"When one townie falls in the forest, can anyone hear it?"

April, 2009 — I'm driving my unreliable Volkswagen Cabrio up the corn roads of Indiana on my way to Grand Rapids to deliver an academic paper on themes of grace in The Hold Steady's songs at Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Music. The Hold Steady is slated to perform and the call for papers specifically mentioned a preference for work on the featured musicians, and I’m that kind of fan so I write about Augustine and Aquinas and Craig Finn. The band’s fourth album Stay Positive is on repeat in my car and the fields hold all their spring promises. We’re going to build something this summer, I’m sure of it.  Midwestern wind is punishing; the land's too farm-flat to shelter the road. I'm pushing the limit because I want to make it in time to hear the conference’s opening interview with Finn. I am convinced secrets will be revealed. Somewhere around Fort Wayne my speedometer breaks. The needle crashes. I have no idea how fast I'm going so I just try to keep up with traffic and hope they know something I don’t. I pull off in a picket-fence town and ask a mechanic to make sure my car won't explode. She drove it like she stole it, as Finn sings on Separation Sunday's "Multitude of Casualties," the rest of the way to Michigan. I still miss the interview.  My session is small but invested. I had worried it would be weird to discuss Catholic things here, like talking about your family with strangers. How to talk about blood and not sound like a lunatic or a witch. But I am not alone. After we do that thing you do in academic conferences where you read your paper aloud like the world’s worst story hour, we obsess together over the minutiae of The Hold Steady’s mythos. The mysteries of the Finniverse. The gospel according to Craig and Tad and Franz and Galen and Bobby. When talk turns to Holly, the heroine of 2005's Separation Sunday, a younger woman with kaleidoscope hair asks me if I think Holly is a feminist character. I don’t have an answer for her. * * * Rewind to June, three years earlier. I'm driving up Missouri to Nebraska to an arts colony in a small town where I will finish writing a book. Loaded in my unreliable VW’s trunk’s CD changer (on the cutting edge when installed by the original owner, no doubt) is Separation Sunday. My friend John made me promise to take it with me for the drive. He calls me sister and believes in miracles.  When “Stevie Nix” hits, I almost drive into the Missouri River on “she got screwed up by religion / she got screwed by soccer players.” I wear out the repeat button, swallowed by storm-bruised prairie sky. * * * Months later I’m back home in Louisville and obsessed with their follow-up, Boys and Girls in America, and The Hold Steady has dates coming up outside Cincinnati on a Friday night and in town the next. We don't think. We buy tickets to both, and I hop in John's still-running car after getting off work that Friday two minutes past nine o'clock and we push up through the December darkness to a former mobster enclave this side of the Ohio River to storm Southgate House, a crumbling Victorian heap of a club riddled with rooms where anything could happen — Mackenzie Phillips doesn't live here anymore — in time to see the lights go down on the opening act.  It’s me and John and some other guy named John and our friends Jeffrey and Blair and we all get hoarse screaming along to “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” for different reasons. The band pulls us all up on the six-inch-high stage for the encore, “Killer Parties.” We pass out in some corporate hotel. Then we do it again the following night at Headliner's in Louisville, back on stage again although the climb is serious and we are not gymnasts. Confetti's everywhere and this is the closest I've been to church in years. My friend Bryan is at the show at my urging because he loves Bruce Springsteen and he loves The Replacements and so according to me that means he should love The Hold Steady. Later he tells me he left before the encore, because it was weird, so many words in the songs, and everyone else knew every single one and sang it exactly alike. Like you're all in some club I'm not part of. * * * What's the old joke? Catholics wear their faith around their necks? * * * At the Calvin College show, there's no hey whiskey hey ginger to order, no handshake xanax. It's a starched-shirt brainy Protestant campus and these kids don’t drink, officially. But during “Massive Nights,” when Craig belts out “there weren't any fights / there's usually one or two” one kid throws a punch and another goes down, and the violence charges the audience just a bit, another illicit thrill. It is decided that he must be a townie by his clothes and his hair. Some truths jump off the page. Finn wiggles his eyebrows on “later on we did some sexy things” and I think about the girl's question about Holly and why I didn't have an answer, only more questions. There are three sides to every story.   “Do you want me to tell it like boy meets girl and the rest is history? / Or do you want it like a murder mystery? / I’m gonna tell it like a comeback story.” * * * After the conference, still unsure of my speed, I head down a different part of Indiana to meet my boyfriend for another Hold Steady show. He's been in Milwaukee chasing Morrissey. We work that way. He booked us in a nearby motel and it turns out to be a sketchy scene, pit bulls guarding cardboard-thin doors that swing open every five or six minutes to let another person in or out, so many miles from the clean sheets of the college retreat center. I think of Augustine, who “fell in with a set of sensualists, men with glib tongues who ranted and raved and had the snares of devils in their mouths.” Now, knowing what I know about the song “Navy Sheets,” I think about the utility of white ones in a motel like this one.  We’re in Bloomington, known as the home of Indiana University and the setting of the classic town-and-gown teen cycling drama Breaking Away. “One for the Cutters,” the third track on Stay Positive, a song about a college girl who parties with townies until the scene gets ugly, is set in a town not unlike Bloomington, with the title a direct nod to the film. When the band plays the song, the crowd goes wild. Nobody gets punched. It’s still ecstatic, as thrilling for me as that first night in Newport. Now it’s ours, too. * * * Over the last six months, I've been working on a podcast with my friend Sean Cannon (of "The Guestlist" fame, etc.) about Stay Positive, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary.  We’re releasing the show in five episodes, one a day starting next Monday, December 3. I hope you'll want to listen.   Here’s a small preview of what we’ve been up to. There were many ways we could have told this story but we tried to be reliable narrators at least.   Tune in on Monday to hear the first episode of These Miracles Work. Til then, maybe you want to revisit Stay Positive. I don't know about you, but I needed it this year even more than I did ten years ago.   P.S. I’m still driving that VW, but I did get the speedometer fixed. I married that boyfriend, because I'm no dummy.