So I was at the Pet of the Year party, and I got talking to a colleague of mine about music, and he asked me what I liked. And I almost completely blanked. Since my main mp3 player esentially broke down, I’ve only been listening to a cheap small one, and really only listening to The Hold Steady’s latest, “Stay Positive”.
Which suits me fine right now, but it suddenly left me blank on anything else I’ve been listening to. It’s funny how an mp3 player would do that — in the past you’d carry around a bunch of CDs so if someone says what are you listening to, you’d just tell them the CDs. Mp3 players make the whole thing different now, and flexible. And like forgetting phone numbers because they’re in the your phone, I suspect this is the same.
But of course, I have only been listening to one album for over a month now, and I make no apologies for that! So I launched into a whole description of The Hold Steady, with Tom admitting he’d never heard of them.
And I loved doing it … rambled a little, struggled for some comparisons beyond the usual Springsteen thing, but I liked hearing how I was describing this band I’m just obsessed with. And I realised how much I do like Craig Finn’s “literary” songwriting technique.
And I don’t extoll the virtues of things I like to other people enough. The Hold Steady have almost no profile in Australia, so us fans need to do more to get them noticed (and get the band to come back here again!)
(On a related note, I discovered that The Hold Steady did a Dylan cover on last year’s “I’m Not There” soundtrack… and so did a whole bunch of other great artists. It actually looks like a great album, which I hadn’t noticed before. Should be worth getting.)