Day 11 – The 30 Day Song Challenge – A Song from your favourite band...

Song  11 – A song from your favourite band...  – ‘Stuck Between Stations’ – The Hold Steady

The Hold Steady

I bought the album ‘Boys and Girls in America’ by The Hold Steady following a rave review in the Observer by Kitty Empire, who called them the best band in the world.  After a couple of listens I had to agree, for a while anyway.  They’ve only been around since 2004 but are veterans of a load of other bands and are in their late 30’s and early 40’s.  Normally this’d mean that they’d already said all the interesting things that had to say, had put the blinkers on and had settled into a rut.  This doesn’t seem to have happened though.  They seem to have laid down their ambition to be famous (or perhaps become reconciled to its unlikelihood) and in that gained a freedom to make the music that they want to make.  They seem to have grown up without growing old and so while the songs have some fairly classic rock ingredients,  they’re lyrically dense and ambitious.  You can imagine they’d sound great in the environment for which they were first written, the bar-band rooms around New York and New Jersey, but they’d swell to fill much bigger venues.  They’re songs that you have to play loud.

The song I picked is fairly typical.  Full of anthemic sounds, from that rolling piano, the crunching guitars, those thumping drums and fuzzy solos with Craig Finn’s rapidly sung/spoken vocal  taking in references from Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ to Pulitzer Prize winning poet John Berryman’s ‘The Dream Songs’.

There’s something really honest about The Hold Steady that I love.  They’re unpretentious, don’t try to be fashionable and aren’t embarrassed to write big songs that wear their hearts on their sleeves and equally aren’t ashamed to try to write songs that tell stories and tackle big album spanning themes.   They write songs that remind me of what it was like to be 17 and taking in great gulps of the world but at the same time I can look back fondly on that time and be glad I’m a little wiser and not biting off more than I can chew anymore.

Are they my favourite band? Probably not, but then favourite bands are for kids.  I’m far too old for that.  They are one of my favourite bands though so close enough I think. 

David Millington

11^th April 2011

Nottingham