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You recently reunited with Paul Westerberg for Songs for Slim. What was it like being in the studio together again after all these years?
It was so much fun. It was so much fun that we talked about doing it again with some original material. In fact, when I get done with this GnR tour, I’m booking a flight to Minneapolis and doing that. Putting some songs down, but not getting stuck on making record — seeing what comes out of it. Neither one of us feels the pressure to become the Replacements again, although we talk about it.

Every time you or Paul mentions in an interview that you might get the Replacements back together, your fans go nuts. Do you really think it will happen?
I think if we think we’re having fun and it made sense and the music we were making was fun, we would do it. If it became too much of a nightmare, we wouldn’t. We want to enjoy ourselves, make some people happy, do our bit — not make a nightmare. Paul has more at stake, as he has more real feelings about it. He’s more reticent. He’s a singer. He doesn’t want to go out and compete with his 25-year old self. He’s 50. But if he could go out and have fun without the pressures and personal demons of competing with himself, I think he would.

Do you think getting back together with Paul was inevitable — or was it only Slim that could have brought you back together?
Paul and I have always played together. We’ve played together for years post-Replacements. I’ve played on his records; he’s played with me. I throw songs at him, he’s thrown them at me. We’re always going to play together when the planets align. We love each other. We have chemistry together and you don’t just get that with just anyone.

As everybody who knows the words to “Can’t Hardly Wait” knows by now, there is also a bounty of recordings in the works to benefit Slim. The first will be the Replacements reunion EP that Tommy Stinson and Paul Westerberg recorded a little over a month ago. Ex-'Mats manager and New West Records vice-president Peter Jesperson said yesterday that the 250 copies of the five-song EP -- the fifth track tacked on is a Slim cover by 'Mats drummer Chris Mars -- are on schedule to be auctioned off mid-December. Details of the auction are still coming together.

Starting in January or February, New West will then begin issuing limited-edition (100 copy!) 7-inch singles of Slim tunes re-recorded by the likes of Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, John Doe, Jakob Dylan, Joe Henry, the Jayhawks, ol’ Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and many more. Word is Craig Finn will record his contribution to the single series next week when he’s home for Thanksgiving and the Hold Steady’s two First Ave gigs, Nov. 24-25.

"We have a long tradition of leaving 'gifts' for each other on the doorstep since he lives close by. I left him a Fender amp once, he left me an Epiphone Casino that I use all the time."

Bowe's gifting system with the former Replacements frontman came in handy when Bowe was preparing his album Natchez Trace, out August 1st on Okemah Prophets. "I had written this song 'Everybody Lies' but it needed a bridge, so I left a recording of it on his doorstep and only a couple of days later, it boomeranged back to me with this very Westerbergian circle of fifths bridge thing, plus some other ideas to 'handsome up' the song, as he put it," Bowe explains."