Track 1: “Hornets Hornets”
“I guess the heavy stuff ain’t quite at its heaviest by the time it gets out to suburban Minneapolis. We were living up at Nicollet and 66th. With three skaters and some hoodrat chick. Drove the wrong way down 169. Almost died up by Edina High.”
Track 3: “Your Little Hoodrat Friend”
“Your little hoodrat friend got me high though. We were 17 and stuck up in Osseo. She said it’s funny even true love gets troubled by Stillwater and washed up in the Mississippi River.”
“She said City Center used to be the center of the scene. Now City Center’s over. No one really goes there. Then we used to drink beneath this railroad bridge. Some nites the bus wouldn’t even stop. There were just way too many kids.”
Track 6: “Stevie Nix”
“And when we hit the Twin Cities, I didn’t know that much about it. I knew Mary Tyler Moore and I knew Profane Existence.”
“She got screwed up by religion. She got screwed by soccer players. She got high for the first time in the camps down by the banks of the Mississippi River.”
Track 7: “Multitude of Casualties”
“While she was at the Citadel, he was getting high as hell. When she came to in the matinee, she was asking round for someplace else to stay. While he was down in Lowertown, she was feeling out the 5:30 folk mass.”
Track 8: “Don’t Let Me Explode”
“He said what about Los Angeles. She said we never really made it that far west. We scored big in Denver, and we thought it might be best to go hang around in the Upper Midwest.”
Track 9: “Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night”
“Sweet Saint Paul. That must be the hardest luck saint of them all. We met him in some suburban Saint Paul mall.”
Track 11: “How a Resurrection Really Feels”
“Holly was a hoodrat. Now you finally know that. She’s been disappeared for years. Today she finally came back. She said St. Louis had enslaved me. I guess Santa Ana saved me. St. Peter had me on the queue. The St. Paul Saints they waved me through.”
8 Reader Comments
11:53 am
This is interesting. Has there ever been a modern rock album that so aggressively referenced a U.S. city that *wasn’t* Los Angeles or New York? Like, has there ever been a mainstream rock album that was completely about Phoenix? Or about Boise? I mean, it’s not like the Smashing Pumpkins spent a lot of time describing the downtown geography of Chicago.
There must be some other examples of this, but I can’t think of one.
5:19 pm
Good point CK, I can’t think of any either.
The Hold Steady were interviewed in Pitchfork today. My favorite quote when talking about Lifter Puller, and also probably relates to The Hold Steady.
“All the characters from Lifter Puller seem to comprise this sealed universe, like a really fucked up Lake Wobegon.”
8:33 pm
How about an aborted album? Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane were to have been included on a Beatles’ album about Liverpool, an idea that was scrapped in favor of Sgt. Pepper. Or so I’ve heard.
11:50 am
Has there ever been a modern rock album that so aggressively referenced hoodrats?
5:58 pm
I just bought the album on iTunes today, it’s great. Besides these, I did catch a line about cigarette burns on the floor of the Thunderbird as well. This has to be referencing the amazingly kitschy Thunderbird Motel in Bloomington, yes?
10:25 pm
That’s a good question. If I get a chance to talk to Craig when he comes to town, I might ask him to give me a list of “unknown msp references” too.
10:38 pm
Here’s East-Lake’s post kinda pulling together a few more Hold Steady recent meanderings.
6:16 pm
The Thunderbird lyric must be a reference to the Bloomington hotel. The line is, “The carpet at the Thunderbird has a burn for every cowboy that got fenced in.”
There’s nothing better than the Hold Steady, and especially nothing better than this album, which I still listen to constantly even though I’ve had it since the day it came out early this year (I think it was early May?). It just never gets old.