The Hold Steady gained a lot of mileage with songs about characters who spent their youths living for the good times without worrying about the consequences. On “One for the Cutters,” a stunning track from their 2008 classic album Stay Positive, those consequences came calling in a major way.
Accompanied by a thunderous musical assault, Craig Finn’s story about a college girl’s ill-advised decision-making pulls no punches and makes no judgments. He and the band just lay it all out for their audience like hard-rocking true-crime novelists and let them make larger sense of it all.
Positive Thinking
The Hold Steady might have formed in Brooklyn, New York, but the exploits about which they sing owe a great to debt to lead singer and songwriter Craig Finn’s youth in Minnesota. Throughout their various albums, certain characters recur in Finn’s songs, allowing listeners to follow them through all their wild times.
On Stay Positive, the band’s fourth album, Finn began to show these characters at a time when they could no longer party their way out of their doldrums. Songs depicted people who had come to a time in their life when the promise of their glorious youths hadn’t been fulfilled, leaving them wondering what they could possibly do next. “One for the Cutters” goes a different route in that it focuses on younger folks. But it fits because we know this event will haunt the participants for years until they do get to that middle-aged malaise portion of their lives.
Even though their perspectives might have changed, these characters still had their lives dissected by Finn in telling detail. Stay Positive found the band at a peak, as they played with fury and passion, while still allowing the stories enough room to breathe and sink in for listeners.
“One for the Cutters” features pummeling electric guitars that sound borrowed from late ’70s arena rock. The surprising musical touch on the song is the frenzied harpsichord part delivered by Franz Nicolay. It’s just the right musical setting for a tale of two different classes of people coming together in joy, but then going their separate ways in crisis.
What is the Meaning of “One for the Cutters”?
The protagonist is a college student at an unnamed Midwestern university who tries to keep up appearances for those back at home. It’s a cute little town, boutiques and cafes / Her friends all seemed nice, she was getting good grades. But her thrill-seeking tendencies push her to look elsewhere for kicks.
The song’s opening lines explain her MO: When there weren’t any parties, she’d park by the quarry / Walk into the woods until she came to a clearing / Where townies would gather and drink until blackout. These “townies” represent another side of life to her: It was always arousing when they’d rev up their engines / It’s hard to describe, so she kept it secret /T he girls that she lived with, they knew nothing about it.
The fun ends when the townie boy with whom she gets involved stabs another kid in a fight at one of these get-togethers. She goes from girlfriend to accomplice when she helps him hide away, and then lies for him on the stand: The girl takes the stand and she swears she was with him / Her father’s lawyers do most of the talking.
Finn’s lines paint a vivid picture: One drop of blood on immaculate Keds / Mom, do you know where your girl is? He suggests the girl will come out of this unscathed, at least from legal repercussions: When one townie falls in the forest, can anyone hear it? But the scars inside her will linger: But when she came home for Christmas / She just seemed distant and different.
The degree of difficulty Finn handles on “One for the Cutters” is staggering. He manages to make a definitive statement on class warfare in a university town, all while giving us a thorough play-by-play of a crime and its aftermath. This is amazing stuff, even by the standards of The Hold Steady, a band that’s given us pretty much nonstop greatness right from their get-go.
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