Everything Dies, That's a Fact

Hopefully by now everyone has checked out the two great new compilations that have been released to raise money for great causes: War Child, Volume 1: Heroes and Dark Was the Night. They're both excellent compilations with a lot of really great music. The latter has a particularly good song by The National (who put together the entire mix) and a bunch of awesome stuff by David Byrne, Antony, and the New Pornographers. But I'd like to take just a few minutes to talk about one track on the "Heroes" compilation that just blows me away: the Hold Steady's long-anticipated cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City."

The Hold Steady performed the song live a few years ago at a big Springsteen event, and ever since then, I've been wanting to hear what they did with it. When I finally got to hear it, I was so glad that it was everything I had hoped for. If you're not familiar with the original, it's the best song on Springsteen's second album, "Nebraska," and it tells the story of a down-on-his luck loser who is hoping to cash out by doing some kind of vague criminal activity. The original has these long Ohh's in the background, giving it a lot of tension and leaving the listener pretty haunted, and for Springsteen, whose largest body of work contains full instrumentation and big sound, the sparseness of the track is a real departure. The Hold Steady's cover is everything you want a cover to be: it reinvents the song without sacrificing any meaning or feeling from the original. Gone are the background Ohh's, but for the first verse and chorus, the only sounds are Craig Finn and a piano. There are a few bits that get cut from the cover, but these are sacrificed for the sake of the story: where Springsteen sings, "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact," Finn gets right to the meat of these phrases. He says, "Everything dies, that's a fact." In his version, there's no need to expand on this sentiment by nodding to the hypothetical listener.

After the first chorus, the song takes an interesting departure, exploding with the saxaphone and full band that Springsteen doesn't use in the original, and I like this touch. It makes it not so much a cover of only this one Springsteen song, but instead a nod to everything the Hold Steady seem to admire in the Boss's work. By far my favorite part, however, is the verse in the song when the narrator talks about getting involved in this criminal act, the line "Last night I met this guy, I'm gonna do a favor for him." In typical Hold Steady style, Finn grabs this line and repeats it several times before breaking it apart and singing, "Last night I met this guy" several times before putting it back together. It's a trick they've used in a few other songs to great effect, and I think it really works in this cover. It seems to cement the narrator's decision to do this favor, and carries the song to the next point, when all of the instrumentation disappears, and we're left with an a capella chorus singing, "Everything dies, that's a fact. Maybe everything that dies someday comes back." Even at the very end of the song, when the whole band comes back in, this line is repeated until the close. It's especially powerful coming from the Hold Steady, who share with Springsteen a certain fixation on the big Catholic mystery of resurrection. In this line, the band's love of broken-down characters who only hope for another chance calls out to Springsteen's love of the same, and the overall effect is beautiful and kind of chilling.

For me, this final line, in the hands of the Hold Steady, hearkens back to "Separation Sunday." Yes, everything does come back, but it's not always in the way you'd expect. Sometimes, it has to be through a girl crashing into the Easter Mass to tell us "how a resurrection really feels."