Soul Asylum — Easy Street

JUL 01 1990 · 12:00

Soul Asylum — Easy Street (1990) Director: Drew Carolan and Dinah Breakall Era: College Rock / Late A&M Era (1990) - Pre-breakthrough Soul Asylum on A&M Records, riding the college-radio alternative wave before mainstream crossover; the band's final album for the label before signing with Columbia and achieving platinum success with Grave Dancers Union (1992). High. This video is a rare documented artifact of Soul Asylum's pre-breakthrough A&M Records period, featuring a confirmed unique location shoot at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin — an unconventional and visually rich setting that distinguishes it from contemporaneous alternative rock videos. Its quantitative profile (rapid editing, warm saturation, high contrast) is analytically coherent with the production environment and genre moment. As a cultural document, it captures the Minneapolis alternative underground at a transitional moment — commercially underperforming but aesthetically adventurous — immediately before the grunge era reshaped the mainstream. Context: Released in 1990 as a single from And the Horse They Rode In On — Soul Asylum's fifth full-length and their second on A&M Records — 'Easy Street' arrived during the twilight of the college-rock era, just as grunge was beginning to displace the Minneapolis-rooted alternative underground on MTV. The band, formed in Minneapolis in 1981 out of the same fertile scene that produced Hüsker Dü and The Replacements, had not yet achieved mainstream crossover, and the album's promotional videos reached limited MTV rotation. The choice of Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin as the shoot location reflects a distinctly Midwestern, low-budget creative sensibility — eccentric, theatrical, and rooted in American vernacular culture rather than the Los Angeles or New York production infrastructure that dominated major-label music video production of the era. The band would be dropped by A&M shortly after this release, signing with Columbia and achieving breakthrough success in 1992 with Grave Dancers Union. Director notes: Per EnterTheSoulAsylum.com, the video was directed by Drew Carolan (credited on source as 'Drew Carolyn') and Dinah Breakall and filmed on location at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin — a 64-acre museum complex dedicated to American circus heritage, housed on the former winter quarters of the Ringling Brothers Circus, a National Historic Landmark site. The circus setting gives the video its distinctive theatrical visual identity, with warm practical lighting from circus artifacts, wagons, and performance spaces driving the video's high saturation (108.87) and warm color temperature (2.19) metrics. The rapid editing pace (135 scene changes, avg. 1.57s shot length) mirrors both the song's energetic tempo and the visual abundance of the Circus World Museum environment. The video was produced to support 'Easy Street,' which charted at #26 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1990, though MTV airplay for the band remained limited at this stage of their career.