As incredible as it might sound, 2026 marks the twentieth anniversary of The Hold Steady’s Boys And Girls In America. It not only marked the band’s third full-length in three years (remember when bands did that? Ah, relative youth…), but as their first release through then-new label home Vagrant Records, it served as a step-up in both production and exposure to a wider audience. We’ll have more on the legacy of the album itself when the actual release anniversary date rolls around in October, but for now, we join the band in their own celebration!
As part of a year-long run of shows honoring the BAGIA anniversary, The Hold Steady announced a four-night stay at the Sinclair, a venue nestled in the general Harvard Square area in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn is rather publicly a graduate of a fellow Beanpot school, Boston College. And while The Sinclair didn’t exist during Finn’s showgoing years on the Heights, there’s something that feels very Hold Steadian (Steadyian?) about the venue and the surrounding area. The venue itself soudns great and is well lit and has an unassuming industrial/subway air about it that is authentic in ways that newer gastropub microbreweries can only dream about. The jangly brick-lined sidewalks and narrow, paved-over pre-Revolutionary cowpaths have long been a way station for a wide cross-section of society; for generations it’s been home to the stereotypical “haves” for sure, but also counter-culture revolutionaries and wayward souls and well-read gutterpunks and upper-middle-class kids from suburbia in search of something close enough to ‘danger’ but also close enough to the subway to be able to return to their safe, suburban homes before the streetlights came on long traveled far and wide and populated The Pit (R.I.P.) and The Garage (also R.I.P.) and the bookstores and coffeeshops and back alleys.
Anyway, as per usual, I digress. On this evening, the first of those four celebratory evenings, The Hold Steady wasted no time in getting on with the business of celebrating, serving as their own opener and playing Boys And Girls In America front-to-back. (Editor’s note: nights two and three featured Jimmy Montague and Happy Little Clouds, respectively, while night four was a stripped-down, storytellers THS set). As proof of the album’s cultural staying power, especially within the Unified Scene, the overwhelming majority of Boys And Girls In America has long been regularly featured in the band’s live sets. Still, it is a different sort of experience hearing the album basically start to finish, in order, the same way so many of us first experienced at the initial needle drop or, I’m sure in most cases, the first time we put the disc in the aftermarket stereo in our 2001 Mazda Protege, a small handful of years before that car literally rusted away into nothing. But I digress again. Longtime Boston-area scene vets Ryan Walsh (Hallelujah The Hills) and Ezra Furman joined the crew for the boy and girl parts originally made famous by Dave Pirner and Elizabeth Elmore on “Chillout Tent,” which is undoubtedly the least-performed song from the BAGIA oeuvre for perhaps obvious reasons. I say “basically start to finish” because the band did insert a bit of a pre-planned audible, sliding BAGIA-era B-side “For Boston” in between “Chillout Tent” and album-closer “Southtown Girls.” It was an appropriate homage to Finn’s former home (not only did he spend his college years in the area, but he was born at the now-defunct St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in nearby Brighton).
The band took a normal opener-to-headliner-sized break of fifteen minutes between sets before returning to the stage for the main set. As interesting as it is to hear a set of exclusively Boys And Girls… tracks, it’s almost more compelling to see a full, headliner-length set that includes zero Boys And Girls… tracks because ten of the album’s eleven tracks have been set staples for so many years. The main set kicked off with “Multidude Of Casualties” from the band’s sophomore release, 2005’s Separation Sunday. The eighteen songs that followed were a pretty representative cross-section of the entirety of the band’s catalog, from Almost Killed Me‘s “Killer Parties” to the as-yet-unreleased “Dream Down By The Water.” Heaven Is Whenever bonus track “Ascension Blues” was a fun highlight from the lesser-played song archive, as was Teeth Dreams‘ “The Only Thing.” I have a soft-spot for that record and feel like it doesn’t always get the appreciation it deserves. Of course Mosh Pit Josh joined for the hardcore-style breakdown at the latter half of “Stay Positive.”
To look at the band is to see a crew of a half-dozen different guys from seemingly different scenes – from Nicolay’s frequent suits and bolwer hats to Selvidge’s 70s cocksure swagger to Finn’s English professor – who’ve felt the same gravity to create iconic, rock-and-roll music. The band has had a few different lineups over the years and each has its own merits, but I genuinely believe that the full-Voltron lineup that for the last decade has found Finn and (essentially) original members Tad Kubler (stage left guitar), Galen Povlika (bass) and Bobby Drake (drums) joined by both Steve Selvidge (stage right guitar) and the inimitable Franz Nicolay (keys, harmonica, accordion when the time is right) is the best lineup in a live setting. It might seem difficult for each of the members to carve their own space into the live sound, but The Hold Steady seem to pull it off effortlessly. Kubler and Selvidge trade massive hooks and frequently double or counter-melody each others leads, creating a swirling wall of guitars that Nicolay weaves his textures into and out of. Povlika and Drake, for my money, might be one of the more underrated rhythm sections in modern American rock, serving as the structural foundation for songs that are built with a lot of layers in a way that is understated without being simple and basic. And Finn…well, Finn is Finn. Equal parts poet and preacher and post-grad lecturer, more storytelling peer than bombastic prototypical frontman, Finn’s got an accessible, everyman quality that makes him instantly relatable to the scene as ‘one of us,’ while at the same time having a tremendously Springsteenian ability to create characters and carve stories that make him transcendent; not simply ‘one of us,’ but ‘the one of us who could actually do this and tell our stories and unify our scene.’
Finn routinely brings shows to a close by pointing out that there is so much joy in what the band does night in and night out. While the music is very much modern American rock-and-roll, there is an old hardcore show vibe of unity and that we’re all in this together in their live show, with the audience playing just as big a part in the vibe as the band. We might all be from different scenes and different crews and different area codes (my little corner of the pit had folks from a neighboring suburb and New Hampshire and Vermont and St. Louis and New Jersey and Seattle) but we are ALL the Hold Steady. Stay positive, and check out more photos from Night One below (and stay tuned for more of a look back at Boys And Girls at Twenty this fall)!
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