Craig Finn is Rock & Roll’s greatest storyteller of the past decade. He has taken influence from Dylan, Springsteen, Randy Newman, and a host of other great Rock & Roll storytellers and put his decidedly indulgent and empathic style on everything The Hold Steady have done. The band itself has wrangled in influences from all over the last three decades of Rock, from the soaring anthems of Springsteen to the abrasive soar of The Replacements to swagger of Sticky Fingers-era Stones. Emerging in 2004 after the dissolution of Finn’s former band Lifter/Puller, The Hold Steady quickly became a symbol of the return of Rock with a capital “R”, arriving directly in contrast to earnest and sensitive contemporaries. The most refreshing thing about The Hold Steady, and the thing that drew me to them in the first place, was their complete lack of irony. This is Rock meant to be played loud and sung along to, perfect for bars, parties, and all the other sordid social gatherings that the characters in Finn’s songs so often find themselves wrapped up in. Their third album, Boys And Girls In America, took The Hold Steady from Indie Bar Band to Rock powerhouse. By strengthening their songs, tightening their presentation, and wearing their hearts just barely on their sleeve, they produced one of the great albums of the decade.

Boys and Girls In America takes its title from a line by Jack Kerouac’s alter-ego Sal Paradise in Kerouac’s novel “On The Road”: “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.” For Finn, this is territory he and the band are intimately familiar with. On 2004’s Almost Killed Me and 2005’s Separation Sunday, The Hold Steady told stories of young people who were looking for transcendence by any means necessary: usually through sex, drugs, and Rock & Roll. This included the introduction of characters that would appear throughout the songs on their first two records: Holly, an innocent Christian girl who becomes tangled up in a life of promiscuity, hard drugs, and endless parties; Charlemagne, a drug dealer and possible pimp that Holly comes to view as her savior; and Gideon, named after a judge in the Old Testament, who appears throughout Hold Steady songs as another party-goer, one of Holly’s peers, and a Reggae music enthusiast. Finn tells his stories in very non-linear fashion, providing snapshots of these and other characters as they navigate “The Scene”, often jumping back and forward in time. On Boys And Girls In America, Finn expands his scope to tell larger stories unconnected to his previous narrative, while still checking in with his old friends.

The most noticeable difference musically between the previous records and this one is Finn’s voice. While on previous albums his delivery was often a mix of speaking/shouting, here the ratio has been flipped and delivers most lines through singing, occasionally revisiting his trademark Fire &Brimstone sermonizing. On album-opener “Stuck Between Stations”, Finn’s narrator is clearly becoming disillusioned with his lifestyle, admitting “Most nights are crystal clear, but tonight it’s like I’m stuck between stations” and seemingly fed up with his peers who are “dependent, undisciplined, and sleeping late.” On “Hot Soft Light”, the narrator recounts his drug abuse not with the reckless abandon of a young adult, but as someone with the understanding that their drug use “started recreational and ended kind of medical, it came on hot and soft and then it tightened up its tentacles.” This new-found self-awareness is important. Finn’s characters have never been quite so self-aware. The message in the songs was certainly there, but it was relayed simply by holding a mirror up to itself. Throughout Boys And Girls In America, Finn allows his characters to begin to internally understand the consequences of their actions.

This understanding is a natural process for twentysomethings, one that I’ve come to appreciate as I’ve gotten older (I was 21 when this album was released, I’m almost 29 now). Those first few years of young adulthood feel like one continuous party sprinkled here and there with seriousness but by and large seemingly consequence-free. By the time one hits their late twenties, it is clear the party is winding down. The same antics no longer entertain. The friends we once thought were a riot now only annoy and inconvenience. The prospect of staying out all night getting wasted and generally fucking shit up no longer seems appealing. All the kids in Neverland eventually have to grow up. That realization permeates the lives of Finn’s characters throughout. On “You Can Make Him Like You”, Finn finds a female acquaintance losing her self-identity and replacing it with the friends, opinions, and drugs of her boyfriend. On “Citrus”, Finn sees “The Judas in the hard eyes of the boys who worked in the corners” while finding “Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers.” This is the unending dichotomy of youth. One is equally influenced by pure love, a search for knowledge and understanding as well as the destructive decisions one often makes in the search for those things.

Finn also has a fresh and abiding empathy for his characters. On “Chillout Tent”, the penultimate track, Finn tells a tale of two young strangers who attend a music festival in Western Massachusetts where they each overdose, meeting in the medical “chillout” tent, and having a brief liaison. Far from being a party monster like Charlemagne or Gideon, the nameless protagonists are pretty average, the boy someone who “went to school but never finished, he’d been to jail but never prison” and who on “his first day off in forever, man” goes with his buddy to the festival; the girl is like any other who “drove down […] with a carload of girlfriends to meet some boys and maybe eat some mushrooms.” Featuring guest vocals for each of the characters from Soul Asylum frontman David Pirner The Reputation’s Elizabeth Elmore. I once heard someone refer to this song as “Don’t Stop Believing” or “Summer Lovin'” for the ADD crowd, which is a pretty apt description. These two characters meet under auspicious circumstances, connect for a short time, and then spiral off into the ether, never to see each other again. Being a boy or girl in America is certainly a strange thing sometimes.

Boys And Girls In America is an album that still takes place at the party, but the people there are beginning to see the writing on the wall. Like many people leaving their early twenties, graduating from college, entering the “real world”, there is a tendency to prolong one’s adolescence as far it can take oneself. It captures so perfectly the moments when we begin to understand that growing up is not some static point, but something that happens to us over time, and that time might already have arrived. Faced with such a confounding realization, we often retreat into social lives that feel familiar all the while questioning our every decision and motivation. It is an understanding that at any moment one might realize “I’m too old for this shit,” but keeping the party going as long as it will hold out. The Hold Steady created a batch of songs that hold up now as well as they did upon release precisely because the phenomenon Finn writes about is one that will continue to affect young people for the foreseeable future. The sex, drugs, and Rock & Roll lifestyle followed by the inevitable hangover is something kids are still going through, and something that will continue to draw them to the phenomenal work The Hold Steady have created in their first decade.