The Weekenders
It’s my favourite song on Heaven Is Whenever, and probably one of my favourite songs of this year, and I think most of it comes down to total gut reaction - it’s a fucking catchy tune, a real lump-in-your-hoarse-throat singalong number that hits you in all the place that rock music should. The Hold Steady do “Whoa-oa-oa”s like no one else. It’s their thing - looking back to classic rock, while slyly subverting its process of mythmaking, even as it celebrates it.
“You could say our paths have crossed before.”
There are numerous callbacks in the lyrics to The Hold Steady’s own lyrical mythology, riffing on different songs from past albums. It’s conscious of the past, not just as a nostalgic booze’n’gigs Camelot (and there are a couple of references on Separation Sunday to the Kennedys, that most famous Catholic couple in American history), but as a place of disappointments, pain, hurt and deaths, which can weigh upon the here and now and make you consider all that’s gone before.
“And if you swear to keep it decent, then yeah I’ll come and see you, but it’s not gonna be like in romantic comedies.
The things that others dislike The Hold Steady for (“they’re old guys singing about music and partying - how DARE they! *gasps, drops monocle*) are what I love them for. There’s a consideration of what happens when you live a life of teenage hedonism beyond the age you should, what happens when the legend is left behind and grubby, disappointing real life replaces those perfect, arms-aloft rock’n’roll anthems. What happens when you have to live outside the myth you’ve made?
“In the end I bet no one learns a lesson.”
