100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s – #100 The Hold Steady – Stuck Between Stations

Released: 2007

It was hard to be a cult band by this point in history, but it seemed The Hold Steady tried: their first two albums Almost Killed Me and Separation Sunday had both received a critical hosing, but as is almost traditional in these cases little benefit came from all the hoo-ha. Early out-of-bubble experiences with the actual general public also stuck with them: singer Craig Finn was scarred by the band’s first British show in 2004 at a near-deserted Islington Academy, a non-event he was moved to describe afterwards as like “a tree falling in a forest”.

Keyboard player Franz Nikolay went further when speaking about the proto-outfit he’d first encountered, telling Uncut in 2008 that “When I first joined, they were still a back-slappin’, Budweiser-drinking bar band from the Mid-West.” This said, they were far from an uncomplicated proposition, with Finn’s lyrics often chronicling either the misadventures of a cast of sketchy characters, thinly veiled references to personal experience with relationships, drugs and alcohol, or both.

Salvation – if that’s what you call breakout success acheived in your mid-thirties – came with 2007’s Boys And Girls In America, the title a snippet plucked from Kerouac’s On the Road. Here everything going wrong sounded so right and knowingly the quintet had decanted the E-Street Band from it’s rather unhip 00’s cul-de-sac and shot it full of punky Minnesotan angst. Suddenly, everyone could relate.

Opener Stuck Between Stations was the archetypal side 1, track 1 in an era when the idea had almost been forgotten; rock n’ roll had been carelessly left on the shelf, but here a towering riff, Nikolay’s roadhouse piano and Finn’s growl were undeniable proofs of life. On it the singer was exploring the hinterland between creative function and mental health impairment, not that the army of new listeners they gathered through it were particularly hip to that. It turned out after all you could still keep a secret when your secret was out.