Elected

Tom Perrotta spent some time with the Hold Steady and lived to tell about it:

Finn's lurid, novelistic songs about midwestern lowlife characters stuck somewhere between oblivion and redemption have earned him frequent comparisons to Bruce Springsteen - not the pumped-up Boss of Born in the USA, but the young greaser Bruce of Greetings from Asbury Park, only with a harder, less romantic edge. On the strength of four remarkable and increasingly sophisticated albums, Finn has established himself as America's reigning poet of drug-addled losers, the unflinching chronicler of their hard-luck adventures, nightmare visions, and occasional moments of grace. He's a sort of rock'n'roll Bukowski with a little Dylan thrown in for good measure, the kind of lyricist who can pull off an ambitious three-narrator song like Chillout Tent (from the Hold Steady's breakout 2006 record, Boys and Girls in America), in which two strangers who've overdosed at a rock festival end up getting it on in the medical tent: "They started kissing when the nurses took off their IVs/... they had the privacy of bedsheets/ The other kids were mostly in comas."

Once I get over my initial scepticism, though, I begin to see where Finn is coming from with this talk of aging gracefully. Despite the fact that the Hold Steady are a relatively new band - they released their first record, Almost Killed Me, in 2003 - they are not a young or glamorous one. Finn himself is 36, a short, bespectacled guy more likely to be mistaken for an associate professor of philosophy than a luminary at Lollapalooza. He comes across as a nice, unusually smart midwestern guy who's close to his parents and eager for a family of his own, the kind of decent, well-adjusted individual you'd be hard-pressed to find in one of his songs.