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.
365 days with the hold steady 
Me too! Seriously. Way the fuck out of my range. Such a great song though.
When they originally wrote the song, Craig to sing “And she drove down from Colgate with a car full of girlfriends”, but after hanging out with some girls -and participating in what it entails when one hangs out with The Hold Steady- from Bodwdoin, they changed the lyric. “Chillout Tent” always makes me feel a bit off; Perhaps, it’s my lack of having such an experience? Despite such a sentiment, the melody, the ‘guests’, & Craig’s play-by-play always make me sing along.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E6D81F31F932A35753C1A9609C8B63