. “And they came out with series two, and I got all those.”
Then there is the other rule.
“I have to buy any Hot Wheel that is green.”
Pirner also reads, watches movies and remains immersed in music. Travel, despite having spent much of his adult life doing it, holds considerably less appeal.
“I hate traveling,” he says.
Touring has apparently created the ultimate occupational problem: when your job involves constantly going somewhere, going somewhere stops feeling like a holiday.
The Song That Made It Back to Minnesota
For all Pirner’s resistance to standing still, there are moments when Soul Asylum’s past catches up with him in ways he clearly enjoys.
One happened at a Minnesota Wild hockey game.
Pirner played hockey as a kid. Years later, he was sitting inside the arena when ‘Somebody to Shove’ came through the loudspeakers.
“I went to a Minnesota Wild game, and they played ‘Somebody to Shove’ in the stadium over the loudspeakers, and I thought that was pretty cool,” he says.
“It’s kind of full circle for me.”
Soul Asylum ‘Somebody to Shove’ video
That might be the more useful way to understand Soul Asylum in 2026.
There is no escaping Grave Dancers Union, nor should there be. Those songs have outlived the alternative-rock boom that carried them into the mainstream, people coming to these Australian shows will want to hear them.
But Pirner doesn’t talk like someone waiting around to reenact his biggest year.
There are new songs waiting for the studio, there’s a recent record in the set and there are five Australian cities Soul Asylum haven’t seen in a very long time.
And somewhere in Pirner’s luggage, there will probably be room for another tiny green car.
Soul Asylum + Ugly Kid Joe Australian Tour 2027
- Monday, March 15th – Perth, Astor Theatre
- Wednesday, March 17th – Adelaide, Hindley St Music Hall
- Thursday, March 18th – Melbourne, Forum
- Saturday, March 20th – Sydney, Roundhouse
- Sunday, March 21st – Brisbane, The Tivoli
Early bird pre-sale begins Monday, September 14th at 11am local time.
General tickets go on sale Wednesday, September 16th at 11am local time via Destroy All Lines.
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