I'm not sure what I'm expecting when I ask Craig Finn to describe the Hold Steady's new record, Stay Positive, but it's definitely not this: "It's about aging gracefully," Finn tells me. "In rock'n'roll, aging gracefully is a tough business. It's a young man's game. Acting in age-appropriate ways is a hard thing."
I nod politely, trying not to look as puzzled as I feel. As far as I know, nobody listens to rock'n'roll for tips on how to age gracefully or act appropriately. Young people listen to celebrate their youth, to revel in a sweaty, sexy world apart from the drudgery of responsible adulthood that's waiting around the corner. Middle-aged people like me listen to reconnect with our younger selves, to remember what it felt like to believe you had an alternative to the drudgery of responsible adulthood, to pretend, as Finn himself sings on their song Stevie Nix, that it's possible "to be 17 forever".
"It's a lot about positivity," Finn continues. "It's like on Oprah, this woman wrote that book, and it tells you the secret of how to live. Basically, it's the same idea I've always had. If you go in and try to be positive, it goes OK. You know, being optimistic. It's a really simple concept that an 11-year-old can have, but I feel it's about as effective as anything."
Now I'm really confused, not to mention slightly disheartened. Because this is Craig Finn talking, the lead singer and lyricist for the fiercest, funniest, druggiest, most visionary American rock band of the 21st century. When I think about the Hold Steady, I don't think about optimism or Oprah Winfrey. I think, Holly's in the hospital, and Gideon's got a pipe made from a Pringle's can. I think, some nights the painkillers make the pain even worse.
Finn's lurid, novelistic songs about midwestern lowlife characters stuck somewhere between oblivion and redemption have earned him frequent comparisons to Bruce Springsteen - not the pumped-up Boss of Born in the USA, but the young greaser Bruce of Greetings from Asbury Park, only with a harder, less romantic edge. On the strength of four remarkable and increasingly sophisticated albums, Finn has established himself as America's reigning poet of drug-addled losers, the unflinching chronicler of their hard-luck adventures, nightmare visions, and occasional moments of grace. He's a sort of rock'n'roll Bukowski with a little Dylan thrown in for good measure, the kind of lyricist who can pull off an ambitious three-narrator song like Chillout Tent (from the Hold Steady's breakout 2006 record, Boys and Girls in America), in which two strangers who've overdosed at a rock festival end up getting it on in the medical tent: "They started kissing when the nurses took off their IVs/... they had the privacy of bedsheets/ The other kids were mostly in comas."
Once I get over my initial scepticism, though, I begin to see where Finn is coming from with this talk of aging gracefully. Despite the fact that the Hold Steady are a relatively new band - they released their first record, Almost Killed Me, in 2003 - they are not a young or glamorous one. Finn himself is 36, a short, bespectacled guy more likely to be mistaken for an associate professor of philosophy than a luminary at Lollapalooza. He comes across as a nice, unusually smart midwestern guy who's close to his parents and eager for a family of his own, the kind of decent, well-adjusted individual you'd be hard-pressed to find in one of his songs.
"I drink way less than people think I do," he tells me, a bit exasperated by the disparity between his public image and private life. "I mean, people have these blogs and they're like, 'I went to a bar last night and Craig Finn was there and he was so wasted!' And I wasn't even drinking."
"But people must have expectations," I suggest, based on the relentless substance abuse in his songs.
"Some do, some don't. The people who get to look inside, their expectations are quickly dashed against the rocks," he says with a laugh. "It's like, so you guys just go to bed?"
Finn seems to have spent a good deal of his life prowling the borderline between solid middle-class citizenship and the rock'n'roll underworld. Growing up in comfortable circumstances in suburban Minneapolis - his father was an executive at a large accounting firm, his mother a microbiologist-turned-homemaker - he found himself drawn at an early age to the thriving underground rock scene in his hometown, which spawned both Hüsker Dü and Finn's heroes, the Replacements.
"I liked rock, but I was always kind a traditional kid," he explains. "That's what I really liked about Kerouac - he was doing this wild stuff but he played football. I always played tennis and followed sports pretty closely, always had rock'n'roll friends, and then kinda straight non-rock'n'roll friends." As a teenager, he began to cultivate an ambiguous personal style that has since become a kind of trademark. "I always wanted to be confusing as to whether I was kinda punk or kinda square. I wanted to be the most respectable guy at the punk rock show or the most punk rock guy at the respectable kids' party."
Party Pit, one of the standout tunes on Boys and Girls in America, offers what feels like a direct reflection of Finn's teenage double life. It tells the story of two encounters between a troubled girl and a boy who seems like a version of the young Craig Finn, who left Minneapolis for Boston College, and then returned to form the band Lifter Puller. The first time they meet as equals at the party pit, local teenagers who move in the same circles. But their lives quickly diverge: "I went away to school that fall/ She stuck around with all those stickpin dolls/ Sped through the scene until the engine stalled/ At some suburban shopping mall/ Sailed away on such separate trips/ She got pinned down at the party pit."
The second time they meet, there's an implicit distance between them - he's a college grad starting a band; "she's gonna walk around and drink some more." Nonetheless, he walks with her, "across that grain belt bridge/ into bright new Minneapolis." Near the end of the song, when the singer confesses, "I'm pretty sure we kissed," it's not clear if he's referring to the first encounter, the second, or both, but we understand the bond they share as well as the experiences that separate them.
There are a handful of songs on Stay Positive that feel like vintage Hold Steady - notably the chilling One for the Cutters, a five-minute film noir in which a thrill-seeking college girl becomes an accomplice to murder, and the funny and enigmatic Slapped Actress, dense with allusions and inside jokes, including some obligatory references to Ybor City, a party district in Tampa, Florida that has been name-checked in several of the band's songs.
On the whole, though, the new record feels like a departure, a move toward a brighter sound and more upbeat subject matter. This new direction is boldly proclaimed on the album's first cut, Constructive Summer, a muscular manifesto that evokes a massive collective effort worthy of a Soviet propaganda poster - "raise up a giant ladder/ with love and trust and friends and hammers" - and reminds its listeners that "we are our only saviours". It's not just the lyrics; a lot of the music on the new record sounds different, too: some of the punky edges of the Hold Steady have been sanded down, replaced by anthemic choruses, soaring background vocals, bubbly keyboards, and guitar pyrotechnics custom-made for stadiums and big arenas rather than basement clubs. The Hold Steady have never sounded more radio-friendly than on Sequestered in Memphis, the first single from Stay Positive, an absurdly infectious tune that boasts a horn section and one of the most peculiar singalong choruses in rock history.
Stay Positive seems to catch a newly confident - and yes, more mature and optimistic - band in a moment of transition, reaching beyond their passionate cult following to the kind of mainstream audience that loves U2 and Green Day. Whether it will work - and whether genuine old-school rock stardom is even possible in 2008 - is anyone's guess.
For his part, Finn views the new record less an aesthetic departure than as a logical step in the band's evolution. Nor is he particularly concerned about subverting the expectations of long-time fans. "I think it's more of a challenge for us to make a more consistent, less rambling rock record. Boys and Girls was a step towards that, and Stay Positive is more fully realised," he points out, emphasising the continuity between the band's most recent releases. "As for the fans, I don't think too much about that. We got our fans by pleasing ourselves."
The fact that rock-star level fame is even on the table is amazing in itself, given the Hold Steady's origins. When Finn and guitarist Tad Kubler formed the band in 2002 - along with bassist Gavin Polivka and drummer Bobby Drake, with keyboardist Franz Nikolay joining later - they were just looking to have a good time playing music together.
"We were so not-serious when we made Almost Killed Me," Kubler recalls. "I remember sitting in the control room. I'm like, God this sounds great. This is a record I wanna listen to. But nobody's gonna want to hear this."
At the time, dance-punk ruled the New York music scene, and even to themselves the Hold Steady felt like dinosaurs, a bunch of hopelessly untrendy midwestern guys playing loud and sloppy bar-band rock'n'roll.
"The first couple of shows we played, we were doing something musically that was so different in New York at the time," Kubler says. "You know, these guys are just a rock band, they like to drink beer and have fun. We got the Replacements comparison a lot. I had this thing where I was buying those little airplane bottles of vodka and I would set like a dozen up on my amp, and between every song I would try to slam as many of them as I could."
If Finn is the literary mastermind of the Hold Steady, Kubler is the band's classic rock id - his motto is What Would Jimmy Page Do? - an affable, hard-drinking riffmeister who seems to get punched in the face a lot, including once by Drake, his own drummer.
"I dated his sister years ago," Kubler explains a bit sheepishly. "We were drunk and somehow that came up, and I made a comment that I probably shouldn't have. [Bobby] fuckin' knocked me out cold, cut my chin wide open. I just got up and I was like, I deserved that, it's cool."
Kubler touches his lip, as if it's still a bit sore. He doesn't really look like a tough guy, with his high-fashion eyeglasses and porkpie hat.
"I've had this tooth knocked out before. I had a Budweiser bottle in my mouth and some guy punched me in the face. That's the thing," he concludes, with a touch of pride and amusement. "I'm a little loose with my mouth, but I'm not a very good fighter. I've had my share of beatdowns."
In their relatively brief existence, the Hold Steady have proven themselves to be an unusually prolific band - Stay Positive is their fourth record in five years - an output that reflects both the unusual chemistry between Kubler and Finn, and the oddly casual process they've evolved for writing songs, along with keyboardist Nikolay. The way Kubler describes it, he comes up with a riff or a chord progression that he plays for the guys, at which point Finn takes over.
"He'll do this thing," Kubler says. "It's like speaking in tongues. He'll start to figure out how he wants the cadence to flow in the song and some of the melody. Then out come the laptop and the notebook and he'll start to pick through stuff and construct the story. Franz and I were talking about this. Having a lyricist like Craig Finn makes our job really easy. In fact, sometimes I used to almost be pissed about it. It's like, 'Fuck, the lyrics are so good I didn't have to work this hard on the song. I could've just gone in and whistled'."
The thing I start to understand after spending an afternoon with the Hold Steady is that these guys are thrilled by their good luck, by the way their just-for-fun band has taken off since their second album, the religion-soaked Separation Sunday, was released to serious critical acclaim in 2004. They love it all - the crowds, the studio, the chance to see the world - and they appreciate it in a way that a younger, more entitled band couldn't possibly begin to understand. Strangely enough, Finn even seems to enjoy the tour bus.
"There's a kind of sensory deprivation," he tells me. "You get these Pullman car kinda sleepers, you pull the curtain and it's pitch black, and the hum of the wheels and stuff ... I'll go in there and wake up 10 hours later. It's very restful."
After a while our conversation turns into an inventory of the cool things that have happened to the band in the past couple of years. The festivals in Zagreb and Australia, Kubler's birthday in Stockholm, Finn's in Cumbria. But for Finn, there's one particular highlight that shines more brightly than the others.
"I met Bruce [Springsteen] last year," he reports. "We performed with him at Carnegie Hall. It was a tribute to him and everyone did a cover. We did Atlantic City - we were gonna do Rosalita but we only had two days to practice and it was too much."
At the end of show, Finn continues, Springsteen came on stage and did a couple of acoustic songs. He started to play Rosalita, but stopped in the middle, and invited all the artists on stage. Aware that Finn knew the words, Bruce invited him to sing the first and last verses of the song.
"It was pretty great," Finn says. "But I didn't get to talk to him."
He got a second chance in Minneapolis several months later, when the Hold Steady and the E Street Band happened to be in town on the same day. Springsteen invited Finn to stop by for a chat, and they spent about a half hour backstage, talking about music. "He gave me the chills," Finn said, still a bit awestruck from the meeting. "We were talking about finding joy in rock'n'roll music, and he said, sometimes, if he sees someone in the audience that's loving it, he'll just keep singing right at that one person."
While transcribing this interview, I found a YouTube clip from the Springsteen Tribute at Carnegie Hall, the one where Finn joins the Boss on Rosalita. The video must have been shot by a cellphone - the picture is lousy and the sound is even worse. But it's all there - Bruce calling Finn to the microphone, strumming his guitar and grinning his big Springsteen grin as Finn launches into the tune with that deep, conviction-filled voice that seems so surprising coming from such an unassuming source. But what's really amazing is to watch Finn dance - he flails around on stage like Joe Cocker's sober, extremely happy nephew, and I'm happy to report that he doesn't look anything like a guy who's worried about aging gracefully. He looks like a big kid who's having the time of his life, and just wants to keep going like this forever.
· Tom Perrotta is the author of five novels, including Election and The Abstinence Teacher. He was Oscar-nominated for the screenplay for Little Children, based on his own novel. Stay Positive is released on July 14 on Rough Trade, preceded by the single Sequestered in Memphis on July 7. The Hold Steady headline the SanDisk stage of the 02 Wireless festival in Hyde Park, London, on July 6, then tour.
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