I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing something more substantial than just Twitter threads in my morning at Starbucks, so let’s talk about my weekend. On Friday, I got in the car a bit before 9am and headed south, to Brooklyn to see the Hold Steady do a show at the Brooklyn Bowl. This is part of a four-night stand there, something they’ve done three years running now; this is their new model, which they seem pretty happy about. Kate got me the ticket as an early Christmas present, and it included a walking tour of Brooklyn music spots with noted music critic Rob Sheffield and a sound check event with the band, thus the early departure.

I did this same sort of thing a couple of years ago, and at that time they were still working out how to do these. The sound check then was a real rehearsal– they went through one song several times, with some false starts– and the happy hour afterwards was just the band mingling with fans. This time out, it was a little more structured– when we got to the venue, we could hear them rehearsing inside (they were playing “Ballad of the Midnight Hauler” for reasons that will become apparent later). After a bit, they let the fans in, and when the band came out they did some Q&A moderated by Rob Sheffield, mixed with a handful of songs.

The Q&A was pretty entertaining– mostly funny stories about past shows and songs and the movie The Last Waltz. Craig Finn does most of the talking, as you would expect, but Tad Kubler is sneakily hilarious, and they got good bits from Steve Selvidge and Galen Polivka as well. There was an extended bit attempting to make an analogy between the current lineup and the full Wu-Tang Clan, hampered a bit by the fact that Sheffield was probably the only one on stage with a chance of naming all the members of Wu-Tang Clan. (There was some agreement that Bobby Drake is ODB, and Tad Kubler the RZA, then they sort of fell apart…)

They played a nice mix of songs: two of the new tracks they’ve released over the last year or so (“Confusion in the Marketplace” and “Esther,” both of which made the set list that night), a couple old songs (“One for the Cutters” and “212 Margarita,” which Sheffield specifically requested), and one unreleased track that had debuted the night before (“The Last Time She Talked to Me,” which they payed in part because includes a reference). Finn said during the Q&A that he had gone through the list of 60-ish songs they’re comfortable playing live and rated them on an A-B-C scale as to how frequently they should show up in set lists, “C” songs being ones that would only appear in one show of the residency. A couple of the sound-check songs were “C” tunes not on the schedule for later that night, so that was a nice bonus.

There was also a photo op portion of the happy hour, so I can add this to my collection:

(Craig Finn saw my Mountain Goats shirt and said “Hey, that’s a cool shirt, I hadn’t seen that one before…” thus totally validating my child-of-the-80s committment to not wearing a T-shirt of the band I’m going to see. A few other people commented on it as well, so that was fun…)

As had happened a couple of years ago, I was struck by how much more low-key they were at the sound check than in the actual shows I’ve seen. Finn sounded a little hoarse (not the least surprising), and they were all bundled up in warm clothes, so I was a tiny bit worried that they’d be off their game. I shouldn’t’ve been.

They came out to the Boz Scaggs song “Lido Shuffle,” which was an outstanding choice because that got the whole crowd doing “Whoa oh oh oh” sing-along even before they set foot on the stage, and hit the ground running. “Banging Camp” into “Magazines” into “Ask Her For Adderall” is a real strong opening, and the whole set list was awesome high-energy stuff. They’re definitely picking songs to maximize their current lineup– “Charlemagne in Sweatpants” and “Most People Are DJs” give room for multiple guitar solos, and “Esther” and “Don’t Let Me Explode” have some great keyboard stuff.

There were also some “white whale” tunes in there– I had never heard “Ascension Blues” before (it was a bonus track on a different version of Stay Positive than the one I bought), and of course the encore featured the aforementioned “Ballad of the Midnight Hauler,” which is an awesome song that I don’t think has been released before. That was part of the encore, for which they brought out Doug Gillard of Guided By Voices for the rarely seen four-guitar attack.

This is the fourth time I’ve seen them live, and all the shows have been excellent. There’s a small part of me that thinks it’s maybe a little silly for a 47-year-old to drive six hours round trip for a rock show, but on the other hand, there’s no better band for it. On the walking tour, Sheffield told a story about seeing the Hold Steady for the first time by accident– they were opening for another band, and he’d shown up late hoping to miss the opening act. He said he was about 38 at that time, and a few songs in he was caught up in the complicated songs and dense references and realized that “This is a band engineered for 38-year-old music nerds…”

As projected in their lyrics, a lot of the fans at the shows have kids of their own– unlike the guys I had dinner with between the sound check and the show, I had to leave early Saturday morning to drive home and take SteelyKid and The Pip cross-country skiing. As exhausting as the weekend was, though, there’s still something very liberating about spending a few hours with several hundred other people singing along to rousing songs about parties and drugs and crime and Catholicism. I didn’t get that much sleep, but still feel pretty sweet as we head into December and everything that brings.