Total Retention: 20 Years of The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America
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Vagrant Records
Something I didn’t realize until I started writing this piece is that [adult swim] is responsible for introducing me to not just one, but two of my all-time favorite bands. When the dark claymation comedy Moral Orel entered its final season in 2008, it incorporated a swath of songs by The Mountain Goats in its soundtrack, which is where I first heard John Darnielle’s distinctive voice cry, “I hope you die, I hope we both die!” One year earlier, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters was released along with an accompanying soundtrack CD that I completely wore out at the time. On a compilation mostly full of comedic tie-ins and extreme metal, one curious track that appeared on the album was “Girls Like Status” by The Hold Steady. The song is a B-side from their 2006 album Boys and Girls in America that helped score the film’s end credits and immediately stood out to me thanks to another one of indie rock’s most distinctive voices, Craig Finn. Like an inscrutable message that wouldn’t be demystified until my next year of grade school, Finn kicks off the song’s bridge with, “It was song number three on John’s last CD, ‘I’m gonna make it through this year if it kill me,’ and it almost killed me,” nodding to The Mountain Goats’ scene-defining “This Year” from 2005’s The Sunset Tree. That voice and those cryptic lyrics led me to Boys And Girls In America, which I quickly fell in love with at an age where I was almost certainly too young to understand the trials and tribulations of its cast. It primed me for the 2008 release of Stay Positive, and sparked a lifelong obsession with the world’s greatest bar band.
A few years back, I got to document my weekend with The Hold Steady and The Mountain Goats in Chicago, who teamed up for two glorious shows with Dillinger Four, the celebrated Minneapolis punk band that also get namechecked in “Girls Like Status.” Finn, Darnielle, and D4’s Patrick Costello brought the song to life together for the first time during the second night’s encore, sixteen years after I first heard it. I have spent twelve massive nights with The Hold Steady so far, and if I had to narrow it to the top five, both of those co-headlining shows would be up there. I would also include their Empty Bottle performance in 2017 and the miraculous two times I’ve seen the band play Boys and Girls in its entirety: first in 2016 at Riot Fest for its tenth anniversary, then earlier this constructive summer when they returned to Chicago to celebrate it again for the twentieth.
Long before it first turned double-digits, I’ve always considered Boys And Girls to be my second favorite album of all time, right behind the unbeatable Raw Power by Iggy And The Stooges. The reasons it’s resonated with me so strongly in the last two decades are likely the same ones that countless members of the Unified Scene have. The sordid storylines of the titular boys and girls, the anthemic choruses that Finn and company pull off so well, and a strong collection of tattooable lyrics. To offer just a few:
“He was drunk and exhausted, but he was critically acclaimed and respected.”
“Lost in fog and love and faithless fear. I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere.”
“He was rough around the edges. He'd been to school but never finished. He'd been to jail but never prison.”
The legacy of Boys and Girls in America highlights the best and brightest of 2000s indie rock, a band who worked through two other great records to make their first perfect one, and remains a celebrated record for both die-hard fans like myself and casual connoisseurs of the era – eleven songs of romance, challenges, and bad decisions amongst a fictional youth.
Boys and Girls in America’s opening blast is “Stuck Between Stations,” which kicks off with a U2-esque riff that eases the listener in before a quick mention of the album’s title, buried beneath a beat poetry reference from Finn: “There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right, Boys and girls in America — they have such a sad time together.” I believe one of Finn’s sharpest lyrics remains “She was a really cool kisser, and she wasn't all that strict of a Christian. She was a damn good dancer, but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend.” The descriptors of the characters captured in his songs are a hallmark of his writing on any record he leads, from the early days of Lifter Puller to his expansive solo discography.
The next song “is about a boy, a girl, and a horse,” as Finn always introduces it live. “Chips Ahoy!” is a song only The Hold Steady could write, featuring some of the best keyboard work from Franz Nicolay, another one of the band’s defining elements across this record and many others in their discography. Nicolay boisterously bursts and slickly shreds with co-guitarist Tad Kubler on the album’s most uproarious and overlooked cut, “Same Kooks,” and the keyboard and guitar trade-offs in “Hot Soft Light” come off like a Marshall stack version of Wilco’s Nels Cline and Mikael Jorgensen.
The album’s title appears again in the ballad “First Night,” where Finn also postures, “we can't get as high as we got on that first night.” There are many lyrics throughout Boys and Girls that reference getting high: “How am I supposed to know if you’re high if you won’t let me touch you?” on “Chips Ahoy!”; “I wasn’t there, I was blind, high, I was scared” and “There are guys with the wild eyes when they ask you to get high” on “Hot Soft Light;” “It only gets inconvenient when you want to get high alone” on “You Can Make Him Like You.” As a straightedge guy, something about the way Finn describes his characters getting high in all these scenarios is extremely alluring. In some ways, it makes me feel like “high” means more than he says, although maybe that’s just my untainted brain projecting, and truly is just about a bunch of kids getting high. The same thing goes for liquor, like in the epic singalong, (oh shit!) “Party Pit,” where the narrator is “Gonna walk around and drink some more, gonna walk around, gonna walk around, gonna walk around and drink.”
Of course, with the kind of substances The Hold Steady spill out on the page, there comes plenty of interpersonal turmoil and awkward human truths. There’s always other boys and always other boyfriends on “You Can Make Him Like You,” one of the record’s best hooks, and “Massive Nights” has become one of The Hold Steady’s trademark tunes, with the band naming yearly residencies after it in various cities. “We had some massive nights, we had some crushing lows, we had some lusty little crushes, we had those all-ages hardcore matinee shows.”
I have only seen The Hold Steady play “Citrus” in the Boys and Girls in America setlists, and on one hand it’s a shame they don’t bust it out more, but on the other, it's all the more special when they do. The brief acoustic cut brings the same energy as the full-band rockers do while showcasing some of Finn’s most tender lyrics: “I see Judas in the hard eyes of the boys working the corners, I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers.” Late-album highlight “Chillout Tent” usually gets the same treatment, due to its need for male and female call-and-response vocals in the chorus. The original recording featured Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum and Elizabeth Elmore of the criminally underrated Chicago band Sarge. When played live, the band will pull in friends and peers to bring the dueling vocals to life, like at their Riot Fest 2016 set where the girl in America’s vocals were handled by Jessica Louise Dye of High Waisted. At a multi-generation indie rock romp at their Salt Shed B&G set this year, The Hold Steady borrowed vocalists from each of their openers: Alicia Bognanno of Bully and Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus.
The album’s finale, “Southtown Girls,” has always been one of my favorite positive jams due to its odd but very, very Hold Steady lyrics. When Finn sings, “Southtown girls won’t blow you away, but you know that they’ll stay,” my young mind heard it as: those girls in America won’t blow you off; they won’t leave, but they’ll stay. Not that the girls were inadequate. And then the rest of the song is just MapQuest directions. It’s brilliant in the Hold Steady way that makes all of their classic material brilliant.
On the album’s 2016 deluxe edition, “Girls Like Status” follows as track twelve, another song I’ve only gotten to hear at the Boys and Girls shows, in addition to the Mountain Goats & Dillinger Four show. A few other B-sides come in tow, with my favorite being “Arms & Hearts,” which is compositionally a very strange song, but once it gets going with the refrain, it pays off like any Hold Steady classic with a good old-fashioned pub-rock rouse. “Arms and hearts and alcohol and death. She was awkward and thoughtful and ascending into heaven dripping wet. Arms and hearts and alcohol and faith. We pull each other in, and then we push it all away.”
Boys and Girls in America is a part of me like I know it is for so many other fans, but I never directly saw myself in the boys or girls in Finn’s stories. There are elements of their feelings that I can connect with, like the running themes of frustration and romanticism, or frustration due to romanticism, but ultimately The Hold Steady evokes the same response in me that I know it does for pop-punk and hardcore fans. The finger-pointing, the lyric chanting, the communal exercises in rock and roll: Finn as the Midwest’s greatest preacher, and his band as the barfly gospel choir. There is so much joy in what they do up there. We are all The Hold Steady.
Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.
