The Hold Steady

Tue 8th Mar, 2011 in Features

The Hold Steady’s frontman Craig Finn is snowed in and snowed under with interviews, but he’s from strong stock and a little New York blizzard doesn’t faze him too much: “I’m from Minnesota so what they call a bunch of snow here it’s not really a bunch of snow… It’s not that crazy, though that said I stayed indoors today.”

As the leader of the world’s greatest bar band Finn has toured the sweet (and bitter) parts of America’s cities and towns for years, but is still inspired by characters from is home state and by the baseball team shared by the cities of St Paul and Minneapolis; the Twins.

“My biggest passion outside of music is Minnesota Twins baseball,” Finn says when asked about his recent contribution to the Baseball Project, a collaboration led by Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn and featuring R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey. Finn didn’t get to meet his famed collaborators: “It was all through the mail and the miracle of modern technology,” he explains, “but it was still really cool to be involved. I felt really good about being able to sing about my favourite baseball team and especially good that they used [ Don’t Call Them Twinkies ] in the stadium and has been well received by Twins fans.”
Don’t Call Them Twinkies

While Hold Steady haven’t quite made it to playing stadiums yet – except when supporting the Rolling Stones – the band has a loyal following and has ventured to Australia to play twice at St Jerome’s Laneway festival. The shows inspire a passionate and boisterious audience that sings every lyric back in Finn’s face; as he puts it on Stay Positive “And the sing-along songs will be our scriptures”. Finn admits that can be a strange experience, especially when the lyrics don’t quite fit the moment. “On You Can Make Him Like You,” Finn explains, “there’s the line “there’s always other boys, there’s always other boyfriends” and when you have huge groups of dudes singing that back into your face it’s a little weird.”

Frightened Rabbit singer Scott Hutchison picked up on the bromance of Hold Steady’s live shows, recruiting Finn to play Kiki Dee to his Elton John on a cover of Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. So how does it feel to be thought of as someone’s ideal Kiki? “Scott kinda pitched it to me as an end of the night drunken brodown where two dudes are telling each other how much the love each other,” Finn says, “It was funny, I performed it with then in New York and we’d never rehearsed it. I had to go to a wedding so I was like ‘I’ll be there but we can’t rehearse it, just practice it’ it went off without a hitch.”

The Hold Steady’s testosterone saturated audience has been drawn to the band for many reasons not least Finn’s lyrics soaked in drunken heartache, small town blues and rock and roll mythology. While references to Meatloaf haven’t been acknowledged, Finn reveals that his tributes have been heard. “Lou Barlow from Dinosaur Jr. was asking me about some lyrics… I know that some [bands] are aware of it but I don’t know about meatloaf. Maybe Pavement, I could see how that would cross and maybe Husker Du. Actually their bass player kinda sent me a message one time.”