Steady As He Goes - The Hold Steady Interview

If you catch a bespectacled American looking through your window don’t panic. It’s probably Craig Finn.

“I get a lot of good ideas for lyrics while walking around,” explains the frontman of The Hold Steady. “On tour I’ll walk around residential areas, find a house and think ‘what might be happening in there?’ Our music is so big, I feel like I have to write something more cinematic than my own life; today I took my cat to the vet, which wouldn’t make a very good song!”
We’re speaking in a rare moment of downtime, between tours of the US and Europe. After five albums in seven years, the band took something of a hiatus before resuming duties earlier this year. Finn says he’s delighted to be back to the grind.
“We were working so hard we needed a break,” he says. “We did all those records, and toured extensively on each. I felt we deserved to stop. It’s great to be back in action now. The band sounds great, and we’re having a lot of fun.”
Of course, plenty has changed since they last visited these shores. The Hold Steady now feature two guitarists, with the addition of former Lucero axeman Steve Selvidge. They’ve also produced a sixth album, the fantastic Teeth Dreams. It has a dark edge and is in contrast to their Springsteen-esque earlier output.
“I’m really committed to write about the idea that for every high, there’s a hangover. I’ve always tried to do that; this record might be more about the hangover! Being 43 years old and six records in.... people expect you to bring in the string sections and the mandolins. We went the other way. It’s our heaviest album. I’m proud of that.”
He’s right – the record smacks you in the gut from the outset. Hard rocking riffs are paired with hard hitting messages .
“The guys were writing music and sending it to me. There were all these tangled riffs that created a tension. I think it probably influenced what I was thinking with the lyrics. I wasn’t in a dark place or anything. That’s where it all went.
“I was sort of fascinated with the idea of anxiety,” he continues. “In truth, I still am. Everyone is: The New York Times even has an anxiety column now! I was in Oslo to see The Scream, a painting about the anxiety concerning the oncoming industrial age. It was painted around 1900, and he was feeling like that back then? Maybe anxiety is just there; maybe it’s always been part of us.”
The standout on Teeth Dreams is ‘On With The Business’, a twisted tale of lost direction and savage consumerism. Elsewhere, the band tackle some truly grandiose subjects.
“’American Sadness’ came from David Foster Wallace, right out of his mouth,” says Finn. “He said there was this realisation that whatever we get might not fill the void inside us. I think we all have this terror of sorts. We can try to fill it with drugs, or alcohol, or expensive sweaters... or we can just accept that we have it and work around it.”
One thing that hasn’t changed on the new record is Finn’s love of putting characters in his songs. The Separation Sunday gang of Holly, Charlemagne and Gideon may have been left behind, but there’s plenty more just like them – albeit unnamed.
“I stopped using names,” Finn offers, “because it felt a little limiting. I wanted to give people some space to put their own hopes and dreams in a song, rather than listen to a dictation of a story.”
Certainly, audiences so far have responded well to the new record. People scream the lyrics in a joyous, beer-fuelled communion.
“I think that’s a very important and very cool thing,” he says. “Even if it seems disembodied from some of the sadness, it’s simply saying ‘I’m here. I made it out tonight, and sometimes I feel this way too.’”

The Hold Steady play The Academy, Dublin on October 18