For a fast drive to the dark end of Thunder Road, hitch a ride on the Hold Steady's "Separation Sunday," an album that made a big noise on the best-of-2005 lists, including an eye-opening No. 8 finish in the prestigious Village Voice critics' poll.
The recognition hasn't changed the Brooklyn band's life, but it's another boost to a growing momentum surrounding its distinctive take on American rock. Like the similarly acclaimed Drive-By Truckers, the Hold Steady reclaims a neglected music and reinvents it with a fierce passion. "Separation's" sales of 17,000 are solid for an indie band, and more than triples the sales of its debut, but the group's growth is also measured by such attention as the profile on NPR's "All Things Considered" late last year, complete with a rigorous annotation of the album's pop, literary and cultural references. Singer and chief songwriter Craig Finn thinks of "Separation Sunday" as "a prodigal daughter story," and says it was drawn from his own experiences and those of friends. The 11 songs follow a "hoodrat" on her wayward path through her late teens, as she encounters lowlifes and predators, saviors and lovers. Kids get high and get saved, hit bottom and claw for salvation.
Finn packs his songs with vivid, colorful vernacular, anchors the album with recurring characters and geographical detail and laces it all with themes of forgiveness and redemption rooted in his Catholic upbringing in Minneapolis.
"You're still half a child, but you're getting in these adult situations with a sense of wonder and a sense of stupidity as well," Finn, 34, said this week. "I see it as a real universal suburban record."
As a young teen, Finn absorbed the unruly, joyous aesthetic of the city's great band the Replacements, and later participated in the edgy rituals of adolescence.
"There's caves in St. Paul that a lot of people would go to that were pretty terrifying, but part of the whole experience was to be there drinking," he said. "It was scary, and there were scary dudes sometimes, but ... it wouldn't have been half as exciting to drink in someone's parents' basement."
"Tramps like us and we like tramps," Finn sings in the song "Charlemagne in Sweatpants," having a little fun with a signature lyric by one of the album's prime inspirations.
"Springsteen is a huge influence," said Finn, sitting with guitarist Tad Kubler in the band's dressing room at the Avalon in Hollywood, where they shared a bill with a couple of other bands from the small independent label FrenchKiss Records, Les Savy Fav and the Thunderbirds Are Now!
