#195: Separation Sunday

Ranking The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far (2025)

The Hold Steady, 2005

This album is incredible. I remember listening to The Hold Steady a little in 2005, around the time this album came out, but it was too jarring for me - specifically, Craig Finn’s speaking/yelling vocal style is something to get used to, and I didn’t have the patience for it back then, nor did I appreciate the masterful band playing behind him. In 2025, however, I can appreciate this brilliant album, and I am again wondering if I just wasn’t old enough to appreciate it then; as with The National, “discovering” this album 20 years after its release is mind-boggling.

The Songs

Craig Finn and company put together a tight 11 song album, and at 42 minutes is just the right length. It’s a rocking, bluesy album with each instrument fitting together perfectly. The presence of an organ elevates many of the songs, ringing in at just the right moments, adding depth and soul to the songs as they power through each track. The guitar riffs are magical: a little faster it might be punk; a little slower, it’s classic rock. The percussion is excellent throughout, and the band plays behind Finn as though they are going about their tasks independent of him - they’re playing these songs whether he sings the lyrics or not. His “singing” is in line with the songs, but it’s a talk-singing style, and in some cases, also like Dylan, he just manages to catch up by the end of the bar.

Sprechgesang

Craig Finn’s vocal style fits firmly in the Sprechgesang mode, or “talk-singing,” similar to Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and other songs of his, particularly the “talking blues” of the early Sixties, as well as Lou Reed’s “Walk On the Wild Side,” among others (Canadian fans might recognize it in The Headstones). More recently, bands like Wet Leg are making a splash with this style. The Ringer has a great article on this recent trend, and cites Craig Finn as a key artist:

What Finn’s talky vocal style shares with hip-hop is a certain facility for detail-rich storytelling. A great Hold Steady song makes you feel like you’re crammed in a bar and your pal is telling you a really wild story.

This really nails it on the head. While the band wails in the background, Finn runs through the lyrics like he’s between sips of a pint and he’s got a rapt audience at the table. He even turns the volume up like he needs to talk over the band. But it works - it’s fascinating and an incredible way to tell the story of his connected characters.

The Story

The album is a loose concept album about teenagers in Minnesota, and several characters appear in different songs. Finn’s lyrics also reference Dylan either directly or adjacently at several turns. Both the band and Dylan are from Minnesota, and that connection comes around again and again.

“Hornets! Hornets!” starts things off as an introduction to the album - both in sound and story, giving the listening fair warning for what’s in store. The first verse is just Finn’s voice, and after 20 seconds the band kicks in with a bluesy rocker, a guitar-rollicking prologue to the story and characters:

I guess the heavy stuff ain't quite at its heaviest
By the time it gets out to suburban Minneapolis
We were living up at Nicollet and 66th
With three skaters and some hoodrat chick

Drove the wrong way down 169
Almost died up by Edina High¹

The listener will follow these characters through the album. They’re drug addicts, pimps, skaters and hoodrats.

The second song, “Cattle and the Creeping Things,” is a truly great song, with truly great lyrics, evoking Dylan in the 60s:

They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things, said I'm pretty sure we've heard this one before
Don't it all end up in some revelation with four guys on horses and violent red visions
Famine and death and pestilence and war?
I'm pretty sure I heard this one before

It’s biblical and epic, and Finn keeps piling on with sneaky brilliance: “Silly rabbit, tripping is for teenagers, murder is for murderers and hard drugs are for bartenders.”

“Your Little Hoodrat Friend” and “Banging Camp” follow, and they are both great. When “Banging Camp” pauses for a small breakdown, it comes out of it with a new sound, like a transformation, and it leads the rest of the way, into “Charlemagne in Sweatpants” and “Stevie Nix,” before approaching the crisis point with “Multitudes of Casualties.” One thing I love about this album and the lyrics are the mini-short stories in the titles alone, which is definitely Dylan-esque. The comparisons to Dylan are inevitable with the Minnesota connection, but Finn also purposely draws comparison to him with lines such as “Hey Nelson Algren, Chicago seemed tired last night / They had cigarettes where there were supposed to be eyes,” which, and perhaps this is only me, recalls “Stuck Inside of Memphis with the Mobile Blues Again:” “And he just smoked my eyelids / And punched my cigarette.” Again, I love the song title “Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night,” a whole story in one line, much like “Mobile Blues” or Sufjan Stevens’s “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts.”

“Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night” is a great song, in my top 3 on the album along with “Multitudes of Casualties” and “The Cattle and the Creeping Things,” and my fourth favourite is the closer, “How a Resurrection Really Feels,” which has a poignant fade out and keeps the listener wondering, hoping, about the characters introduced in the previous songs, that their story continues.

Concept Album

The continuing thread throughout the songs is heartbreaking, from isolation and apathy to drug addiction and crisis of faith. This would make for a great novel if Finn had chosen that outlet; as it is, it makes for a great album.

I absolutely love this album and, again, feel that I came to this too late. 2005 was too early for me, but perhaps 2015 would have been okay - I feel like I’ve missed out these last ten years on a truly great band. I also love the near-Canadian connection. As with most Minnesota musicians, we share an affinity with hardship. The oppressive geography and excessive winters are factors Canadians know well. In The Hold Steady, I heard traces of The Tragically Hip and 54-40, Joni Mitchell and Bruce Cockburn.

I could write more and more and more about this album - I didn’t even touch on the deep Catholic ties and allusions to Christianity and the bible. There’s so much to find here, and all the while the music is incredible. This album is perfectly placed at #195 and an excellent choice for this list.

1. Edina High School’s team name is the Hornets - Edina is a suburb of Minneapolis