“I fantasize about it,” Craig Finn says of his first post-Covid gig with The Hold Steady, still unscheduled, like all gigs and all things. “There’s a celebratory but also a physical aspect of the shows we play,” he continues, and he is both absolutely correct and vastly understating the point. Finn, 49, is a tornado of bliss and poetry onstage, a guy who begins each show looking like the creative writing professor he once was and ends each one an unlikely rock god. In every last encore, Finn tells the crowd, “There is so much joy in what we do up here,” and while from someone else it could come off self-serving, at the end of a Hold Steady show, it is just a fact. A Hold Steady show is cathartic and ecstatic, a situation where you wind up arm in arm with a stranger, maybe two, definitely someone else’s beer down your front. The vibe in the crowd is joyful, communal, sweaty. It’s the kind of thing we’ve been denied for nearly a year, and as the band drops its eighth album Open Door Policy, out today on Nashville indie label Thirty Tigers, the fans are as antsy as Finn. Those massive nights will have to wait until the world comes back to normal. If the world comes back to normal. “I mean, I hope at some point everyone feels safe enough to celebrate, and to behave like that again.” But for now, the world’s best live rock band… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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