And it had started to creep into the band's lives, too, as they dealt with the increased time on the road, sleeping on a tour bus and feeling removed somewhat from the more grounded aspects of community that once made touring more fun. The darkness is there, in the lyrics - on songs like "One for the Cutters," when a college girl's night out with townies turns violent, and on the heartbreaking ballad "Lord, I'm Discouraged," a song that's very personal for Finn. “You never say ‘stay positive’ when things are going well,” Finn says. But ‘Boys and Girls ’ was much more of a party record, while ‘Stay Positive’ was a much darker proposition.” “The Hold Steady has this reputation as a good-time party band, but I think that’s always been misleading, and an intentional misreading of a lot of the stuff. “I think of ‘Stay Positive’ as quite a dark record,” Nicolay tells us. Listen to episode 2, "Our Psalms Are Sing-Along Songs": "They can put their fists in the air," says Nicolay. That got me thinking about how cool hardcore is, and when Tad had the riff for ‘Stay Positive,’ I was like, let’s make a good positive hardcore song.”Ī side benefit of the "whoa oh oh oh"-style chorus in a song like "Stay Positive" for a band that's picked up a lot of new fans in a couple of years? It's easy to sing along. “I feel like through we started to revisit punk and hardcore more and talk about it more. “At the beginning of The Hold Steady we were all rediscovering classic rock that we’d grown up with but kind of gotten away from in our 20s a little bit,” says Finn. And with that they rediscovered, as Finn puts it, "the power of the wordless chorus" for live audiences. That time on the road also brought the band back to punk and hardcore, thanks to tour manager Craig McQuiston’s influence. “Franz and Tad and myself would go into hotel rooms after the shows and we had these acoustic demos we were just making on laptops,” says Finn. The success of “Boys and Girls in America” meant the band wasn’t coming off the road any time soon, so if they wanted to write a new album, they were going to have to do it while they worked. Listen to Episode 1, “Start With a Positive Jam”: In episode one, we looked at where the band was when they started writing the album, which they see as a companion piece to “Boys and Girls in America,” and how producer John Agnello - who produced the previous album too - helped guide the process. Over five episodes, we explored how the album was written and recorded, the role the band's success played in changing how they approached writing song, and why they think of "Stay Positive" as their last "easy" record - with the two that came after "more troubled." We also delved into how visions differed for the future of the band at one point, and how they reconciled those differences for another ten-year anniversary in 2016, and are now steadily writing songs together between less-frequent but no less epic shows. We talked to Finn, Kubler, and Nicolay for our podcast, “These Miracles Work,” a mini-series revisiting “Stay Positive” and its aftermath for the album’s tenth anniversary. The band played a series of anniversary shows for "Stay Positive" this year, and Vagrant Records just released a deluxe three-LP reissue of the album this week. It was also the last album keyboardist Franz Nicolay played on before leaving the band in January 2010, after the album’s tour wrapped and they had to decide what would come next.Īll's well that ends well, as fans know - Nicolay is back with the band, which expanded in the years he was gone to add guitarist Steve Selvidge alongside drummer Bobby Drake and bassist Galen Polivka. The success of “Sequestered in Memphis” as a single and the reception of the album as a whole isn’t the only reason “Stay Positive” remains a pivotal point in the band’s history. I don’t want to say we willed it into existence without too much blood sweat and tears, although there’s always that in a record,” says guitarist Tad Kubler. “It definitely feels like the last record that was very effortless and just kind of, like. “’Stuck ’ somehow seems bigger now, but ‘Sequestered’ got more radio play than anything else.” “‘Sequestered ’ was probably the biggest song we ever had as far as radio,” Finn says. So when “Stay Positive” launched, they were poised to build on that success. Suddenly the band, whose live shows were already word-of-mouth legendary stateside, were playing dates in Europe and the UK as well. When The Hold Steady released their fourth album “Stay Positive” in 2008, the rock band from Brooklyn with roots in Minneapolis was riding high on the success of their breakout 2006 hit “Boys and Girls in America,” which had set off “a whirlwind of touring,” frontman Craig Finn tells us.
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