BUMP IN THE ROAD
Band changes with the times
RHINEBECK, N.Y. The Hold Steady, an old-school rock ’n’ roll outfit once dubbed “America’s best bar band,” was falling into the kind of unofficial hiatus that can settle upon a band after a decade of relentless touring when it fielded an unusual request: Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern wanted to book the group for four straight nights.
Even considering its cult following, that felt excessive. However, every night The Hold Steady played, the club was packed, recalled frontman Craig Finn. Similar extended stints in Brooklyn and Chicago also did well. Eventually the band realized it might have a new touring model on its hands.
Now, The Hold Steady has traded its old frenetic schedule for these kinds of semiregular residencies held in a handful of cities a year that draw fans from several states (or countries) away and build community, as well as boost merchandise sales. They’re not just lucrative, but they ’re also a heck of a lot easier on a cadre of road-weary musicians now well past the age of 40.
It’s just one of several new tactics the band is experimenting with as the industry rapidly is transformed by streaming, social media and other forces. In doing so, The Hold Steady has also made a startling break with the conventions of crafting albums as a way to get new music to the public. In other words, after 16 years, this old band learned some new tricks.
So, the days before the mid-August release of their new album Thrashing Thru the Passion found the bandmates in an unlikely place — back in the studio, recording new music that may never end up on an album. At the Clubhouse, a home-turned-studio atop a hill in Upstate New York’s Hudson Valley, band members were smoking cigarettes, debating the best po’ boy in New Orleans and chatting about Led Zeppelin.
The band occasionally stopped futzing around to fine-tune a song. It is archetypal Hold Steady. Big classic-rock riff? Check. Propulsive, E Street-style piano? Check. Sad/funny lyrics (about moving to California just to find it’s all “disinterested kissing”)? Check.
In late 2017, the band began releasing surprise singles on streaming services with “suggested donation” price tags that went to charity — a way to release new music without “the promotional obligations that come with releasing a full LP,” the band explained in a recent email to fans.
The rise of streaming services and social media has shaken so many aspects of the music industry, from the meaning of an album to the mechanics of the charts to the way songs are disseminated to the public.
The Hold Steady, however, may have figured out how to navigate those waters.
“How much they’re going to make from streaming is pretty limited,” said Jeff Dorenfeld, former manager of the band Boston and a business professor at the Berklee College of Music, but it’s “one more tool” to help a band pinpoint clusters of fans and sell tickets for a show.
When The Hold Steady burst out of the Brooklyn scene in 2003, the band had no intentions of changing an industry, just of sharing joyful rock music with fans.
Most members of the band were already entering their 30s when they formed. It was the age of the New York City rock revival, featuring The Strokes, Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Much ado was made about how out-of-place-and-time The Hold Steady seemed, from Finn’s non-skinny jeans and talk-sing delivery to guitarist Tad Kubler’s Thin Lizzy-esque riffs. The band averaged nearly one album release a year from 2004 to 2008 while touring extensively.
It was a rock ’n’ roll dream, but it took a toll.
After releasing Teeth Dreams in 2014, the band went silent. Years passed with only occasional shows and no releases, save for three solo records from Finn.
It was during that silence that the band began thinking of new ways to do things.
Finn and Kubler began collaborating again, but with no particular schedule. The band members set up a Dropbox to share ideas from their far-flung homes (New York, Memphis, Berkeley), and started getting together every few months in the studio, coming up with four or five songs at a time.
The business of being in a band, however, had changed since 2003. “It felt like some of the norms — be it through touring or releasing music — were worth examining,” Finn said.
The new record tells the tale of down-on-their-luck characters, such as a dude shaving his head at an airport (Denver Haircut), the girl “on the pay phone with an angle on some Western states,” and the titular Blackout Sam. It feels more like a collection of short stories than a novel; that’s because the songs were recorded individually, over the past two years — as opposed to during one concentrated studio stint — and some have already been released on streaming sites for several months.
“It’s funny, people’s attachments to the idea of an album,” keyboardist and pianist Franz Nicolay said. “The average working band, let’s say, who puts out a record every two to three years, writes 10 to 15 songs in those two to three years and releases them all at once. We have those same 10 to 15 songs, and we just sort of release them as we have them, but it’s not like the workflow is any slower.”
What’s the point, he added, of “keeping them secret for three years so (fans) can have the moment of hearing them all at once?”