Happy 15th Anniversary to The Hold Steady’s third studio album Boys and Girls in America, originally released October 3, 2006.
There is something that lives beyond happy songs. Happy songs put a smile on your face because they’re light and fun—the kinds of songs that are easily collected in oddly-specific algorithmic playlists like “Weekday Evening with A Mild Breeze Out Of The Northwest” or “Chill Barbecue With Your Neighbors and Your Buddy’s New Girlfriend Who Seems Okay.”
While songs by The Hold Steady make me happy, they don’t fit into these categories. They have a happiness that goes much further—a sense of euphoria that lives in dark moments. Where this feeling comes from, and what it means, is a hard thing to describe—but its most vivid rendering is their 2006 record, Boys and Girls in America.
The Hold Steady didn’t invent this feeling, nor are they the only ones to set it to music. You can hear it on everything from Titus Andronicus to Ramshackle Glory to The Wonder Years to The Worriers. But it’s Boys and Girls in America where it is connected to tangible characters and made real. Just as Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) gave small-town postindustrial malaise names and faces, Boys and Girls and America does so for this righteous euphoria.
Take for example a personal favorite track, the criminally underrated “Chillout Tent,” from the record’s back half. The narrative isn’t especially complex—two people have a meet-cute after passing out at a festival from taking too many drugs. (And who hasn’t been there?).
Still, the lines sung by guest vocalists Elizabeth Elmore and David Pirner, alongside the triumphant horns and driving piano, make the incident seem like a pre-ordained miracle. The song isn’t glorifying the drug use—lead singer Craig Finn’s narration makes it clear that the whole scene is pretty unbecoming—but that doesn’t really matter to the people in the chillout tent. The album has you believe both: what has happened here is bad and dangerous, but isn’t it also beautiful if you look at it on its own terms?
This is the tension at the heart of Boys & Girls in America. Bad things happen. Women dump their boyfriends when they get bored of them in “You Can Make Him Like You.” Relationships can’t live up to their early promises in “First Night.” People fall off the wagon in “Same Kooks.” There is serious and real darkness all over this record—but there’s a quality to the singing, the instrumentation, that lets you know this is not a dark record.
“You Can Make Him Like You” has a singalong chorus that makes you want to dump your boyfriend even if you don’t have one. The tragedy of “First Night” has a spiritually fulfilling, piano-driven buildup in the coda. “Same Kooks” has a filthy organ solo and, right when you thought it couldn’t get any higher, an honest-to-God vibraslap to lead you into the last chorus. This album is dark and scary and so, so fun.
This doesn’t minimize the violence and darkness in these stories, or the seriousness of the mental illness that some of the characters face. Instead, the album chooses to celebrate everyone’s humanity and quest for joy, rather than reducing people to the broken things about them. Boys & Girls in America doesn’t ask you for judgment or pity. It’s not interested. It just asks you to sing along.
This is obvious from the jump: “Stuck Between Stations,” still the quintessential Hold Steady song fifteen years later, spends the first verse profiling a self-obsessed generation of boys and girls in America who are certifiably miserable. The instrumentation reeks of triumph when the first line lets you know that triumph couldn’t be further away: “There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.” And yet for forty unhinged minutes, The Hold Steady wants us to celebrate.
I think this is because, even though not all of us pass out at parties or blew our winnings at the racetrack on a week’s worth of drugs, the fear and lack of self-worth that drives so many of the characters in the Hold Steady catalogue are part of everyone’s lives. None of these songs are about people like me, but I recognize the feelings in a lot of them. And there’s a band there to tell me that this is ok, this is what it’s like to be a person, and let’s all sing.
To put it another way, as band and audience declare at the end of every show, we are all The Hold Steady.
LISTEN: