a query

Oh, I haven’t gone anywhere; in fact, I’ve been hibernating this winter in the warmth of the bassline from “Massive Nights.” While I’ve been here, I’ve been wondering what one Hold Steady lyric people are most struck by. It doesn’t need to be a favorite or one that you identify with – just the one that strikes you every time.

Leave me a comment, send me an email, I want to know and then I want to ruminate on it. I know only a few people read this, and half as sporadically as I post, but I have confidence in your abilities to touch upon the overlooked.

beginning a new year with the hold steady

A new year, a new world.

2008, for me, was a year of a great many unpleasant sorts of discoveries and a number of events I would rather have forgotten. In terms of personal triumphs and achievements, it’s not the kind of year one would like to have. In terms of musical discovery, however, it was the perfect time for me to come to terms with the Hold Steady.

Sometimes the best way to understand everything you hate about yourself is to stare it down unblinking; this results in some tremendously awkward moments. Nowhere are these moments more awkward or more tremendous than in the works of the Hold Steady.

At the risk of making harsh generalizations, I like to think there are two kinds of listeners. There’s the kind of person who listens to songs as narratives, marrying the plot subtexts with the instrumental shifts and taking it in as one would a novel, weighing the whole on the sum of its criteria. Then, there’s the kind of person who listens to songs with their heart, engaging in their fictions and identifying with them whether they like it or not, and occasionally tattooing a lyric or two in their mind as accidental but true life tenets.

It is difficult to imagine either sort not finding something to love in “Constructive Summer”; it’s easy to think that either one might get completely tangled up in the trainwreck of “Magazines.” This music – this record, a lasting momento of 2008 – is as palatable as it is completely uncomfortable. It’s for this reason that our dear Alice fell down the rabbit hole that was the past year’s worth of merriment, whiskey, and veritable shitshows; it is for this reason that she fell right into the Hold Steady back catalog and found it an acceptable place to stay.

I started last year hating a band; I ended the year with their latest album on my top ten list, one of their shows under my belt, and their back catalog in regular rotation on my mp3 player. If I learned anything in the last year, it’s that sometimes the things that make you the most uncomfortable are also the things you love the most.

staying posi for the holidays…

It’s remarkably easy to become one of those people who think about the Hold Steady all the time. It’s even easier not to realize you’re thinking about the Hold Steady all the time.

I came across this lovely little piece in the Independent this morning whilst the final notes of “Slapped Actress” made their way across my aural spectrum, and it’s inspiring in all the generally predictable Craig-Finn-interview kinds of ways.

One thing that really struck me about it, though, was the way in which he pinpoints seeing The Last Waltz as a moment that changed his line of thinking about music. I’ve always maintained that those kinds of moments are exactly what rock and roll is meant to be about – in a sense, we’re floating in a world of billions of songs just trying to strike that exact feeling. It’s kind of fun to wonder what revelatory moments of our own we would be without if someone else hadn’t had one first. Would there be a Hold Steady without that viewing of “The Last Waltz”?

Probably, but would it be the same band with the same ideas and the same faith? Not exactly. Would they be able to fully recreate what it meant for me to discover Stay Positive in summer 2008, broke and broken-up-with and trying to remember if there still existed a hopeful artist in me somewhere?

Maybe. Probably. I’m just glad I’ll never have to find out.

chillout tent

It seems so blatantly obvious that I have to assume many people have written about this before me, but every time I listen to “Chillout Tent” (Disclaimer: lately, it’s a lot), I’m struck by how simple it really is and how I can’t believe no one has really done this before The Hold Steady. We live in a world where remakes are the standard and reinventions of old ideas are almost as good as having completely new ideas – how has it taken someone this long to modernize “Summer Lovin’?”

[More importantly: Was it intentional?]

Certainly, Finn as narrator is a new device; here, the boy/girl call and response happens only in what might be called the choruses. In this particular tale, however, it makes sense: these kids are too fucked up to really tell the stories of what happens before they wake up in the chillout tent (as evidenced by their brief explanations of how they got there, and how they subsequently end up “kicking it.”) It’s no longer as simple as making out under the dock – now, we need a third party to tell us what exactly the hell went down.

As creepy and gross as this song obviously is (and pretty much admits to being so), it’s lyrically arresting: “She looked just like a baby bird / All new and wet and trying to light a Parliament.” Where “Summer Lovin'” is mildly coy and it takes the length of the song to drag out the full story, with the need for a chorus of voices to coax it out (“Tell me more, tell me more…”), you can sort of guess where this story is going simply by virtue of its lack of virtue. At the same time, it says something kind of banal and sad about modernity that makes me kind of depressed.

It’s funny sometimes how you can literally spend weeks thinking about a song and have it only boil down to two vague paragraphs, but all you really need to do is start thinking about the evolution of songs and their subject matter, and you’ll find it might happen to you, too.

Elizabeth Elmore’s vocals still drive me kind of bonkers in this song though.

you can make him like you

It seems natural that I’d want to review the Hold Steady / Drive By Truckers show last Thursday, that I should write a really clear and thoughtful treatment of how it came to be that I faced the Hold Steady in the setting I feared them most and lived to tell the tale. It is true that I came, saw, and conquered; I will note that I’m not one for fingerpointing, but I did dance and I sang along and I have to be honest – I knew the words to almost all of the songs, and I was sad that I didn’t have tickets for the following night.

Combined with an already unabashed love for the pure Southern rock of the Truckers, the evening as a whole was the sort that I haven’t experienced in perhaps years. It never gets old to watch New Yorkers get excited about a band, to sing, to dance – it’s a phenomenon I’ve even appreciated in my younger years, dragged to Dashboard Confessional shows by well-meaning friends. It’s a hell of a lot better, though, and feels a hell of a lot more important when the band does.

The events of the past week – the show, the week prior to it, a comment my friend Ryan left on this blog during that time – have brought both careful attention to and thoughtful re-examination of Boys and Girls in America. Each time I listen to it, I’m reminded over and over of when I went to look the lyric up online for “You Can Make Him Like You,” wanting to make sure I was understanding it properly. On one of the “365/Songmeanings/Etc” sites, a user had commented on the song with a note about how it was great to have a man sing a female perspective, and how it’s important to remember that if one boy doesn’t work out, there’s a whole world full of boys who will treat you better!

In some ways, this is horrifying; in others, it gets to the problem at the heart of the Hold Steady. At the risk of mentioning Springsteen too much in this blog (sorry, but he’s pretty much a big deal), it reminds me of seeing him at Shea Stadium on the Rising tour and watching as fans throughout the place waved American flags with pride the second he kicked into “Born in the U.S.A.” I felt nothing but scorn at the time, but years later in a “Springsteen Vs Petty” conversation with my father, he characterized it for me: “See, I love Tom Petty because he tells it like it is – or how I want it to be. The problem with Springsteen is that he writes great songs, but half the time, I have no idea what the fuck that guy is talking about.”

There’s a great deal of danger in writing songs that seem so obvious. Do they retain the same strength when they’re so easily misinterpreted as the very worry they’re being written about? Does that make them even stronger? “You Can Make Him Like You” is maybe my favorite Hold Steady song write now, because it’s simple and it’s powerful and it’s really quite sad. It sounds twice as good live as it does on the record, and it’s poignant and empowering in ways I’m not really smart enough to articulate. The danger in the narrow interpretation of the song is, of course, what makes it have a broader meaning at all. Insofar as there is a narrow interpretation, however, are we forever risking the notion that a girl will take hold of this song and keep it to her heart as proof that she can pass from boyfriend to boyfriend as needed?

(Even more frustrating: Does it matter?)

It’s funny how quickly I can embrace the song and how all at once, it somehow manages to address all of the “girl issues” I’ve long had with this band. I’m starting to see where this is all coming from; I’m more than able to sing lines like “She was a damn good dancer / but she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend,” and laugh about it, thinking of the truth in it. But as always, I fall short at the moments at which we find ourselves in these fictional characters – we’re meant to engage in these fictions, for certain, but what happens when they don’t awake us to the broader understanding of our own realities?

The thought seems scary, but it doesn’t make me love the song any less.

she was a damn good dancer

I gave myself 365 days, and in reality it’s only been a couple of months.

But I think I can safely say that the danger has passed (or wholly entered the picture), and I’m not sure there’s a way for me to really hate The Hold Steady anymore.

More on the show later!

dear jesse malin

If you’re going to cover a Hold Steady song on an album (and really, isn’t there some kind of “too soon” rule about this, both for you making a full-length covers album and also for covering a contemporary on it?), you might at least consider getting the title right.

damn, this used to seem like grammar

The music of middle America: this is a topic that seems to be debated as often as it is generalized. We as “refined music listeners” or critics have come to align the sound with the likes of Springsteen, Petty, and Fogerty; we see the torch passed on to the jam bands left behind by the Grateful Dead. Phish, Widespread Panic, and much to our critical delight, My Morning Jacket have filled this passionate niche; elsewhere, we find ourselves getting behind The Drive-by Truckers (we have a Lynyrd Skynyrd! And it’s okay!), Kings of Leon (they’ve toured with Bob Dylan! And it’s okay!), or the Arcade Fire (They’re Canadian! But so is Neil Young, so it’s okay!). And of course, somewhere in that category comes the notorious Hold Steady.

At the same time, there’s something else going on in middle America, something that we might call “reality.” We have a completely distorted view of how much times have changed; somewhat unconsciously, we seem to equate the implosion of the music industry and the rise of the digital age with the advent of a more interesting and varied equation where now the fringe has become the mainstream. What we seem to have forgotten, however, is that the implosion we’re seeing is in part nothing more than an ebb and fall much like that of the stock market. Just like the stock market, the majors were invested in some overblown lending, some overblown spending, and that led to some fucking crazy sales numbers. Things were bound to fall, only when they did, we seemed somehow surprised.

Cut back to middle America. Cut to the Billboard top rock charts, where only one of the aforementioned “new rock” artists (Kings of Leon, whose success we all seem mildly surprised at) is in the running. Here, we’re met with a fairly accurate account of what the masses are really listening to: Nickelback, Staind, Theory of a Deadman, Seether. I know how these charts vary, and I know which artists are omnipresent on them; it’s a part of my day job to look at these singles and see how they translate digitally. One thing that stands out is the simple fact that, in this digital age, these rock radio bands have generally small digital percentages. Week after week, their fans are still buying their CDs.

Whatever the reason, I respect it, because it’s more than I can say for a great many of my Arcade Fire-loving peers. And as with all things labelled “middle American”, I know that it is true not only because I’m secretly obsessive about SoundScan numbers, but also because I’ve seen my mother’s CD collection, and it’s full of Creed, Nickelback, and 3 Doors Down albums. What got me thinking about all of this is the interesting dialogue in music blog-land wherein Mike comments on other Mike comments on Marc comments on Ann. It’s a topic I think about often, and at the end of the day I sort of feel like if you’re the kind of person who spends most of your time writing about music, you’re already so far removed from the kind of person who listens to modern rock radio that you’re pretty much doomed when you open your mouth to talk about it because you’re going to sound like an elitist, like a doofus, or like an elitist doofus.

As long as you continue the conversation, I think that’s all okay. Just don’t ask me, as a critic, to explain why I sometimes get tears in my eyes when I listen to the Foo Fighter’s “Everlong.”

And so, my tried and true test for finding out whether or not I can continue to refer to The Hold Steady as a good old middle American rock and roll band: I am going to take one of their records to the Midwest for Christmas, and I am going to ask my mom if she likes it.

[Just for the record, she also likes My Morning Jacket and The Drive-By Truckers. She does not, however, own a single Springsteen album.]

i have to try so hard not to fall in love…

Suddenly, here we are in November. By this time, I have resigned myself to The Hold Steady in the way that old married couples resign themselves to each other’s bad habits. I may not approve of all this skirt-chasing of tragic women, and I may not understand all of the underlying Judas vs. Jesus banter, but when we’re together, I feel quietly content with The Hold Steady. When I’m happy, they’re ready to offer up “Certain Songs” as a celebration of the things in life that I cherish the most. When I’m desperately sad, they have an inkling that what I need is a creative crutch, and they silently hand me “Constructive Summer” and wait for its healing powers to kick in.

Still, as in all relationships, I’m cautious and waiting for that quiet contentment to break. Coming later this week marks the moment that I am both excited about and fear the most. It’s the moment, really, where we move in with each other and I wait for them to pee with the metaphorical bathroom door open. This Thursday, you see, I have tickets to see The Hold Steady live.

The reason this is terrifying, of course, is that seeing The Hold Steady live is what started this whole debacle in the first place, what inspired years of hate, and what led me down the strange little road to making a blog about my love/hate relationship with a band (as opposed to a blog about my my love/hate relationship with everything else.) There’s a very real sense in which, like many relationships, this could end badly.

At the same time, the fear takes a very secondary place to the excitement; I’m wondering what they’ll play, I’m getting kind of excited, I’m reading about Patterson Hood’s top five favorite Hold Steady songs and wondering if they’ll play them. I’m thinking, too, about what a totally gratuitous “dude rock” tour this pairing is and wondering if I’m finally going to get locked in my status as a secret boy when the Truckers are on stage and break into their fifteen-minute-long version of “Let There Be Rock.”

Right now, though, I’m immensely thankful for all the boys who embody the main characters of all these songs, all the boys who sat me down and said “Listen. Here is what you’re missing about this band.” Right now, we’re really happy together.

This could change. Dudes, don’t fuck it up.

we’re gonna build something…

Life has a very funny way of getting in the way of people living their lives. “It’s all part of living, even the bad parts,” we think, but all of these distractions often keep us from doing the things we really want to do. Now is a strange time to be a person. There are the everyday things in life that you deal with on a singular level: maybe you’re sick or you’re unloved or you’re not really sure where your life is headed. And then there’s the world around us: the economy is eleventy kinds of fucked, the race for president doesn’t really seem to bode well no matter the outcome, and we’re still doing a fairly decent job of making sure that the earth won’t be around for us to care about our grandchildren’s financial futures anyway.

It seems a bit bleak, when you think about it.

In all of that, there’s this little admission: I listen to Stay Positive every day.

This used to freak me out some, but now it’s a comfort; even the things that make me cringe about it are comforting, like the moment you realize that even the most gentlemanly of your guy friends will spit on the sidewalk now and again. It’s a comfort both on that personal level and on the national one, where if everything seems weird and wacky and out of place, we have to remember that that’s because things have always been that way. These bizarre characters that I can’t stop thinking about, Charlemagne and Holly and the like, are all watching as life gets in the way of living itself. Through it all, the working man’s theme: “We gotta stay positive.”

What scares me most about times like these is that the right kind of music has always and will always pop up when we need it. This is a record that is so damaged in itself, and yet so hopeful, that it makes perfect listening for the fall of 2008. What worries me about that is something that’s yet another favorite Hold Steady topic: the scene has changed.

Are we still smart enough in these times to be able to reach for our favorite records as an answer? Will we understand that now more than ever, we need to be able to spend the little money we have on songs that sound important and shows that bring us together and a sense of unity that we have forgotten because we have some paltry excuses about having grown up and gotten too old?

Normally, I’d say my answer to that question is no, but every day there’s some dude singing in my ear about how we gotta stay positive.