Random Access

I once said that I'm glad I learned to like music before I learned what the Internet was, because it gave me a weird appreciation for it that doesn't seem possible now that there's nothing scarce or mysterious about music because every band needs to have a MySpace page. Yet it is thanks to my new mp3 player that I have become reacquainted with an experience I'm not sure I've had since the last of my pre-Internet days: I have fallen in love with an album.

In college I was introduced to the internet via the dizzying concept of ethernet. Napster had just been killed but there were others! setharoo quickly became popular for introducing my floor of the dorm to its clones.

And since college I've been living with someone who almost never takes Winamp off shuffle, which does get to me sometimes. Just because I like Louis Armstrong and Stravinsky doesn't mean I want to listen to them back-to-back; it can be a bit disorienting, and tiring when it's like that all he time.

The little mp3 player gives me reason to listen to a few albums at a time, as that's all it holds. I put on the 20 Years of Dial-a-Song and Tom Waits on Storytellers — and The Hold Steady's Separation Sunday.

As far as I can tell I've been hearing about The Hold Steady ever since I started listening to The Current. I thought of them as sorta belonging to this little MPR station — an impression only confirmed by actually listening to the songs: they talk the Twin Cities like they know the place.

It's still and always crazily comforting for me to hear the names of things I know, roads I used to talk about, even if I never said "Drove the wrong way down 169. almost died up by Edina High." "When we hit the Twin Cities i didn't know that much about it. I knew Mary Tyler Moore and I knew profane existence."

My favorite is "She said it's funny, even true love gets troubled by still water and washed up in the Mississippi River." It's funny if you know that Stillwater is a name of a town on the Mississippi, a suburb of the suburbs of the Cities, or at least it makes me smile.

But there's lots of bands I've only heard of because of my beloved radio station, and being so terrible with names and connecting them to songs means that I wasn't sure foir a long time what I or anybody else meant by the words "The Hold Steady." I figured this one out more quickly than most because they were That Guy's Voice.

The singer, Craig Finn ... well, he doesn't sing so much as tell stories; there's not much melodic variation. While he seems influenced by hip-hop it's not that either because it's not as strongly rhythmic, doesn't rhyme, and is backed by straightforward bar-band rock-'n'-roll.

I finally listened to the whole album as I was doing the dishes (with the laptop and stereo tethered to the end of the house opposite the end where most of hte housework gets done, I find portable music a godsend). When it was over I stopped, wet hands and all, to fiddle with the controls to go back to the beginning of the album. This should be easy in the 21st century but I'm not aware of any instructions having arrived with this mp3 player and if there's a way to skip between folders rather than just individual songs, I haven't figured it out yet. I'm left with the mandatory downtime that I remember from having to rewind tapes (or, more often, turn them over, press fast-forward as my Walkman didn't have a rewind button, and turn them back over again).

I'm not expecting you all to run out and buy the CD just because I proclaimed it worth a few seconds of angrily stabbing at modern we're-too-cool-to-be-obvious buttons; it's hardly a rave review. I'd write one of those if I could, but I'm no good at reviews. I'm just talking about me; that's all I can do.

My favorite of the few fan-sites I've looked at describes Finn's old band Lifter Puller (which the fan describes as "sounding like something from the ass-end of a 'Nuggets' boxed set") with "And no matter how much a dork you are, you will walk around listing to this band and you will feel like a Guy-You-Do-Not-Fuck-With." And I think the same might be true of the new incarnation.

He seems to expect the people who listen to be dorks; he also says "Lifter Steady is a great band for nerds. If you grew up (or are still growing up) on comic books and sci-fi/fantasy and you've used the word 'continuity' out loud more than once in the past year, you'll probably love Lifter Steady." Which made me laugh because I live with someone who's surely said "continuity" more than once in the past week.

Maybe the dorks will feel tough because the subject matter isn't so much what they're used to: the lyrics have much of the content, as well as the sound, of stereotypical hip-hop. They taught me the word hoodrat.

The second definition quotes a song on this CD, "Your Little Hoodrat Friend," perhaps my favorite on the album and one of the more conventional-sounding; I'm convinced I'm great at singing the harmonies to its chorus and I'm happy it has something so familiar as a chorus because everything else about it is so unfamiliar to me.

Craig Finn calls it "a very teenager album" and it makes me feel like one when I'm listening to it (if only because I haven't had this kind of obsessive repetitive fondness for an album since I was a teenager). Yet Separation Sunday is all about things I barely even knew existed when I was a teenager: drugs, pimps, punks, sex, ugliness and confusion. And, oddly, one thing I knew a lot about by then: Catholicism.

Sometimes it's hard to tell them apart — "She said: I was seeing double for three straight days after I got born again. It felt strange but it was nice and peaceful. It really pleased me to be around so many people. Of course half were just visions but half of them were friends from going through the program with me." — but the songs give both subjects equal time and respect.

I forgot how much fun it is to want to totally immerse myself in an album. Modern music doesn't seem up to it: I'm sure mp3s have been proclaimed the death of albums many times by now, and at best new music seems to be what many pop albums always were: a good single or two and a lot of filler. The Hold Steady convince me that there is hope. You just have to know where to look.