Happy 15th Anniversary to The Hold Steady’s fourth studio album Stay Positive, originally released July 15, 2008.
Despite the bravado, The Hold Steady are a fragile enterprise. While bar-band rock, narrative lyrics, and gnarly guitar solos are their bread and butter, their trade is belief. The forthcoming book on the band’s history is titled How A Resurrection Really Feels, named after the closing track on Separation Sunday (2005), revealing that the band’s great promise is redemption. But you can’t have redemption without belief in that which promises to redeem you. Stay Positive is an album for believers.
By the time Stay Positive came out, The Hold Steady had already dragged us through three records’ worth of failure and resurrection stories. Despite being the most sonically accessible of the band’s first four records—losing the relentless growl of Separation Sunday, the sloppiness of Almost Killed Me (2004), and the conceptual cul-de-sacs of Boys And Girls In America (2006)—it’s harder to access the essence of Stay Positive until you’ve been through the rest of the band’s work.
To the uninitiated, its vague invocations might fall completely flat. The opening track promises that “we’re gonna build something this summer,” which sounds just like a lot of the same aphorisms that litter the dad rock canon. And if this were a debut record, all of that messaging might in fact mean nothing. But if you’ve already been through “There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right” (off “Stuck Between Stations” from Boys And Girls In America) then it’s not such a big jump to “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer” (off “Constructive Summer”). It’s enough to get someone like me, who’s usually in bed by 10:30 and can handle two beers at most, to joyfully raise his glass at a show.
There are no apologies about the band’s indebtedness to their earlier work; “Stay Positive” is basically a laundry list of callbacks to the previous efforts. “Hornets! Hornets!,” “Stevie Nix,” “Sweet Payne,” “Constructive Summer,” “Massive Nights,” and “Positive Jam,” all make appearances, a veritable Avengers of rowdy rock and roll. While absolutely a form of fan service, the tune is still narratively serviceable and puts the band’s ethos on its sleeve: all of this is connected, and if you think that’s cheesy, this probably isn’t for you.
Listen to the Album:
Like Springsteen before them, The Hold Steady’s manic spirituality is brought down to earth through an honest acknowledgement of the meanness in this world. Tunes like “Lord I’m Discouraged,” featuring some of Tad Kubler’s finest guitar work, is a spot-on encapsulation of knowing a friend is in a dead-end or abusive relationship and not knowing how to get them out. “One For The Cutters” is a searing critique of power and status, as a college girl tours a townie party scene and, once things get messy, gets freaked out. It contains one of the most vivid Craig Finn lyrics (“sniffing at crystals in cute little cars / getting nailed against dumpsters behind townie bars”) and reveals the dark underbelly of the party scene that the band uses as its vehicle for redemption.
Most of Stay Positive exists between the two poles of “Constructive Summer” and “Lord I’m Discouraged.” “Navy Sheets,” for example, finds a snarling, almost contemptuous Finn describing people searching for spiritual fulfillment through desperate sex. The party scene itself is not the reason these people are worth celebrating, it’s the fact that they’re desperate in the first place, and their desperation matches whatever yearning or searching the listener is involved in.
Stay Positive is then an album that tries desperately to see you at your lowest, and not shower you with banal platitudes about things getting better or dropping artificial pop hooks to raise your spirits. The “gotta” in “we gotta stay positive” is a statement of fact, not an encouragement. Staying positive is simply indispensable if you’re going to make it out of whatever rut you’re in, and The Hold Steady are going to do their absolute damndest to get you there. But you have to believe in yourself, and you have to believe in them, for any of it to work.
Listen: