To celebrate the kickoff of their tour together the Hold Steady and Deer Tick have covered each other’s music. The Hold Steady took on “Easy” the lead song off their tour-mates’ album Born On Flag Day while Deer Tick covered “Constructive Summer,” the first song on Stay Positive. Listen...

On the afternoon of the last day of SXSW, I saw the Hold Steady on the patio of Red 7, at the Brooklyn Vegan showcase, and it was pretty close to the ideal setting for a Hold Steady show: outdoors on a sunny, summery day, with a crowd small and loose enough that one could [...]

Today, the Hold Steady release Teeth Dreams, the album on which they once again affirm their status as one of our greatest working rock bands. And last night, they were on the Late Show With David Letterman, knocking out “Spinners,” one of that album’s early singles. It’s still a bit disorienting to see Cr...

Earlier this week, I posted a Premature Evaluation of the Hold Steady’s excellent new album Teeth Dreams, but there was one slight problem with it: None of you motherfuckers could hear the album yet. It hadn’t leaked, and it wasn’t streaming online; the only songs you could hear, in their studio forms, were &#82...

There are two different ways to experience a Hold Steady album for the first time. There is, of course, the first time you throw the album on, the first time you let the riffs reverberate around in your ribcage for a couple of minutes and then blur into the background while you’re driving or doing [...]