The Hold Steady, grown up

Craig Finn remembers the day, maybe four years ago, when The Hold Steady came of age.

“When we got everyone in the band life insurance,” he says. Long pause ... “That doesn’t sound very rock and roll ...”

Nor does paying taxes. But touring rock bands are businesses. And then comes a knock at the door of Finn’s Brooklyn apartment, while he’s conducting this phone interview. “Excuse me a minute,” Finn says. Distant murmured conversation. Money, some kind of transaction. Drugs?

“The landlord,” Finn explains when he picks up the phone again. The rent was due.

Again, not very rock and roll. Shouldn’t Finn be sleeping on someone’s couch? But on balance, there is something very good about a rock band that ages well. And The Hold Steady, joined by the excellent Deer Tick on Monday at Water Street Music Hall, seems to be one of them.

The evidence is heard in Teeth Dreams, the band’s sixth album in 10 years. The Hold Steady’s Midwestern, blue-collar, hard-drinking, classic-rock roots are still showing. Finn and guitarist Tad Kubler, both from Minnesota, are the core of the band. But there have been changes. A process more optimistically called growth.

The Hold Steady lost a significant personality in its keyboardist, Franz Nicolay. It replaced him with a second guitarist, Steve Selvidge. It’s growth, Finn says. “I think that ended up defining the record. That back-and-forth between two lead guitar players. We were very insistent that they played in the same room, actually standing together while they played the parts. So you get the stereo thing. One guy covering the low part, the other guy covering the high part.”

Kubler, there’s another change. Or growth, whatever you want to call it. “It you want to talk about the biggest drinker in the band, it was easily him,” Finn says. “He was the lead-guitar playing wild man.” Then the rent came due — pancreatitis — and Kubler’s lead-guitar playing wild man days were over. “We dialed back, reinvented how we thought about the shows,” Finn says. “We always had a lot of beer thrown around, and that still happens in the audience. But not as much onstage anymore.”

Finn writes what he sees. One of the songs on the new album, “On With the Business,” addresses consumerism, “how people think you get ahead by accumulating more and more stuff,” he says. Although this is not from any direct observation of his own behavior. “No, I have barely anything,” he says. “My apartment got broken into. They got nothing, because there was nothing here.”

He sees “all that broken-stuff part of living.” Broken stuff fuels Finn’s songwriting, which he thinks of as “cinematic in scope, which doesn’t always resemble my own life. ‘This morning I went to the grocery and the post office ...’ That wouldn’t be much of a song.”

In the opening moments of Teeth Dreams, Finn sings, “I heard the Cityscape Skins are kinda kicking it again.” The Cityscape Skins first appeared in The Hold Steady’s debut album. In Finn’s creative eye, they are “desperate characters. People on the fringes. People who needed to make moves quickly in order to get ahead or find of sense of belonging.

“Five albums later, I’m referencing back to that,” Finn says. “People new to the band, I don’t expect them to notice that. I wanted to create a world that the listeners go into. That is how I listened to music as a kid. I was a careful listener, a close listener.”

Who was building songs around recurring characters when Finn was listening carefully? “No one,” he says. “And I wanted more.” He mentions Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 Born to Run album, filled with desperadoes like the title track’s Wendy — “Wendy, let me in, I wanna be your friend,” Finn says, reciting the line. “Magic Rat in ‘Jungleland.’ Eddie in ‘Meeting Across the River.’ They never came back. I was always hoping for some character development.”

They all could be Cityscape Skins.

There’s not a lot of time to build a character study into a three-minute rock song. But with recurring characters, perhaps you have a shot at it.

Yet even fictional people can’t stand still for long. Finn points out that he was 32 when The Hold Steady’s first album was released. Now he’s 42. “I thought it would be a real challenge, and more interesting, for me to write adult characters,” he says. “Some of the great artists, like Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, have successfully done it.”

As those artists have grown older, the characters they’ve written about have grown more mature. With more-mature concerns.

“Not just the highs,” Finn says, “but the hangovers.”

If you go

What: The Hold Steady and Deer Tick.

When: 8 p.m. Monday.

Where: Water Street Music Hall, 204 N. Water St.

Tickets: $20 advance ($23 the day of show) at waterstreetmusic.com and (888) 512-7469.