Saturday, August 05, 2006

Song of the Week 8/4/06

Soul Asylum - "Lately"

Thursday night I saw Soul Asylum again. Unlike the last gig a few weeks ago, this was a full on headline set at Irving Plaza. And I'll be damned if they weren't just as good as their show last fall at the Bowery Ballroom. I knew that one of their songs would end up as Song of the Week because I listened to every Soul Asylum track I had in the iPod twice during my commutes this week. And when they broke into the third song of their set, "Lately," I knew that I had found my pick.

"Lately" is perhaps the most topical song Dave Pirner has ever written. Inspired by a story in a local paper about a woman waiting for her husband to come home from Iraq--and to see his child for the first time--Pirner paints a picture that too many families have been going through the past three years. The song especially resonated with me this week, as one of my friends found out that her brother was finally coming home from Iraq just in time to be there for his daughters birthdays. These lines seem especially worth highlighting:

"You gotta bring your soldier home
All those stones have all been thrown
You gotta give a kid a chance to get a look at his kid
And hope that he can live with whatever he did."

The band's performance of "Lately" Thursday night was, simply put, fucking rocking. Dan Murphy made his guitar howl at the end of the song, setting the tone for a night where he was on fire during every song. I went looking on You Tube to see if someone had perhaps posted some footage from the show, but what I found was infinitely more interesting:



I love how today's technology allows anyone to create a video to their own liking and then post it for the whole world to check out.

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