Adam Parshall
“I fantasize about it,” Craig Finn says of his first post-Covid gig with The Hold Steady, still unscheduled, like all gigs and all things. “There’s a celebratory but also a physical aspect of the shows we play,” he continues, and he is both absolutely correct and vastly understating the point. Finn, 49, is a tornado of bliss and poetry onstage, a guy who begins each show looking like the creative writing professor he once was and ends each one an unlikely rock god. In every last encore, Finn tells the crowd, “There is so much joy in what we do up here,” and while from someone else it could come off self-serving, at the end of a Hold Steady show, it is just a fact. A Hold Steady show is cathartic and ecstatic, a situation where you wind up arm in arm with a stranger, maybe two, definitely someone else’s beer down your front. The vibe in the crowd is joyful, communal, sweaty. It’s the kind of thing we’ve been denied for nearly a year, and as the band
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Brooklyn six-piece
The Hold Steady are an NYC indie-rock institution. The bandâs revered songwriter Craig Finn plumbs the depths of the human condition to tell stories that explore power, wealth, mental health, technology, capitalism, consumerism, and survival â issues which have compounded over the last 12 months. Their seventh studio album âThrashing Thru The Passionâ, released 15 years after their debut, showed the band rejuvenated, receiving critical praise far and wide in 2019. Now, theyâve unveiled their eighth collection of poetically punky musical works which carries their fresh momentum to expansive heights.
Sonically, âOpen Door Policyâ sees The Hold Steady explore new textures including horns which feature prominently on tracks like âHeavy Covenantâ and âHanover Cameraâ. âIt feels like our most musically expansive record,â says Finn in a press release, but their characteristic backbone of driving rock guit
SPIN: Let’s start with
Open Door Policy. It’s your second time writing and recording with the current six-man group. How did the process compare to the sessions that turned into
Thrashing Thru The Passion?
Craig Finn: I think one of the stories of
Thrashing Thru The Passion, but especially
Open Door Policy, is that Franz and Steve, there were times in the past when only one of them was in the band. So they kind of have had to figure out their space. And as we’ve written, that’s become a big part of it. Figuring out where they both fit. And I think we did a good job of that on Thrashing. And I think we did an amazing job on