“The way we were traveling and writing, Boys and Girls and Stay Positive were made in the same blur,” says Finn. On tour, nights collided with the morning. It's something that’s scratched into the Hold Steady's DNA: We are a party band. The booze started before the shows and ended after the sunrise. Up until this point, Kubler had never been on stage sober.

“When Tad went to the hospital," says Finn, "it was a wake-up call for everyone.”

In the fall of 2008, Kubler was diagnosed with pancreatitis as a result of his years of drinking. The band canceled a European tour. A year later, in November 2009, the guitarist was hospitalized again for pancreatitis. Shortly thereafter, keyboardist Franz Nicolay left the band.

“Pancreatitis is incredibly painful, and they had me on morphine and all kinds of other shit, and if you let that get away from you, it gets away from you quickly," says Kubler, trailing off. “I wasn’t sober but I wasn’t drinking either—you can fill in the blanks there."

Both Kubler and Finn say that the lead up to writing 2010's Heaven Is Whenever felt a little disconnected, the process a little rushed. Finn hedges and says simply the band needed a little break; Kubler says it was due to his own seclusion following his diagnosis, now that he was unable to drink like the rest of the band.

Kubler cleaned up in early 2010, just as the band was mixing Heaven Is Whenever, which debuted at No. 26 on the Billboard charts, a new high. But after spending years living up to his own ultimate drinking band code onstage, Kubler was now sober under the lights.

“It’s fucking terrifying,” says the guitarist. “And it can be really hard when the rest of the band is six drinks into the evening and you’re not. It’s like, ‘How do I feel like a part of what’s happening here when I’m not involved in that part of it?’ It took me a year to really get involved—I’m sure I was a miserable prick for a lot of that time too, because I didn’t know what I was doing.”

"If somebody's drinking that much and they have to stop, there’s an adjustment period of their personality," says Finn. "Tad came into the band as someone who was pretty rock'n'roll in his behavior and he had to go from being the most likely to be out until five in the morning to being the least likely. Our shows became less drunken, less crazy. It changed the culture of the band.”

Unbeknownst to Kubler at the time, Finn went to Austin to record a solo album after the Heaven Is Whenever tour wrapped. What was supposed to be a three month break for the band turned into a year-and-a-half hiatus. Kubler started writing songs on his own and with the rest of the Hold Steady, which now included guitarist Steve Selvidge. The music for their forthcoming sixth album, Teeth Dreams, was written completely separate from Finn.

“When the band first started, Craig and I spent a lot of time together, we just hung out and were bros," remembers Kubler. "It's weird because when I was in Lifter Puller, Craig and I didn’t have that relationship, because I had one lifestyle and he had another. Now, that’s kind of happening again.” As he says this, we sit on the couch in his Greenpoint loft, located just a couple blocks from Finn’s place. “I never see the guy.”