Sporting his signature baseball hat and thick-rimmed glasses, singer Craig Finn speaks from his Brooklyn home.
He and his band, indie-rock stalwarts The Hold Steady, have been together for 21 years. To celebrate the milestone, they’re heading to Australia for an exclusive three-night residency in Melbourne.
Though Finn says it hasn’t been without its struggles, one of the secrets to the band’s longevity is adapting their touring style. “I think at the heart of it it’s fun, and we’ve maintained a way to make it fun,” he says. “We don’t do 200 tour dates a year anymore… we’ll probably only play about 25 or 30 shows and we’ll tend to do three in the same city.”
The Hold Steady Weekender Dates
- Friday 24 May 2024: The Croxton Bandroom, Melbourne VIC
- Saturday 25 May 2024: The Croxton Bandroom, Melbourne VIC
- Sunday 26 May 2024: Stay Gold, Melbourne VIC
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Not only is it gentler on the band, but it benefits the fans too. “The soundchecks become much more musical,” says Finn. “You’re not seeing if your amp works anymore, you’re maybe working out a song that you haven’t played in a long time and surprising the hardcore fans.”
Finn says performing multiple nights in the same city also helps build a community. “We have 140 songs so we can wildly change up the sets, and we do – we take great pride in not playing the same set ever,” he says.
“People who are into the band might come to two or three shows in a row because they know it’s going to be different each night and for that reason I think we have a lot of people who travel for the shows.”
With nine The Hold Steady records (not to mention the five solo records Finn has released and tours), the volume of lyrics to remember is immense. “Muscle memory is absolutely your friend… and it helps if you wrote them in the first place,” he says. Finn is the first to admit he might brush up on lyrics after soundcheck. “I probably Google The Hold Steady lyrics more than anyone else,” he laughs.
Before moving to New York City and forming The Hold Steady, Finn and guitarist Tad Kubler were in Lifter Puller in their hometown of Minneapolis. The harsher sound of their former band was inspired by hometown punk heroes The Replacements and Hüsker Dü.
“Lifter Puller ended up being sort of a cult thing where people who didn’t see it seemed to have elevated it to something that they wish they’d seen,” he says. “But a lot of people didn’t because when we were touring around the shows were really small.”
Finn was surprised with the first The Hold Steady shows being made up of Lifter Puller fans. “There was a building of momentum,” he says. “What I’ve learned is to appreciate when people seem to be listening to your music, are excited about it and are coming to your shows… because that wasn’t always there.”
Along with fans, Finn also brought the distinctive vocal style he developed during Lifter Puller somewhat out of necessity. “In a rehearsal space when there was a bad PA and a lot of noise… loud talking directed in that way cut through in a real physical sense [so] you could hear it better than when I was singing,” he recalls. “I always liked stuff that was kind of talky already, like Lou Reed and Mark E. Smith from The Fall.”
“When we started The Hold Steady, I wanted to see if we could pair that with more grandiose music,” recalls Finn. “Try to make it a little more epic and a classic rock style, but still have that talky vocal.”
Known for his third-person, narrative lyrics, Finn astutely touches on themes of drugs, alcohol, relationships and mental health. As he ages, so do the characters in his songs.
“I was always writing with a looking backward angle, so when I started the band, I was 31 and a lot of the characters in the songs were more like 20,” he explains. “I could look back on myself with 10 years distance and find what was interesting, what was frightening, what was unique, what was terrifying.”
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve maintained that 10-year lag, but now I’m 52 so 10 years ago is 42, which is still decidedly middle age,” says Finn. “I think that that’s interesting to me… and it’s easier for me to honestly write characters that are closer to my age.”
Titling their upcoming tour ‘Boys and Girls Down Under’ is a nod to their third record Boys and Girls in America. Released in 2006, Finn sees it as a turning point for the band.
“We became a little more global… and so I think that’s a lot of people’s entry into the music,” he says. “We will be playing a little bit of everything… so it’s not like we’re going to recreate the record, but at the same time it’s always a big record in both our history as well as our setlist.”
Finn says Melbourne was an easy choice for their Australia visit. “It seems like the best rock city in Australia,” says Finn. “That’s its rep and it seems like the place to do it if we’re only going to do one.”
Get your tickets to The Hold Steady Melbourne Weekender here.
