Craig Finn and Patterson Hood have been writing the storied \u201cGreat American Novel\u201d for decades. Finn, with The Hold Steady and on his own, has been building a world of Midwestern scenesters and drug-taking partiers, lost lovers and conflicted Catholics, while Hood, with Drive-by Truckers and in his solo material, has spun a narrative that wrangles racism, poverty and alcoholism into a specifically Southern eccentricity inspired by William Faulkner and Wright Thompson.<\/p>\n
That the material is broken into songs or short stories rather than compiled into one printed volume is of no import: Finn and Hood are writing the story of America in real time. On Sunday night, when they put on their \u201cDevil in the Details\u201d show at Music Hall of Williamsburg, the scenes in the songs were illuminated by cinematic accompaniment by multi-instrumentalist Ben Hackett and their between-song stories of their mutual admiration and their very different but complementary experiences as humans living in this country.<\/p>\n
Finn talked about moving to Brooklyn and wanting to no longer be in a band. This changed after he saw a Drive-by Truckers show: \u201cThat show changed by fuckkng life. And I walked out and said I have to start a band.\u201d He would form The Hold Steady, who played their first show at Northsix, which is now Music Hall of Williamsburg (which, sadly, will close at the end of the year). <\/p>\n
Finn told the story of his courting of the DBTs, with an early funny misstep at 30 Rock, after he and Hood sang the DBTs song \u201cThe Righteous Path.\u201d It includes the line \u201cJust trying to hold steady on the righteous path.\u201d Finn said that when he first heard the song, he felt the band he loved was sending a message to his band; Hood confirmed this was indeed the DBTs\u2019 intent.<\/p>\n
Finn played several tracks from his 2025 album \u201cAlways Been,\u201d and Hood emphasized material from \u201cExploding Trees & Airplane Screams.\u201d Hood prefaced \u201cMiss Coldiron\u2019s Oldsmobile\u201d with the heartbreaking Southern Gothic tale of the title character, his godmother. <\/p>\n
Finn said he\u2019s working on a new album and played a song from it called \u201cPalominos\u201d about a townie who has flings with visiting carnies. Before singing \u201cThe Living Bubba,\u201d the Drive-by Truckers\u2019 tribute to Gregory Dean Smalley, the Atlanta musician who died of AIDS in 1995, Hood spoke about becoming tight with Smalley when he did sound for some of his shows at The High Hat in Athens, where he\u2019d look out for the sick man. A gut-punch of a line in the song: \u201cI can\u2019t die now \u2019cause I got another show to do.\u201d <\/p>\n
Other highlights of the combined set included Finn\u2019s \u201cPeople of Substance\u201d and \u201cShamrock,\u201d and Hood\u2019s \u201cThe Van Pelt Parties\u201d and \u201c(I Never Heard of) Emmett Till.\u201d Finn only played one Hold Steady song, \u201cCertain Songs,\u201d which ended the encore, while Hood played a handful of DBTs songs along with his solo material.<\/p>\n
Hood said the DBTs are about to go into the studio to make their first album since 2022.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Craig Finn and Patterson Hood have been writing the storied \u201cGreat American Novel\u201d for decades. Finn, with The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-294930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}