The Hold Steady are just one of those bands — it takes all my will-power not spend the entire interview drilling down on the specifics of all of those story songs that populate the group’s backcatalog. After a decade of listening to everything they’ve ever got out, I’ve got my share of questions about Charlemagne and Gideon and the Cityscape Skins. In a funny way, sitting down with Craig Finn and Tad Kubler is like interviewing the creators of your favorite soap opera — albeit one that has unfolded obscurely, one album at a time over the course of ten years. It’s a soap opera no doubt inexorably tied to the lives of the musicians who create it, mirroring semi-misspent youths growing up in and around the upper midwest. I do have get a little nerd time in, after the recording, asking about the Party Pit, the one location none of the locals seemed to have heard of on my last trip to Minneapolis. A clearing in a suburban forresty area, according to Finn — developments that had never been fully developed, where the local kids went to drink just out of sight from their parents’ prying eyes.  It’s hard to imagine another band getting so much creative mileage from a glorified hole in the ground that had likely been paved over decades before in the name of commercial developments. But, then, that’s precisely why there’s never been another band quite like the Hold Steady.

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