Despite the start and stop recording process, the album sounds spontaneous and fresh. The result is Eventually (Reprise), the title apparently a reference to the three years that have elapsed since his solo debut, 14 Songs (Sire/Reprise).
Westerberg enlisted Lou Giordano (Goo Goo Dolls, Sugar, Smithereens) to help him finish up.
Once an iconoclast, always an iconoclast. “Sometimes you just have to know when to pack it in and try over.” “It just wasn’t shaping up to be as good a record as I knew it could be,” Westerberg says. Two weeks later, the former Replacements’ frontman was on a plane home to Minneapolis, with most of the tracks he and O’Brien had worked on left to gather dust. Some observors hoped that working with O’Brien, the über-producer who has worked with Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam and the Black Crowes, might bring Westerberg the hit record which has always eluded him. Last spring, Paul Westerberg and Brendan O’Brien entered an Atlanta studio to record Westerberg’s second solo album. I knew there was something different in his music. And I’m proud to have been the one to get Westerberg to tell his secret – he always wanted to be a blues guitarist. I’m really pleased to have found it and to have the opportunity to share it again. I was very happy with it at the time, but sort of forgot about it and when I came back across it I was honestly taken aback by how good it is. I consider this 1996 interview with Westerberg something of a lost classic – lost even to me. I turned away from most of it and back towards blues and other roots music before long, but the best Replacements music has stuck with me, because I think it transcends its time and genre, and that’s because Paul Westerberg wrote some really great songs. It was my introduction to a whole other world of music, and it helped open my eyes to a burgeoning alternative world. I was sold by the Village Voice quote on the poster which was plastered all around town – something like, “the dream flannel amalgamation of CCR and the Ramones.” Sounded good, and they delivered. Per Hoffman – now one of my oldest friends, then a new and exciting acquaintance – told me that his friends were talking endlessly about the Replacements and we had to go. I saw them in September, 1984, at the late and lamented Joe’s Star Lounge, weeks after arriving in Ann Arbor as a freshman.
The Replacements were a very important band to me.
I would have loved to go see them in Queens Friday night, but I had my own gig going on. In honor the Replacements’ recent reunion shows, I present to you this interview with Paul Westerberg.
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