For those of us who experienced high school in the nineties, especially high school in suburbs or more rural parts of America, there is a certain experience one had with those around you. I was a nerd, not very sociable, and that made me uninterested in parties. But it made me come face-to-face with social awkwardness, and it made me acquainted with teenagers who take organized religion instead of drugs. While I cannot relate to everything that “The Hold Steady” writes and sings about, it does make me very comfortable with the experience they seem to be capturing: a thirty-something, trying to make sense of when they were a teen-something.
Tonight, for the first time, I get to see “The Hold Steady” in concert. Jodi and I are going to make an evening out of it, a way to kickoff the week of Thanksgiving. THS is headlining with “The Drive-By Truckers”, also a sweet band (check out “The Day John Henry Died” for a novel modern retelling of the timeless tale).
What makes THS’s music accessible to anybody in their late twenties to late thirties is that we all knew a Holly (“If she scared you then she’s sorry. She’s been stranded at these parties. These parties they start lovely but they get druggy and they get ugly and they get bloody.”, from “How a Resurrection Really Feels”), or a Gideon (“Gideon’s been living up in bay city, michigan. / He’s been workng at the michelin. / He got messed up with some messed up magicians. / We got so high some nights michigan looked just like a mitten some nights we got fried.”, from “Sweet Payne”).
The lyrics and the music are excellent, and to see just how deep the rabbit hole can go with this band check out some of the NPR analysis of the lyrics [1].
[1] http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2005/aug/holdsteady/lyrics_cattle.html
