Happy 20th Anniversary to The Hold Steady’s second studio album Separation Sunday, originally released May 3, 2005.
Let’s start with a verse from “Banging Camp”:
“I saw her at the party pit / She was shaky but still trying to shake it / half-naked and three-quarters wasted / she was completely alone.”
I’m going to be honest: I probably wouldn’t be friends with Holly, the lapsed Catholic at the heart of Separation Sunday who fills her spiritual void with sex, drugs, and rock & roll. She’d probably strike me as trouble, as “too much,” as bad vibes. But when I hear this verse, I usually tear up. This is the magic of The Hold Steady: hiding in the most fun bar band music you’ll ever hear is a deeply empathetic, earnest spiritual voice that reminds us that bars are not places we go despite our divine souls—they’re where we nurture them. To encounter Holly at the party pit is to realize her humanity and to want to reach out to her.
Delivering spiritual guidance via bar rock is quite the aesthetic feat, but Separation Sunday never makes the typical mistakes of ambitious rock music. It is earnest without being cheesy. It is snide without being cruel. It is grandiose and self-referential without being full of itself. It embraces the power of rock & roll at a period in rock history when the rest of the big bands were self-effacing, distant, overly clever—the “clever kids” that the band critiques on songs like “Hostile, Mass,” from their debut Almost Killed Me (2004). Separation Sunday is the rare work that rewards repeated listens not because of its cerebral power and intricacy, but because of its emotional depth. There are very, very few things like it.
Yes, it is a narratively virtuosic album. Hard partying is given mythopoetic status in “Your Little Hoodrat Friend.” There’s the streetwise re-telling of the Garden of Eden: “Did you hear the one about original sin? / I heard the dude blamed the chick / I heard the chick blamed the snake.” There are sick insults: “She said you remind me of Rod Stewart when he was young / You've got passion and you think that you're sexy / And all the punks think that you're dumb.” And there’s Holly’s quiet, desperate prayer before the album concludes: “Lord, what would you prescribe? / For a real soft girl in some real hard times?”
Listen to the Album:
What makes these lines special is not singer and lyricist Craig Finn’s technical skill. Instead, their power comes from the faith in the album, and the band’s fundamental premise that “Rock and roll can save our souls, or at least some of ours” as Finn once put it. Your interest in Separation Sunday depends, at the end of the day, on whether you count yourself among that number.
Bringing you into that camp is a job that belongs to the rest of The Hold Steady, and there’s nobody better suited to it. Finn’s singing isn’t the most melodic sound in the world—he really does sound like the half-drunk guy at the bar screaming in your ear—but the bobs and weaves of The Hold Steady make it into something more than poetry. There’s Tad Kubler’s majestic pick slide into the final chorus of “Your Little Hoodrat Friend.” Franz Nicolay’s comforting-yet-grandiose piano breakdown of “Stevie Nix.” Galen Polivka’s snaky bass groove beneath “Charlamagne in Sweatpants.” The dual drumming efforts of Judd Counsell (side A) and Bobby Drake (side B) raise the stakes with drama, thunder, and occasionally heart-catching white space.
The finest moment of them all is the finale, “How a Resurrection Really Feels.” The song starts with a riff that’s exciting but short; by the time you realize you’re in a gnarly riff, the gnarly riff is over. So, you wait around for it to come back. And then, Holly has her triumphant return to the church, and says “Father, let me tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels.” And the riff comes back. This time you’re ready for it; you recognize it as this magnificent, fleeting thing, arriving at just the right moment to punctuate our hero’s moment of revelation.
What happens to Holly next? Separation Sunday isn’t interested in that question, because it’s not really the point. The band collapses the binary of “I once was lost / but now I’m found” into one unified moment. It’s not about Holly making it home; it’s about the wilderness that she wandered through, and the sense of joyful, rowdy togetherness that all of us feel with her there. It’s about the loneliness and the party pit and the prodigal return, all at once. When she walks into the church, she is messy and too much and exactly the way that she’s supposed to be. And The Hold Steady will celebrate her—and you—the whole time, because that is what they do.
Listen: