DomPassantino

Topics forgotten to broach during this interview with Craig Finn, frontman of Brooklyn-based bar-rock revivalists The Hold Steady: Daniel Radcliffe says you’re his favourite band; those beards you grew in the build-up to release of new album Stay Positive were pretty suspect; and that guy that looks like a Romanian taxi driver from 1963 – what’s his deal? We did, however, find out that “being healthy is a big part of The Hold Steady”.

DiS: There’s a clear change of sound on Stay Positive, everything is a little less ‘indie produced’ and a little more ‘anthemic produced’... was that something you deliberately set out to do?
Craig Finn: Well, every time we make a record, we make it a little more musical. The more you play, and we’ve played hundreds of dates these past few years, the more musical you get, whether you’re using different instruments, getting tighter, being able to sing better on my part... right now, we’re a better band than we’ve ever been, just from playing all these dates.

DiS: The album has lyrical progression as well. Although it’s still classic Hold Steady territory, the characters that make Stay Positive up are a lot more honest than the cast on Separation Sunday and Boys and Girls In America.
CF: What the album talks about a lot is facing your responsibilities as you get older. The people on the album are reaching an older age, while trying to maintain youthful ideals. It’s pretty sobering.

DiS: Is reaching an older age while trying to maintain youthful ideals something you can relate to?
CF: Yeah man... I mean, I’m 36 years old and making a living off of rock ‘n’ roll, I’m always trying to make sense of it.

DiS: So how much of what the characters are saying on this album are what you yourself is saying? You’re a guy who paints some pretty large landscapes on your songs... I hate to use the word ‘literary’ but it kind of applies?
CF: Well, I’m trying to tell a story that is what I am actually saying, but there’re different viewpoints, different ways of telling the story and looking at it... These characters aren’t real people, but they’re based on people I’ve been around all my life, especially when younger.

DiS: So which song on the album is closest to your actual viewpoint then?
CF: To me, the title track is the most real. That’s actually me talking about myself, you know... “There’s a lot of old friends that are getting back in touch / And it’s a pretty good feeling, yeah, it feels pretty good”. One of the things we started to deal with on Boys and Girls In America, and it’s continuing into this album, is the idea of becoming a public figure. I know we’re not household names, but it’s still something I struggle with. It does make life a lot more interesting, just not in a positive way always.

DiS: Examples?
CF: Well, there’re times you don’t want to be recognised. If I’m in a bar and fighting with my girlfriend, I don’t want the person sitting next to me to know who I am.

DiS: On a similar tip, this album, like a lot of your back catalogue, takes place in the bar, but you’ve said that people always assume that The Hold Steady drink a lot more than they actually do?
CF: What’s happened is that because of the touring we do, we’ve had to clean ourselves up. I want to keep my voice, and we need to keep our energy up for going on stage. Being healthy has become a big part of The Hold Steady. People assume that because you’re a songwriter you’re the guy in your songs. When we recorded our first album, yeah, there was a lot of drinking, but now we’re trying to keep ourselves in better shape.

DiS: Four albums in five years, plus near-constant touring... for guys that grew up Catholic you sure do have a Protestant work ethic...
CF: It’s gotten to the point where, for me, it’s much harder to sit at home and do nothing than it us to go out and tour or record an album. If I sit at home, I have problems. The touring is all by design, people are consuming music a hell of a lot quicker these days, and we’re just trying to give people the opportunity to see us as much as they can.

DiS: Do you think that you’re a throwback to a touring era then, before bands were launched with MySpace and viral marketing and YouTube campaigns?
CF: We’re a little older than most bands. We’re from an era where this kind of touring, this kind of release schedule, was commonplace. If you look at guys like Husker Du, they did an album a year, and toured constantly. Those are the bands who we, as an organisation, want to be.

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Stay Positive is out now on Rough Trade and is reviewed here. The Hold Steady’s upcoming UK dates are as follows (full dates and more information on MySpace):

August
16 Chelmsford V Festival
17 Staffordshire V Festival

September
30 Manchester University

October
2 Wolverhampton Wulfrun Hall
8 London Roundhouse

Tickets for September and October shows are on sale from July 23.

Every Hold Steady song is pretty much the same: a man caught the wrong side of 30 hollers “Remember that one crazy broad from last summer?” over the sound of a bar band trying to discover the mid-point between The Replacements and John Cougar Mellencamp. Someone gets drunk, someone else gets high, lather rinse repeat.

Every Hold Steady album is pretty much the same as well. It must be deliberate. I’m not talking about the constant callbacks to other albums (observant HS fans will notice the repeated use of the lines “There’s gonna come a time when she’s gonna have to go with whoever’s gonna get her the highest” and “When the chaperone crowned us the king and the queen” on here). No, I mean the way that they frontload the shit out of their LPs, so on first listen you assume that they’ve finally blew it and dropped off one-third of the way through.

Like on here, like on every other album they’ve ever released, the singles are early doors. So here, in the ‘Chips Ahoy!’ / ‘Cattle and the Creeping Things’ spots, you’ve got ‘Constructive Summer’ and ‘Sequestered In Memphis’. The former seems to be a deliberate nod to those who just go “Springsteen” when they listen to HS and refuse to develop any further thoughts on the matter, a ‘Darkness On The Edge of Town’-esque driving anthem dedicated to the joys of getting fucked up in your youth: “Me and my friends are like / The drums on ‘Lust For Life’ / We pound it out on floor toms / Our psalms are sing-along songs”, complete with John Bender middle-eight denunciation of the “grey walls” of detention. The latter is classic HS, insistent bar rock with, yep, one of those damn crazy broads that keep making the band’s life such a misery (“In bar light she looked alright / In day light, she looked desperate”).

And then it seems to drop off. And this is why you don’t like The Hold Steady, not just because you’re a damn simpleton, not just because you enjoy the empty thrill of false innovation over the sound of a band perfecting one solitary genre, not just because to you ‘drinking music’ should be the vomit-on-Yates’s-carpet mitherings of The fucking Pigeon Detectives or whoever. No. It’s because you’re too lazy to put the hours in. More fool you.

The album is unlocked by the title track. The big line about this album is that it’s about Growing Up, as if the band were just providing the soundtrack to Boys Meets World or something. It isn’t. It is an album about dealing with dealing with growing up. Follow? Look at it this way: for around a decade now, rap music has been desperately trying to work out what its 35-year-olds can do. They’ve had two options, either the “Get off my damn lawn” hectoring of Ice-T and KRS-One, or ‘Kingdom Come’’s unique branch of “Exactly the same fucking songs as before, except now in a blazer” steez. Finn, word to Anthony Charles Lynton, has found a third way. He’s playing the role of scene elder who isn’t 100 per cent comfortable with what’s going on these days, but knows he’d be an utter fool to fight it. Yeah, the scene is “too druggy”, yeah the kids are “too skinny”, but there’s still anthems to drop and the album is about the joys you can find alongside the grind.

What else is there? ‘One For The Cutters’ drags a harpsichord into the mix to tell a tale of a girl so dangerous she even “parties with townies”, over what sounds a little like the music from a Edwardian dance party. ‘Joke About Jamaica’ takes a fantastic opening line (“They used to thing it was so cute when she said ‘Dire maker?’ / All the boys knew it was a joke about Jamaica / She’d always find a ride back home from the bar”) and goes on to tell that depressing story of a groupie slowly losing her looks and her reason to live, a similar tale to album closer ‘Slapped Actress’, a retelling of the John Cassavetes movie Opening Night, in which Gena Rowlands plays an actress who realises that with age comes ugliness.

And there is, yes, an argument to be made here that The Hold Steady are misogynistic, that the guys on this album find great wisdom with age while the chicks just get crow’s feet, but that’s too simplistic. The story of The Hold Steady has always been, from day dot, a celebration of actually getting up and getting angry and doing stuff, which is why on every single album the guys getting drunk are having a whale of a time and the dudes getting stoned are at rock bottom. Aggression versus acceptance.

It’s just a Hold Steady album at the end of it. They’ve never let us down so far, and they’re not liable to do it any time soon. They turn critics into gibbering wrecks unable to write proper reviews and leave us forced to just string together our favourite lyrics like a damn teenage girl scribbles Tokio Hotel choruses onto her bed headboard. But, y’know. Hairier.

So that’s Stay Positive then. An album that, like The Hold Steady themselves, is some straight-up grown man shit.

The main problem with Plan B is that is a group of dull writers covering a bunch of dull bands, and hoping that some form of magical alchemy will lead to this making interesting reading. Surprisingly it doesn't.

I personally think Chuck D's politics were a _lot_ more reactionary than is usually put across (like, beyond Morrissey, probably on a par with Axl Rose, not as bad as Ted Nugent), but this isn't the time and the place to go into it.

Does Tom Artrocker still edit, hey, Artrocker? Does he still write editorials about how he, as a white male, doesn't get all the opportunities that asylum seekers get in the UK? Or did he graduate to the Daily Express?

Doesn't Grimey Simey write for you? The least you could do is read the damn books he writes. Check your copy of "Bring The Noise", read the Chuck D interview again, then come back and redraft your notes.

You gotta support your staff man!

"This may have something to do with Hip Hop Connection's perceived slight accusing the radical band of peddling nostalgia by agreeing to perform this concert. I ran into Barry Hogan, ATP's head honcho, the night before the gig and he said with no small amount of wryness that he was surprised about the number of writers for Hip Hop Connection were keen to get into the sold-out Brixton show on the free list given how nostalgic it was for them"
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This is completely innacurate. HHC ran a point-counterpoint column about whether backwards looking in hip-hop is a positive or a negative. So there was one dude saying "I like rappers looking backwards", and another saying "It sucks, lol". Not really a slight, now. Although if Chuck's raging against aging whiteboy rap hacks, at least it'll stop him banging on about how he hates gays, Jews, and feminists for a while.

Pretty sure I'll be dead of heart failure by then.

Of course I'm aware of MBICR, they're the band that Miss Black America could have been. Doesn't change the fact that it's an awfully clunky lyric and the kind that I wrote when I was 17.

"Hello Tiger"

Always wondered what happened to that guy from Lit.

Just checked this, Delicious Vinyl was actually set up by Matt Dike and Michael Ross. Please get your facts straight before posting.

Went to *Oxford University.

At least one of Foals went to university. According to a friend who fucked him, he didn't own any CDs aged 20.

I was the first ever guy to review these dudes outside of Sheffield. They repaid me by using one of my quotes in their press release, and then attributing it to The Guardian.