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.

Musical Wednesday: Craig Finn Preaches to the Converted

Last Friday, I went to a Hold Steady show in Jermyn, PA. They’re touring all summer to promote their new album, Heaven is Whenever, which comes out in a few weeks, but for this show, they mostly stuck to older songs because you can’t have a big sing-along when no one knows the new album’s songs yet. They did probably five or six songs off of the new record in their hour-and-a-half set, including the first single, “Hurricane J” and “We Can Get Together,” which I posted the live video of a few weeks ago; they also premiered a new one, “The Sweet Part of the City,” which was in the vein of “Certain Songs” and “Lord, I’m Discouraged.”

I was really surprised by the crowd at this show. I only know three or four Hold Steady fans, and they’re all, well, geeks. English majors who go crazy over the literary allusions and overarching themes of redemption and temptation and all of the biblical insanity in Craig Finn’s lyrics. But the fans at this show were…different. They seemed to be a bunch of bro-dudes who severely missed the point of the songs. All they hear are the whoa’s and the guitar solos, and while those are things I also love about the Hold Steady, the real heart of the band for me are the lyrics and the stories. I actually overheard two of them talking about drinking a lot of whiskey and getting all fucked up, “just like Craig Finn would,” and I had to fight the urge to turn around and berate them for completely missing the point. These songs aren’t glorifying what the characters are doing—they’re about these characters hitting bottom and slowly crawling their way back.

Craig Finn performs like a Pentecostal preacher; he moves around the stage, eyes wide like he’s delivering the gospel or predictions of damnation. He gets the audience clapping, raising their hands like they’re testifying, chanting back at him. I love it; what other working band (other than the E Street Band) gets onstage and delivers anything close to a tent revival?

The only problem with this, though, is that it felt a lot like preaching to the converted. If the goal of constant tours is partially to drum up new listeners, then how does a band that puts on a show that is really for the die-hard fans draw in new people? Maybe a newcomer to the band sees the fervor and the familiarity and can’t help but dive in; but maybe some other newcomers feel that the fan base is a closed system because the conversation between the performers and the audience is so intimate. Just something to wonder about; I mean, I am already firmly in the camp of Hold Steady fans.

There were some songs they didn’t do that I really would have liked to hear, and a few they played that aren’t among my favorites. Even though Separation Sunday is one of my favorite albums, the song “Hornets! Hornets!” just doesn’t do it for me, and that was the second-to-last song. I still haven’t heard “How a Resurrection Really Feels” live, but I bet if I keep going to their shows, they’ll eventually play it. And where’s the fun in a resurrection if you don’t have to wait for it?

And as promised, I want to let everyone know that Record Store Day is this Saturday! Go support your local record store! The Hold Steady (see, this is related) will have an extremely limited edition of the new record available at some stores. Hope I get one.

Musical Wednesdays: Baseball Edition

"I ain't ever had a job, I just always played baseball."

-Satchel Paige

Well, it's that time of year again. The weather is getting warmer, the afternoons longer, the Bruce Springsteen songs more relevant. That's right, my friends: baseball season. So today's post is two of my favorite songs about the sport. One of them is a classic performed by the Hold Steady, and the other is a love song for baseball sung by a Scottish band.

First up: "Piazza, New York Catcher" by Belle & Sebastian

And "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," as performed by the Hold Steady. There used to be a video of the band recording this one, but it appears to have disappeared, which is a shame because there's a great moment after the song ends when Craig Finn takes a swig of beer. It's like his way of saying, "Play Ball." Since the video is gone, I think it falls to all of us here to have a cold beer to kick off the season.

Musical Wednesdays: May 4th

It seems like every year, there's one Tuesday where a ton of albums I really want are released. I think last year, it was early in March. This year, it's May 4th.

The first album coming out that day is the new record by the New Pornographers, "Together." They released the first single, which you can download here. It's a little different from their other stuff--the beginning in particular has a strange staccato feel--but I'm really excited to hear the rest of the album when it comes out.

And the second album? The Hold Steady's new "Heaven is Whenever," an album Craig Finn says is about "embracing suffering and finding reward in our everyday lives." The title of the album reminds me of a line in Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin," where a character whose brother thinks he's on heroin says, "All respects to heaven, I like it here."

I've only heard one song (in this video), and the sound quality isn't great, but the clip starts with "She said, 'Heaven isn't happening,' she played 'Heaven is a Truck." I'm really looking forward to seeing them tour for this album. They're coming to Pennsylvania twice!



So those are my two big albums that day (although I wouldn't be surprised if the new Arcade Fire album was coming out the same day.) Who wants to drive to Jermyn, PA to see the Hold Steady show in April?

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."