I’m naturally craving a long, substantive look into the inner depths of the Hold Steady back catalog, but sometimes my actual life gets in the way.
In lieu of that, a few brief notes:
i. A note from my Twitter, which I still don’t understand but am attempting to: flynnwaslike has started constantly quoting the hold steady. this is bad…
ii. I’ve now made it through Boys & Girls In America twice and my first thought is always: who let this girl sing? It’s awful!
To the best of my recollection, I have listened to two bands every day for the last two weeks. The records, surprisingly, vary slightly depending on my mood and location and whether I’m listening to my stereo, my headphones, or my Rhapsody account at the office. The bands are strikingly different. Both are contemporary, both cater to a fairly similar audience, both excel at navigating their way through girls and God and family issues. Sonically, lyrically, they’re worlds apart.
I’m speaking of course of one band I’m immensely comfortable with loving, Okkervil River, whose songs have carried me through breakups and makeups and never-happeneds and the time that I listened to “It Ends With a Fall” on repeat all the way from the Newark airport to Times Square in tears. In contrast is naturally the band I love to hate, with Stay Positive having become regular and easy listening in my rotation and Separation Sunday still some strange anomaly I don’t know what to do with. (Almost Killed Me at times feels too obvious; Boys And Girls awaits me for a rainy day or my next half-drunk record store trip.)
And I have to be honest, I’m to the point where these records do something for me beyond the ordinary analytics and definitions. When I get past the piecing together of who Holly and Gideon and Charlemagne may be, when I’m not pondering what exactly a hoodrat or a townie is (I’m a small town girl, I don’t know these things), when I’m not waiting for someone to sit down and explain to me what it’s like to be a lapsed Catholic and sing about it, I’m really enjoying it.
The contrast between both bands’ newest records is perhaps the sweetest; I switch from Stay Positive to The Stand-Ins with relative ease. There’s something remarkable about the buoyancy of the new Okkervil; it’s a record so familiar-sounding that one is able to get behind it in a way that required a definitive sadness on all their previous efforts. True, this one is full of that very sadness, but it’s one that lets you inside and comforts you rather than punching you in the gut. When the narrator in “Calling and Not Calling My Ex” thinks about separation by way of airplane terminals and dissenting lifestyles, he ends the song quietly: “You’re so lovely, you’re so smart / So go turn their heads, go knock them deads, go break their hearts.”
We can get behind that song because it’s sweet; we can get behind it because the statement is following by a burst of horns and musical bounty that end the song with a certain level of hope. Now, how do we get to the Hold Steady from here?
The explanation, I think, is lovely and part of the fun and has much, much more to do than the simple “songs about girls.” (If you really only are interested in listening to pure pop songs about girls, then you may as well just keep the Material Issue back catalog on file and be done with it.) To get from point A to B, I’m going to take the liberty of quoting Cora Diamond, in her discussion of Conrad’s fiction in “The Importance of Being Human”:
“He hopes to awaken the feeling of unavoidable solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world; he takes himself to speak to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives, to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation.
The sense of mystery surrounding our lives, the feeling of solidarity in mysterious origin and uncertain fate: this binds us to each other, and the binding meant includes the dead and the unborn…and those behind whose vacant eyes there lurks a ‘soul in mute eclipse.’”
Here, the idea is that being human is not something biological so much as it is something imaginative; we are able to leap from one fictional reality to another here because our existence as humans, in a sense, requires it. We seek out this sense of mystery even as we hope for solidarity, and somewhere in between the two we arrive from the smart and the lovely to the following: “There’s gonna come a time when she’s gonna have to go with whoever’s gonna get her the highest.”
Two different moments in two vastly different songs; one melodic, one strangely jarring. Both are grounded in this “uncertain fate”, and in the certainty of the pain that will come along with it. Both grip us with the sense that what happens next is colored in a certain light by the context in which it comes, but there’s a strange way in which the listener expects, at least during the course of the song, to somehow be a part of that uncertain future.
In reality, the uncertainty of that future mirrors our own, and in that sense both of these songs, these albums, these artists, are beautifully the same. And as the weather changes and I stop knowing whether or not I should be wearing a jacket or when I’ll meet a new friend or when I’ll forget myself just long enough to trip and fall over in the street, I know that on some possibly less poetic level, I’m bound to these songs by that very mystery and wonder.
I went to see Chuck Klosterman read from his new novel tonight because I have a certain love for him, possibly despite myself. As his Q&A session turned into the recall of anecdotes, most of which I have to assume he saves and relishes for just these occasions, I realized that I desperately wanted to ask him one thing:
“Do you like the Hold Steady?”
I saved that question for two reasons: one, because knowing Klosterman, I was pretty sure there was no way that he wasn’t, and two, because I didn’t want the cute guy sitting next to me to think I was a doofus. (And three, because I’m terrifically shy and public speaking makes me nauseous.)
Thankfully, the internet proves me right on a regular basis: Chuck Klosterman fucking loves the Hold Steady. Adores them. Raved about them in Esquire (because dudes who read Esquire are totally down with the Unified Scene.) Called Separation Sunday the best record of 2005. Chuck Klosterman adores this band!
His girlfriend was sitting in the front row. I bet her name is Holly.
I wasn’t even thinking that much about it when I returned from a doctor’s visit last week and my best friend texted to see how it went. My reply was simple: “She says that she’s sick, but she won’t get specific.”
With regards to those maladies, I ask today if I’m being unreasonable. He responds, “We gotta stay positive!”
I’m in way over my head.
My friend Rob sent me this link to some Finn chat on Mog today. Here, Finn touches on a number of the themes I’ve been afraid to hit: religion, forgiveness, and the heavier-hitting messages of Stay Positive that underlie the easier bits about girls and drinking and building towers.
I’m sure I’ll have plenty more to say on the matter when I’ve waded through the video, but at the moment I’m too busy being jealous of people who have had conversations with Springsteen.
A good friend of mine just brought to my attention a simple fact. “I’m not a big Hold Steady fan, but I loved Lifter Puller,” he started out, “and…”
I knew immediately I was in trouble.
The album is called “Fiestas + Fiascos” and not “Fiestas Fiascos.” This has been duly noted.
(However, it’s worth noting that it’s been uploaded to Rhapsody as “Fiestas Fiascos”, which is where I got it from, because when you’re truly progressive in the digital age, you don’t buy MP3s. You use a subscription service, by golly.)
Mid last week, I wrote a very short post on my first listen to a Lifter Puller record, describing it merely as “dissonant.” Here, a few more deserved words, at least with respect to this aspect of the band that came afterward.
The inherent abrasive quality of The Hold Steady’s music is part and parcel of what gives them a “sound”; it’s something that holds each of their songs together and begins to give it an identity that can’t just be easily bundled away into a genre. (Go on and give me shit for saying this, but it’s what separates them from, say, Band of Horses.)
At the same time, there’s a disconnect between what makes up a Hold Steady song and what in my mind really characterizes a song in a non-experimental sense. This struck me tonight as I was listening to a track that I consider an incredibly well-put together, living and breathing song: the Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies).” Here is a song that marries a number of separate things, all difficult to nail, and puts them into one entity that’s ultimately complex but sounds competely simple and reasonable to the listener. The lyrics are poetry; they’re somewhat obtuse while still making sense if you don’t think about them too hard. (If you choose to think about them too hard, they’re as ripe for the picking as any decent novel.) Add in some well-placed harmonies and a number of different instrument parts that come together in a way that sounds orchestral without sounding slick, and you’ve really got something magical. You’ve got something that really feels easy; you’ve got yourself a song. It’s a lot to handle at once, but it’s got to feel like it was absolutely meant to be.
Now, this is no argument that The Hold Steady are in any way meant to sound like The Arcade Fire; in fact, both bands have managed to garner the same continued comparisons on their most recent records, which is really interesting if you pause to examine it just a bit. Where on their debut album, The Arcade Fire were pushing a line between mainstream likeability and the kind of esoteric craft that Neutral Milk Hotel once perfected, Neon Bible is a collection of solid and likeable but mostly forgettable songs. By comparison, Stay Positive is suprisingly melodic after making your way through most of The Hold Steady’s body of work; you start to feel a real sense of verse and chorus and singalong-song that works in a much less jarring manner than before.
Where those two points converge, apparently, you get a Springsteen comparison.
Springsteen’s works, like the aforementioned Arcade Fire track, revolve mostly around taking what you think is an ordinary rock song and building it, so that what sounds simple and easy is really a bunch of little songs in one, all coming together to make something truly grandiose. The examples here are easy, all you have to do is look at “Rosalita.” It’s sprawling, it’s epic, but it’s also a song to sing along to. It sounds absolutely simple until the day you’re listening to it and you really realize just how long it takes to get to that favorite fist-pumping part about the record company and the big advance. This is a song.
All of this said, it’s this dissonance that in part makes The Hold Steady who they are as a band, but at the same time it’s what separates them from this notion of song as something at once both intricate and immensely palatable. It’s what keeps the average listener (or so I think!) from being able to engage in their songs as one might engage in a standard work of fiction: to lose oneself in it so completely that you forget the world in which you live, and in turn become colored by the moral and emotional canvas of the world inside that work.
These songs don’t ever quite give you that opportunity – at least, not on the first couple of albums. I think the idea of the sonic dissonance here – that jarring disconnect between guitar chords and spoken-word, barely sing-song vocals – pairs itself with its subject matter for a purpose. Here, you aren’t being challenged to enter another world so much as you are being asked to examine your own.
It’s possible that what makes the girls in Hold Steady songs so compelling is that you can imagine them: you can feel what their lives must be like after they’ve been pinpointed in a few lines. You imagine them – Holly from “Barfruit Blues” or the antagonist from “Magazines” – waking up in the mornings after a few too many drinks next to a stranger. You imagine them trying to piece together events in shame; you imagine the boys around them as a cast of characters encompassing both the problem and the solution. Our underdog protagonists (who, as Conklin points out, are arguably more pathetic than the females, because they see all of these problems and still pine away) watch helplessly (why are they helpless, anyway?) as these girls twist themselves into situations with achingly predictable results.
These girls are gonna wake up in the morning and they’re going to have regrets. We just know it. It kills us all to hear it, but we love to hear Finn sing about it.
There’s a sense in which I learn to identify with these girls on occasion; on a long Labor Day weekend, there are all too many occasions to have a few drinks with the boys and wind up doing things you don’t wholly remember and might well wholly regret. Saturday night found me merry, events glazed with the pleasant amber cast of Leinenkugels Sunset Wheat; Sunday morning found me waking up with quite an interesting kind of stranger.
It seems disturbingly appropriate that I went drinking, went to the record store, and woke up on a Sunday morning with a brand new copy of Separation Sunday. Our saga continues.
This record is really quite dissonant.
365 days with the hold steady 
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