Michael Monroe - Finn Glam Thank You Ma'am... Page 4
By Martin Popoff

And why the title Life Gets You Dirty? "Because it does (laughs). No, actually, I was living in the countryside for awhile, in Finland. I lived in New York for ten years, on Manhattan, 3rd Street, the lower east side, right across the street from the Hell's Angels. So it was ten years there, and before that I lived in London for five years. Then when I decided to leave New York I was either going to go to London or Finland. My brother here, who I don't see much, he has a house in the country, so I thought it would be cool if I lived in the country too. So I had a house for about two or three years in the countryside. That house I had to leave because there was mold. There's a big problem with mold in Finland. All these old wooden houses get destroyed in stages. Then I moved into another house and that had mold and I had to move again. I thought I was going to have fresh air and clean water and healthy surroundings and it wasn't quite that. It got sort of crazy. I had to take the car everywhere. You can't just walk down the street and take a bus. And winter time, forget it. I would get stuck in the car, I had to chop wood, which is fine. At first I didn't mind all the work, but then you start thinking this is taking all my time away from writing and stuff. So Life Gets You Dirty was Jude Wilder's title. She and I live together. We went to a laundromat to wash. After the second mold house, we had to take like 15 sacks of laundry to a laundromat and we're washing everything and I just jumped into a laundry basket and she took a picture of me and I was thinking that life gets you dirty. And then, well, by the way, that's the title. I didn't get excited about it at first, but then I thought, hey, that's a new album title."

Look for both Life Gets You Dirty and Peace Of Mind out now, as Monroe indicates, the new one sounding a little more "finished", while Peace Of Mind features mostly originals with a few key covers: MC5's Kick Out The Jams, Machine Gun Etiquette from The Damned and Not Anymore from Monroe's deceased hero and close friend Stiv Bators, and Stiv's pioneering late '70s punk act the Dead Boys.