Musical Wednesdays: Sing Sing Sing Every Song We Know

I will admit that when I first listened to the Hold Steady's new album, Heaven is Whenever, I wasn't overly-impressed. There were some stand-out songs, of course, but nothing that matched the moment in "Stuck Between Stations" when the piano filled in that little break before Craig Finn started singing "We drink and we dry up." Or the break in "Stevie Nix" before the "17 forever/33 forever" section. I started to wonder if the loss of Franz Nicolay meant something essential had left the band. The whole thing seemed a little bit older, and a little bit sadder, and I wondered if they still had the power of their first three albums.

It's an album that I needed to hear a few times, and now I'm finding that I like it a lot more than I first thought I would. Sure, the piano is gone, but I don't think that's the biggest change. Craig Finn's lyrics have shifted slightly, and this album takes on the voice of someone who has walked away from the scenes of his youth and is torn between nostalgia and imparting the hard lessons he learned there. The opening song, "The Sweet Part of the City," is one of my favorites, a look back at the events and themes of Separation Sunday that acts as kind of a memoir of where the band came from. The last few lines, "We were bored so we started a band. We like to play for you, we like to pray for you," are almost a manifesto of what the band is about: a rock and roll band obsessed with the big Catholic themes.

Another of the great tracks on the album, "The Weekenders," is a song about the couple in the earlier song "Chips Ahoy," and it has the feeling of something that has ended. The narrator is remembering, and wishing they could do it again, but he doesn't delude himself. What's really interesting is that the characters who recur in the earlier albums don't turn up, at least in name, in this album. Hallelujah, Gideon, and Charlemagne vanished into the Midwest, and the band telling their story seems to have moved on. It feels like a book where you really loved the characters has ended, and the author has moved on to different stories.

I read a review that called this a transitional record, and I think that's accurate. The band is shifting their focus, both lyrically and musically, and I think they address the dangers of this in one of the tracks, "Soft in the Center." The song is filled with advice, one line of which is, "You can't tell people what the want to hear if you also want to tell the truth." Another one is simply, "the center is a dangerous place." He's referring to frozen lakes, but he might also be talking about these middle albums, when a band is slowly shifting toward a newer sound.

The more I listen to this record, the more I wonder if it's the band's last album about the Twin Cities; and why shouldn't it be? They've moved to Brooklyn and developed a much larger fan base--maybe it's time to tell a different set of stories, about a different cast of characters. If this is how they end that chapter of the Hold Steady, I think it's a fitting end. It will be interesting to see how the next one begins.