Random Records: The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America (2006)
I love Craig Finn. I first discovered him in 2017, through a random chance encounter with "God in Chicago", a song that immediately stopped me still and to this day has that emotional oomph with me that marks it among my all-time favourite songs; the album it was from, We All Want the Same Things, was and still is my 2017 Album of the Year. An immense love affair with Finn's works began and even now my ears activate when I hear he's got a new album coming out.
Oh, and he's got a band too. His day job, instead of the divergent solo career that I ended up getting latched onto.
I have tried with The Hold Steady a lot, and I keep trying, but rarely do I get the same rise of feelings and appreciation out of them as I do when Finn's by himself. I don't know why either, it's all very irrational: Finn is still his charismatically wry himself, wrapped around in other people's stories as the omnipresent self-insert narrator in various snapshots in down-on-their-luck protagonists' lives, and the band around him has punch and muscle. The repeated description I see of The Hold Steady is that they're the E Street Band playing punk in a random dive bar, and that's at least accurate of the ethos - and as someone who finally clicked with Springsteen (to some extent) a few years back, that should just make me even more enthused. But as much as I superficially like what they're doing, no Hold Steady album to date has seized me in the same manner that Finn's solo records do. They're the definition of good albums that disappear in my shelf - I enjoy them while they're on but rarely do I go back to them on my own accord instead of e.g. projects like this.
All of them except, ironically, the album I've been randomly prompted to revisit this week.
I don't know exactly what it is about Boys and Girls in America that's different, but it's different - it hits me, I get excited, thrilled, engaged. A lot of is likely down to the fact that it's the perfect middle ground in the story of The Hold Steady. It's raw and loud and raucous without being too ramshackle for its own good; it's also tidied up and polished enough to let the band's inate talents and strengths shine, but without making them sound too neat and slick. It has so much wild fist-pumping, crowd-surfing, mosh-pitting energy but it also gives so much space to pure melody and room for them to grow. It's big but not bombastic, rrrocking but not monotonously so. It sounds, closest to any other Hold Steady record I've heard, like a Craig Finn album with a fire in its belly and a kick up its ass - which I guess is my ideal vision of a Hold Steady album. If the rest of the band's albums slip between my fingers to one degree or another, all eleven songs here have left some degree of impact on me.
Above all "Chillout Tent", which is an odd one to have as a favourite because even though it's cut from the same cloth as all the other songs on this album are from a musical and lyrical perspective, The Hold Steady aren't the lead stars here. Including Finn, who acts in his usual role of setting the scene and telling the story, but this time around he's more akin to a narrator on the side of the stage reciting the events taking place, rather than actively taking a role in the play. The spotlight instead belongs to the Boy and the Girl who meet at the festival chill out tent after both have hit an unexpected bump in their evening. Dave Pirner (Soul Asylum) and Elizabeth Elmore (The Reputation) take over the choruses with their recollection of the evening they first met and then never saw each other again, eventually both trading lines like they're in the key moment of a rock musical. All the while the horn section behind them gets louder and louder until they're downright celebratory: these two ships in the night only ever saw each other for a fleeting moment but they still recount those minutes to this very day, and that is the most electrifying and jubilant romance in this world, or at least that's what the music makes you believe. The whole song is almost Jim Steinman-esque slice of rock and roll dreams come through, but played with its feet steadily on the mud-soaked ground. It's glorious and its place as the penultimate song on the tracklist is so important - it is the grand finale where the fireworks go off, right before "Southtown Girls" rolls the credits.
Boys and Girls in America is a great album. I wish the rest of Hold Steady's discography had the same effect.