Latest news with #Replacements
Economist
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Economist
Republicans have a plan to add trillions to the national debt
United States | Elephant dung Photograph: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times/Redux/Eyevine May 13th 2025 | WASHINGTON, DC M UCH AS he may wish to, Donald Trump cannot govern through imperial decree alone. Congress is drafting legislation to remake the tax system and alter federal spending—something only it can do. On May 12th Republicans unveiled their new plan. Unfortunately it is a mess. Republicans want to save billions through Medicaid work requirements. Millions could lose coverage He is just making them harder to fix What to listen for in oral arguments over birthright citizenship Replacements, in Greensboro, is an encyclopaedia of tableware The rise and fall of the 'disparate impact' doctrine
Los Angeles Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
At home he's a hero. Is America next for Sam Fender?
Sam Fender peered out at the crowd filling the Mojave tent at last month's Coachella festival — possibly the highest-profile American gig to date for this 31-year-old singer and songwriter from the north of England — and said he was going to play the stupidest song he ever wrote. A thrashing three-chord punk tantrum inspired by a tasteless joke Fender saw on Facebook during the COVID pandemic, the song was 'Howdon Aldi Death Queue,' in which he describes a bunch of pensioners lined up at a supermarket near his working-class hometown of North Shields, near Newcastle. 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa — keep your distance,' it goes, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa — that's less than two meters.' At Coachella, Fender punctuated the song's climax with a messy guitar solo that seemed to lampoon the whole idea of guitar solos. Why perform something so dumb with so many eyes on him? 'Because it's great,' Fender said with a laugh a few days after the show. 'Sometimes you can do a daft song that's just fun. Not every song needs to f—ing say something.' Yet most of Fender's do. Part of a lineage that stretches back through the Clash, the Jam and the filmmaker Mike Leigh, Fender writes with searing honesty about the real lives of everyday British people: veterans navigating a neglectful bureaucracy, teenagers struggling with depression, workers left behind by globalization. At home, his music — which sets those thoughts against hearty arrangements stacked with electric guitar and wailing saxophone — has touched a nerve that's made him one of the U.K.'s biggest rock stars, with three No. 1 albums and three Brit Awards to his name and a summer tour that includes sold-out dates next month at London Stadium and Newcastle's St. James' Park. On Thursday, Fender released a music video for his song 'Little Bit Closer' directed by Philip Barantini and starring 15-year-old Owen Cooper — a duo familiar to millions of viewers from their work in the much-talked-about 'Adolescence,' which according to Netflix is the streamer's most-viewed British series of all time. Said Elton John of Fender in an interview a few years ago: 'He's a British rock 'n' roll artist who's the best rock 'n' roll artist there is.' Now the singer is making a go of it in the U.S., several months after the release of his latest LP, 'People Watching,' which might be the most convincing rock record so far this year. 'It's kind of ridiculous: We're playing to 80,000 people in London, then we come over here and I'm playing bars,' he said during a late-afternoon stroll around Pan Pacific Park. Fender was in Los Angeles on a break from the road between the two weekends of Coachella, and though he was underselling the size of his shows — he'd been hitting theaters, not bars — you took his point about the whiplash. 'I actually love these gigs,' he said, dressed in a gas station attendant's jacket over a ratty Replacements T-shirt. 'It reminds me of the early days.' He added that he's not necessarily aiming to fill stadiums in this country. 'The only goal is to make it pay for itself, because right now when we come over we're not breaking even.' He laughed. 'All I want from America is to not lose money.' For Fender, the visit to L.A. represented a return trip after he spent a month and a half here last year recording 'People Watching' with Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs. He'd fallen in love with that band's 2014 'Lost in the Dream' album while laid up with a serious illness — 'I'm not gonna fully disclose what it was because I just don't know if I want to be constantly talking about it,' he said — and jumped at the opportunity to 'learn from somebody who I really look up to.' Like Fender's first two LPs, 'People Watching' lashes anthemic choruses to surging grooves in a way that makes clear he's always thinking about his rowdy live show. But as they experimented in Granduciel's gear-stuffed Burbank studio — 'a dreamland for us,' as Fender put it — he and the members of his band leaned into the producer's richly atmospheric sound, texturing the songs with luscious vintage-synth parts, as in the coolly ecstatic title track, and occasionally slowing the tempo for a tune like 'Crumbling Empire,' in which Fender sings more movingly than you'd think possible about the privatization of the British railway system. The album showcases the most expressive singing Fender has put on record, not least in the gorgeous 'Arm's Length,' where he dials back his desperate yelp to find a soulful new register. 'I really appreciate that because I get very self-conscious about my voice,' he said. 'I've got quite a high voice for a tall lad' — Fender stands sturdily at around 6 feet 1 — 'and I've always kind of associated the highness with how good I am. As you get older, obviously the range has changed, so losing a bit of that top made me think: S—, I'm not good anymore.' Asked whether he took care not to clutter the arrangements at the expense of Fender's singing, Granduciel scoffed. 'You couldn't get in the way of that vocal if you tried,' the producer said. Reviews of 'People Watching' have nearly universally invoked Bruce Springsteen, and the critics aren't wrong: With its gauzy keyboards and arpeggiated electric guitar, 'Crumbling Empire' has some undeniable 'I'm On Fire' energy. But Fender thinks the comparison to the Boss is 'a bit lazy' and that 'there's more influences than just Springsteen in my music.' To his ears, the synth lick in the title track echoes Dire Straits, while the chiming 'Nostalgia's Lie' recalls the Byrds or the La's. 'Maybe it's a bit Tom Petty,' he said. 'But my vocal sound is nothing like Springsteen' — true enough, given the pronounced northern English accent Fender makes no attempt to hide. 'I'm sure 20 years ago, you'd have some A&R guy who's like, 'Don't use the word 'lads,''' Granduciel said. 'But Sam's a proud Geordie, as he says, and you can tell in his voice. Where he's from is such an important part of his identity and his songwriting.' Fender learned to play guitar and write songs as a teenager living paycheck to paycheck with a mom suffering from fibromyalgia. At 18, he was performing in the North Shields pub where he also worked when the guy who's now his manager walked in and beheld a star in the making. (One reason Fender's still on Facebook — 'even though it's not my generation's preferred social media,' he said — is to 'keep an eye on all the old people I used to serve in the pub.') His debut album, 'Hypersonic Missiles,' came out in 2019, followed by 'Seventeen Going Under' two years later. England's NME called the latter the best album of 2021 thanks to songs like the anguished title track — 'I see my mother / The DWP see a number,' he sings of the U.K. welfare agency — and 'Spit of You,' an almost unbearably poignant tune about his complicated relationship with his dad for which Barantini directed a video with 'Adolescence's' Stephen Graham as Fender's father. What's Fender think about these days when he sings 'Spit of You,' in which he describes watching his dad deal with the death of Fender's grandmother? 'I'm thinking: God, this is gonna suck when he's not here,' he said. 'I can't think about it too much because then I worry about him going.' Songs like that have attracted plenty of famous fans: Last year, Noah Kahan drafted Fender for a new version of Kahan's hit 'Homesick,' and the singer recently told KROQ that he'd been invited to a so-called Joni Jam at Joni Mitchell's Bel-Air home — but that he didn't go because he was too nervous. 'I completely bottled it,' he said, adding that it was one of his great regrets. At Coachella, Matt Bellamy of Muse took in Fender's set (along with Bellamy's movie-star ex, Kate Hudson) and later went backstage to say hello. 'I wanted to be like, 'Ah, dude, I loved 'Knights of Cydonia' when I was 13,'' Fender recalled of the meeting. 'But I didn't know for sure if it was him or not, so I thought best not to just in case.' With a laugh, he admitted he's made that mistake before. 'I told Danny from McFly that I liked 'Naïve,' the Kooks song,' Fender recalled. 'I was like, 'That was a great tune,' and he was like, 'What tune?' I said, 'You know, 'Naïve' — was a good one, wasn't it?' He was like, 'Uhhh …'' Fender shook his head. 'He probably doesn't remember that, and now you'll put that in the article, and he'll be like, 'F—ing hell.'' Fender's dealings with the notoriously aggressive British media have made him hyperaware of what he says to reporters and how it's framed in stories about him. For starters, he rejects the idea that he's become kind of a spokesman for young British people (though of course no spokesman worth listening to has ever embraced that role). 'People bandy about those terms all the time, and it's ridiculous,' he said. 'Saying that somebody's the voice of a generation — I'm not, honestly. I'm an idiot. I'm just writing about my experiences and the experiences of people I know, and people attach such weight to it.' Indeed, Fender made headlines this year after he told London's Sunday Times that 'white boys from nowhere towns' are being drawn to 'demagogues and psychos like Andrew Tate' because they're 'being shamed all the time' for enjoying the advantages of a white privilege they don't perceive. Seated at a picnic table in the park, Fender said he doesn't understand why his comments caused such an uproar. 'The young lads I know — my nephews and things like that — they'll be watching some YouTuber,' he said, 'and then, a couple of clicks away, they'll end up on Tate,' the controversial online influencer who's been accused of rape and other abuses of women. 'They're looking for role models — for people to help them become men. I just don't think it needs to be drowned in misogyny.' Fender's also made waves with his comments regarding the class dynamics of a music industry he believes is 'rigged' in favor of the well-to-do. 'Because of Brexit, touring has become impossible in Europe for starting-out artists,' he said. 'The venues and the grassroots scenes — they need to be protected at all costs.' He's quick to acknowledge that he doesn't know how exactly to do that — so quick that you can tell he's accustomed to being asked. Said Fender: 'You're allowed to point at stuff and say, 'That's f—ed up,' without having the answer.' Not every song Fender writes reaches for some sweeping sociocultural diagnosis. The new album's closer, 'Remember My Name,' is a brass-band love song 'from the perspective of my granddad to my grandmother when she had dementia and he was looking after her,' the singer said. 'Arm's Length,' meanwhile, is 'about not being good at dating,' he said with a laugh. 'It's about people who've got an avoidant attachment style.' Is it autobiographical? 'Little bit of me in it,' he said. 'I think I always felt more comfortable in chaos and uncertainty because of my childhood. So whenever things were nice, it was like: If I don't blow this up, it's gonna blow up on its own.' As he spoke, Fender pulled a canister of nicotine pouches from his pocket — a habit, he pointed out, that's proved tougher to kick than cigarettes. 'Anyway, I'm trying my very best these days to feel comfortable in comfort.' Is dating harder or easier now than it was before he was famous? 'A lot easier, because I'm not dating,' he said, smiling. 'I don't want to talk about it. Well, actually, it doesn't matter — it's already out in some of the papers in the U.K. I'm seeing somebody, and it's great. That's all that matters.' (The Sun reported in March that Fender has been 'secretly dating' Rosa Collier, a young actor from London, since 2022.) For all his reluctance toward certain aspects of celebrity, Fender onstage embodies the offhand fervor of a natural rock star — which isn't to say he puts a tremendous amount of thought into his look. 'I probably should think more about it,' he said. 'I look like s— most of the time.' Playing England's Reading festival in 2023, he sported a mullet haircut that 'kind of happened by accident,' he said. 'Some of my favorite Geordie footballers had terrible mullets in the '80s — Paul Gascoigne and Kevin Keegan — and I always fancied it. I'm not gonna lie: I looked at the photos of myself and went, 'Oh, Christ.' But you know what? I kind of want the mullet back. It was so s—, I kind of love it.' After his U.K. stadium shows and a run of summer festival dates in Europe, Fender is due back in the States this fall. If he ever concludes that things couldn't get any bigger at home, would he consider moving to L.A. to break in America? 'Elton told me, 'Just move there — that's what I did,'' he said. 'I'd be tempted to do it.' There's a lot of lore about Elton John's days in L.A., beginning with the night at the Troubadour in 1970 that changed everything. 'Sooo much lore,' Fender agreed. 'But the lore is always bollocks. I mean, he played the Troubadour so many times — he really grinded. In the biopics, you play one gig and then you're in Dodger Stadium five minutes later. The thing about rock 'n' roll lore is they always forget the hard work.'
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Five Noritake China Patterns Worth Serious Money
With its intricate, hand-painted designs and captivating luster, it's no wonder that Noritake is one of the most popular china brands in the world. Your parents and grandparents probably had a few pieces (or even a whole set), and it's good to know a bit about Noritake china values so you can decide which pieces you want to keep and collect. Certain patterns can sell for hundreds of dollars a place setting, but others are only worth around $25 for five pieces. As you shop in antique stores and thrift shops or just take stock of what's in your china cabinet, look for these super valuable patterns. They tend to bring top dollar when sold at auction. Noritake Pattern Value per Place Setting Frank Lloyd Wright Imperial Hotel Dinnerware $512 Foxboro $365 20056 Black and Gold $188 Fitzgerald $170 Hemingway $129 - $140 Although you may not find this at the thrift store, we couldn't resist including it anyway. This 1925 design was a collaboration between Frank Lloyd Wright and Noritake for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. There are several versions of this pattern, and most are valuable. A 32-piece set sold at auction in 2023 for $3,276, which is about $512 a place setting. Foxboro is a vintage Noritake pattern that was discontinued in 2001, and it's actually worth more than a lot of the really old Noritake. It's an absolutely gorgeous design with a wide band of cobalt blue around the rim. The edge is scalloped, and the band has gold trim and sweet bird decorations on it. A five-piece place setting sold on eBay for $365 in 2024. It was in mint condition. An ornate pattern dating to 1924, 20056 is a lovely design of black with gold embellishments. It has a simple shape and delicate white base, but the glimmer of the gold accents and the scrollwork motif make it feel very fancy at the same time. Because this is an old Noritake pattern, it's hard to find. A set of eight place settings sold for $1,500 in 2024, making it about $188 per five-piece place setting. Hailing from the 1990s, Fitzgerald is a simple pattern with an emerald green band and gold accents. It's got plenty of vintage charm, and it's hard to find in good condition. Replacements sells a five-piece place setting for about $170, and a covered vegetable dish sold at auction in 2024 for $360. Another pattern from the 1990s that fetches high prices is Hemingway. Replacements asks about $140 for a five-piece place setting of this classic design with a red marble pattern on the border and bold accents in gold. A set of service for 14 sold at auction in 2024 for $1,800, making it about $129 per five-piece place setting. Most Noritake patterns aren't this valuable. It's common to see a whole set of service for eight or 12 selling for under $200. Common individual pieces like teacups or bread and butter plates can sell for a few dollars apiece. Related: While certain patterns tend to be valuable, there are some other factors that make a huge difference in the value of Noritake china. Even though this china is special, there's a lot of it out there. To find out if yours is worth money, consider these qualities. One of the most important things to consider when assigning value to china is its condition. Chips, cracks, stains, and scratches will detract from the price you could get for it. Unless you're talking about something really old or rare, buyers will pass up china with damage. Use a magnifying glass to look for small scratches and cracks that could detract from its value. Older Noritake is worth more than newer examples, except when there's a lot of demand for a specific newer pattern. Those patterns made in the early years of the 20th century are often worth the most. In any pattern, there are some pieces that are rarer and more valuable than others. Teacups, saucers, and side plates tend to be worth less than serving pieces because there were just fewer serving pieces made. For example, Replacements asks about $10 for a saucer in pattern 20056, but a punch bowl with a little damage sells for almost $450. Because Noritake has such a long history, there are patterns that really evoke the eras when they were made (and can feel dated in a bad way on a modern table). On the other hand, certain elements like gold edging or a charmingly retro style can add to the value of that pattern. It's all about what people want to see in their china cabinet or on their holiday table. Related: While Noritake china values depend on what people want and the condition of the pieces, don't forget that not all value is monetary. If you remember seeing that china on your grandma's table every Thanksgiving, it's already worth more to you than it would be to anyone else.
Yahoo
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Green Day Performs at Coachella 2025 Weekend One: Watch
Green Day is one of tonight's headliners at the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The set marks the punk trio's debut performance at the Indio, California festival, despite frontman Billie Joe Armstrong joining the Replacements on stage in 2014. During their set, Green Day are expected to perform performed fan-favorite songs as well as selections from their 2024 album Saviors. Watch Armstrong & co.'s performance live below. Green Day announced Saviors back in the fall of 2023, releasing their zombie-filled black-and-white video for 'The American Dream Is Killing Me' that same day. They also shared the singles 'Look Ma, No Brains!' and 'Dilemma' during the rollout. The LP follows the band's 2020 full-length Father of All… Revisit Marc Hogan's 2017 Sunday Review of Dookie, and follow along with all of Pitchfork's coverage of Coachella 2025. Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Craig Finn Made the Seventies L.A. Record of His Dreams
When Craig Finn wants to make an L.A. album, he doesn't mess around. He might be best known as the Minnesota-via-Brooklyn frontman of the Hold Steady, a punk bar-band wordsmith specializing in down-and-out tales with a Midwest flavor. But on his great new Always Been, he takes inspiration from Southern California, steeped in the style of old-school soft-rock troubadours like Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, and Randy Newman. Just how Seventies L.A. is this album? Finn poses for the cover photo on a bridge over the Harbor Freeway — the exact same bridge where Newman posed on the cover of his 1977 classic Little Criminals. Like Newman, Finn stands with the shrug and the shades of a born storyteller, lurking amid the classic combo of palm trees and traffic jams. More from Rolling Stone The Secret History of Coca Bruce Springsteen Announces 'Tracks II: The Lost Albums' Box Set Bruce Springsteen's High School Buddy Immortalized in 'Glory Days' Dead at 75 'I've always wanted to make an L.A. record,' Finn says, with his hearty laugh. 'That Jackson Browne album For Everyman is what I was listening to on the drive to and from the studio. At one point I was saying, 'You know how that early Seventies stuff has the suites where one song goes into another? We gotta do one of those!'' Right now he's a few thousand miles away from that bridge, sitting on a park bench in his longtime Brooklyn neighborhood, coffee in hand. Always Been is his sixth and finest solo album, his most ambitious narrative concept yet. He sings a set of interconnected songs, with characters who recur from tune to tune, giving different views of the same story. At the center is the Reverend, a disgraced pastor heading into a downward spiral of drugs and despair. We meet his sister, her ex, their daughter, a whole cast of doomed drifters. But bleak as it gets, it's about people trying to hold on to faith in the future. 'Faith is obviously part of my work overall,' Finn says. 'But to me it also means just the faith to get out of bed, the faith to move forward, the faith to fall in love. 'I Will Dare' [by the Replacements] is my favorite song. I always thought it was so romantic. 'I will dare to meet you there. I'll dare to take this leap.'' Craig Finn has always been the kind of songwriter who obsesses over the details. That's why a philosophical conversation about his new album gets derailed into a loud and pointless argument over a lyric from an old hit by The Who (one of their worst songs, 'You Better You Bet') and whether the line that rhymes with 'to the sound of old T. Rex' is 'ooooh, and Who's Next' or 'ooooh, havin' sex.' (Finn is totally right and I'm wrong — it's 'Who's Next.') But he's a fan who intuits how the most trivial sonic details connect to the big-picture emotional impact of a rock & roll song, in the lives of people who hear it. That's a crucial reason he's inspired such a hardcore following over the years, with his impact on younger songwriters from Phoebe Bridgers to MJ Lenderman. (Listen to 'Kyoto' or 'Wristwatch' for a taste of their Finn fandom.) Yet he didn't start making his own solo albums until he was already a couple of decades into a career fronting bands. His Nineties art-punk jesters Lifter Puller never made a ripple outside the Twin Cities. So he relocated to Brooklyn in 2000, got a real job, and just for kicks, started a new band with Lifter Puller's Tad Kubler. The Hold Steady made more than a ripple. They became a word-of-mouth sensation, with Finn ranting his wildly funny tales of drugs and Catholic damage and the Midwest blues, over the punk-rock bar-band blast. They weren't shy about shooting for Springsteen-level scale, with the motto, 'Tramps like us and we like tramps.' The Hold Steady might have started as a goof — 30-something indie dudes feeling all washed up, so they get together to cosplay as The Band in The Last Waltz. But they made converts all over the planet, from early classics like Almost Killed Me and Stay Positive to recent bangers like The Price of Progress. No other band has come close to writing this many great songs in the 21st century. Their 2005 masterwork Separation Sunday, the one that everyone agrees is their zenith, turns 20 in May, and they're celebrating with a sold-out Minneapolis residency. If you know a Hold Steady fan, chances are they're a bit of a lunatic about it. At first Finn's solo work was just a scheduling issue — he was ready to make an album, his bandmates weren't, so he plowed ahead. His 2012 debut Clear Eyes Full Heart was full of hard-luck tales like 'Western Pier,' forcing him to find his own voice. But since then he's built up his own major songbook, mostly famously with a pair of heartbreaking spoken-word drug elegies, 'God in Chicago' and 'Messing with the Settings.' 'I had to understand songwriting, versus playing in a band,' he says. 'Paying attention to real songwriters like Jackson Browne, that was kind of eye-opening to me. Warren Zevon can sit down at a piano, or John Prine with a guitar, and the story is always going to come through — they're going to be able to tell that very directly. And your chance of making an emotional connection is stronger, maybe. They can wreck you a little more, with the restraint and control. I mean, I love indie rock, but as you get to be an adult, John Prine or Warren Zevon might wreck you a little more than Archers of Loaf.' Always Been is definitely an album where he's setting out to wreck you. 'What I'm interested in is making that emotional connection, trying to get to the point where someone says, 'Oh, I've felt that way, too.' Noisy guitar rock can do that too, but I feel like great songwriters are more likely to make you weep.' 'Bethany' sets the scene, with the story of a pastor who tried to preach the gospel, but couldn't make himself believe in it. The Reverend falls from grace, with a broken marriage and a criminal record, until he's just another loser caddying at a golf course on the Delaware shore. As he confesses, 'I was faking all the faithfulness/Every single sermon was a fraud/Drifted through the rituals/Prideful, high, and pitiful / And pissing off a pretty vengeful God.' 'I wrote that song about a priest who didn't believe in God,' Finn says. 'The next song I wrote was about the same guy. It just opened up the whole record. It was the entrance to a different world, so I could pursue a narrative that just kept giving. I was like, okay, so he goes to crash at his sister's house in Philadelphia. Then the third song, 'Crumbs,' is gonna be about that house. I just kept putting a microscope on the story and saying, 'There's another song here.'' When times get tough, these characters mostly run away — 'pulling a geographic,' as they say in A.A. 'I always like stories where people move around a lot,' Finn says. 'But there's some isolation in there. Moving around, changing the places we live — trying to find something that isn't ever going to be there until you love yourself. It's gotten so extreme since the pandemic. You know — we're all so alone, nobody has any friends, no one's going to church. So these people move around trying to find those things. But wherever you go, there you are.' Before now, his peak solo albums were 2017's We All Want the Same Things, with its spooky late-night vibe, and 2023's A Legacy of Rentals, where he taps into the classic Sixties orchestral pop sound of 'Wichita Lineman.' Always Been seems to form a trilogy with those two, in these tales of grifters and hustlers on the fringes of capitalist society, like 'Postcards,' 'The Man I've Always Been,' the synth-pop love triangle 'Luke & Leanna,' the spoken-word skater-party reverie 'Fletcher's.' After a string of collaborations with producer Josh Kaufman, Finn had a different idea for Always Been — Adam Granduciel from the War on Drugs, longtime friends and tourmates of the Hold Steady. 'The first time I performed with the War on Drugs, we did 'Accidentally Like a Martyr' by Warren Zevon, and 'Walk On' by John Hiatt,' Finn recalls. Other War on Drugs dudes play on the album: bassist Dave Hartley, pianist Robbie Bennett, and drummer Antony LaMarca, along with guest vocals from Kathleen Edwards and Sam Fender. But the main appeal of this collaboration was Granduciel's drastically different creative process. 'I knew the way Adam works when he's making a record — he goes on a journey of sound, where the music changes, the tempos change. Then when he finally gets somewhere, he writes lyrics, but it's a journey to get there. I'm the exact opposite; I have two chords and a story. So I thought, what if we meet in the middle? That turned out to be one of my better ideas ever.' Finn expands it in the companion book Lousy with Ghosts, with eleven short stories set in the same fictional universe. 'I certainly hope before I die that I write a book,' he says. 'But I didn't want to be like, 'This is my literary debut.' I wanted it to make it more like a zine — I don't even know if the punctuation's right.' (He previously published a 2019 collection of lyrics, I Can't Keep Saying Thank You.) But he wrote these POV pieces just to know these characters better. 'That's something I've learned from novelists—sometimes stuff that doesn't end up in the book helps you understand your characters. So I kept writing and writing and writing about them — stuff you can't fit in when you have 20 lines to work with.' He's always been a fan of longform rock narratives; it's why he takes so much delight in The Who singing about Who's Next in 'You Better You Bet.' 'That's the kind of music fan I was, or I am,' he says. 'When I was a kid, I thought EVERY record was like a rock opera. I was always looking for connections because there were all these words and terms where I didn't know what they meant, especially on English records that I thought were clues. I thought The Vapors [Eighties new wave one-hit wonders who sang 'Turning Japanese'] were sending me messages. I believed it was like A Clockwork Orange—they'd made up their own language. It turns out they just used a lot of British slang that I didn't know. Their second album, Magnets, with its whole concept about the JFK assassination — that kind of world-building always excited me.' The last time Finn did that kind of world-building across a whole album, with a unified cast of characters, it was 20 years ago, on Separation Sunday. Does he see these albums as linked? 'I guess they are, in a way,' he says. 'Separation Sunday seems like a younger crowd. Maybe this is the mid-life Separation Sunday, which is a lot less sexy. When you're casting it, everyone's less hot. But that's very interesting to me, as I get older, to write songs about people of my age.' That's one of the timeliest things about Always Been — the sense of Gen X angst in these songs, especially middle-aged loneliness. 'That's something I'm seeing a lot in my 50s,' he says. 'A lot of people I knew started to split up. And when you're over 50, you just realize that maybe it's nobody's fault. We're human.' It's a long-running theme for the 53-year-old Finn. 'I think it might be the pandemic, or it might be the 50s,' he says, 'but I feel like there's people in my life that just sort of stopped. My big joke sometimes is how I can't tell if certain things are from the Nineties or the Midwest, when it comes to that slacker thing of not trying. 'Sorry, I'm not tuning my guitar' — is that Nineties or Midwest? I don't know. But I feel like right now I'm always asking, 'Is it 50s or post-pandemic?' Like when you have friends who just disappear? Or they stop going to work and you think, wait, what's the plan? I think that's a theme on the record.' Finn is on tour this spring, opening for one of his Minnesota punk idols, Bob Mould. He's also doing another season of his podcast That's How I Remember It, where he's interviewed guests including George Saunders, Bill Hader, Hanif Abdurraqib, Lucinda Williams, Fred Armisen, and Duff McKagan. Meanwhile, the Hold Steady have a typically busy year ahead. They've kept rolling through some weird twists over the years, opening for the Replacements and the Stones, playing TV shows like Billions and Game of Thrones. When they played a Bruce Springsteen charity tribute at Carnegie Hall — they did 'Atlantic City' — Springsteen unexpectedly showed up and casually asked, 'Who knows the words to 'Rosalita'?' Finn did, which is how he ended up singing with Bruce that night. The Lord had mercy, indeed. But over the past decade, they've almost accidentally invented a whole new model for how to keep a sustainable career going as a veteran band, rethinking old ways of releasing music and performing live. Instead of touring, they now play multi-night residencies in destination cities: 'Massive Nights' in Brooklyn, 'The Weekender' in London, 'Constructive Summer' in Philadelphia, and their four-night Separation Sunday 20th anniversary blowout in Minneapolis. 'I don't understand why more bands don't do it,' Finn says. 'I feel like there's this thing where a lot of bands think if you don't get out there and just suffer through Omaha on Monday night, you're not a real band. So much in the industry has changed — not to make adjustments feels suicidal in some way.' The group's longevity is surprising even to him. 'When I think about the Hold Steady being around for 21, 22 years, we're the least likely band to do that, because we started in our 30s and we drank like crazy. It doesn't seem sustainable. It's not like we started when were 18 — the fact that we're in our 50s and still going seems insane. But I think it's because we made that adjustment, and the community around it makes it possible and fun.' But of course, the only way you can get away with not touring is if you have the kind of rabid audience that's eager to travel for these curated events. And somehow, the Hold Steady has no shortage of those fans. 'It's always such a beautiful thing to see how all these people show up from around the world, and have all these friendships,' Finn says. 'I guess the final level is when we don't have to play anymore and everyone can just get together. It'd be a lot cheaper if we don't have to bring the gear.' In the band's best-known hit, 'Stuck Between Stations,' he opened with a quote from Jack Kerouac: 'Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.' But Always Been is full of older men and women, having even sadder times all alone. It's a tribute to his touch that he makes it feel uplifting by the end, rather than depressing. 'I'm an optimist,' he admits. 'A lot of my songs are bleak, but I always feel like they're human. The fact that these people can get up and move forward and forgive themselves — that's a hopeful thing. Forgiveness is the most beautiful thing we have. I mean, it's love, grief, and forgiveness, right? Of all the things we have, it seems like those are the three big ones.' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
