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.

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."