Featured Essay: Boys and Girls in America at 20

by Mike Held

Why are we all so obsessed with our 20s? 

Movies, TV and music are always going on about how your 20s are all that matters. How I Met Your Mother, Ke$ha, and seemingly every romance movie all have us clamoring to be young again, and for a long time, I felt the same way: craving a youth that didn’t happen, or, at least, a youth that happened way less than it felt like it should have. 

With an assist from Last FM, I can tell you the exact date I discovered my favorite band. It was September 24, 2018, noon-ish when Spotify feeds me The Hold Steady’s “Sequestered In Memphis” while I was walking for a slice of pizza. By 4 o’clock that same day, I was headphones deep in the Craig Finn fronted group’s seminal 2006 album, Boys And Girls In America, which turns 20 this month. 

The album opens with a Franz Nicolay piano riff, and leads into Finn preaching the album’s thesis. “There were those nights when I thought Sal Paradise was right/Boys and Girls In America have such a bad time together”. The entire premise of the album. Being young isn’t what everyone makes it out to be. 

Boys And Girls In America is a different type of nostalgia. A reminder of what things were not the rose colored glasses that we like to put on after the fact. A real look back on your 20s, the shady people you meet, the sketchy situations you find yourself in, and those nights where things seem so desperate, without ignoring the fun and the understanding that comes with the same memories. 

Boys and Girls found me at a weird point in my life. I was 9 months clear of a gnarly set of breakups and one night stands, working my way out of the major depressive funk that I was in for a few years, and a period of aggressive drinking that had friends and family concerned. I had started seeing my now wife 6 months before (and told her about this “weird new band I had found” that same day). There was a deeply entrenched part of me that was certain I could never change, that I would always be the same piece of shit I had been - something I’ve dealt with my entire life. 

This album was a big part of realizing that the past few years were actually pretty shitty and that things, can, in fact, get better. 

There’s Chips Ahoy!, a gambling anthem with a side of sex and drugs. There’s the drugs, and the lies of Hot Soft Light. First Light has the depression and crashouts and seeing the people you used to love change. The dirty dive bars and blackouts from Party Pit (special shoutout to 

my party pit, George O’Deas in Syracuse. RIP King). The desperate crushes and lost love, and the people who try to save you from yourself in You Can Make Him Like You. Isn’t this your 20’s in a nutshell? Things that feel like the biggest problem in the world, things that ARE the biggest 

problem in the world, problems you caused, and the results of trying to avoid those problems. This is what Finn and Co. have managed to do so well here, describing the desperation, the tragedy and the inherent sadness and loneliness of your early 20s.

This was music I could relate to, in a way that I had never found a way to relate to nearly anything else before. Maybe you were like me: constantly chasing that next hit of dopamine, however you could find it. Betting on high school basketball, trying to sleep with anything that moved, and falling down into a canyon of lies that you couldn’t find your way out of. I pushed friends away, and the ones I kept around weren’t the ones worth keeping. Throwing parties that ended in some sort of drama, fight, cops showing or some combination of the three. Finding love, and immediately losing it. 

But to quote Craig Finn in every single live show, there is also so much joy in this record. There’s songs dedicated to those crazy characters you meet in your 20s (Same Kooks) who you run into non-stop. There’s Massive Nights, a party anthem that NEARLY makes it an entire song without a complete bummer reminder of reality. 

The happy times were all I ever wanted to relive for a long time. The things we all want to remember. The nights drinking 15 beers at minor league baseball games, or staying out til 3am just to go to work 5 hours later. The concerts, the nights playing Jenga at bars after last call, and the quiet nights by the fire. They exist! And are worth remembering! But it’s the context of them that matters. Those 15 beers almost got you into a fight. You dozed off during an audit planning meeting at 8am. You flirted with someone you shouldn’t have. The nights you want to remember always have the parts you actively choose not to. 

And finally, there’s the recovery. The waking up and moving on. Citrus, the album’s most subdued track. The realization that it may be time to grow up and move on, and realizing that you, yourself, had been lost in the love and the fog and the faithless fear. In Chill Out Tent,we’ve got a pit stop through a music festival in Western Mass that shows that maybe better things can happen, not in spite of the shit we’ve been through, but because of the shit we went through. And finally, Southtown Girls. The people who stuck with you, through the good and the bad. Maybe they weren’t the people you thought would have your back. Even in the kind-of-but-not-really bonus track, Girls Like Status, Finn preaches the joys and power of music in your 20s, invoking Mountain Goats and Dillinger 4 when talking about using the bad times to help get better. 

I’m gonna tell this next part like a comeback story. 

I bottomed out - at the same bars I was once having the Massive Nights at, I was now having the Depression Monday Afternoons, liberally mixing citrus with liquor. But I wasn’t finding hope in the other barflies. I was finding hope outside the bar. This cool girl I met online wasn’t turned off by me texting her the corniest Beatles lyrics at 2am. And I knew that she would stay. We never had our Chill-Out Tent moment - we’ve certainly had our fair share of Karaoke Duets - but I’ve seen firsthand that sometimes, things have to go terribly wrong, like taking way too many mushrooms, for something to go right.

Sometimes, you find something at the right time. Finding this album at 13 would have made me take one look and never come back. I wasn’t ready for this when I was 13. But I needed it at 26, and finally understood it at 31, seeing the group live for the first time at the 9:30 Club in Washington DC. 

A 2020 survey found that most people discover their favorite band right in the middle of their youth - around age 13. For me, age 13 was Franz Ferdinand, Bowling For Soup, Jimmy Eat World and Something Corporate, all still bands I listen to. But these wouldn’t end up as my favorite band. That’s a spot reserved for this weird fivesome from Brooklyn, by way of Minneapolis, and their deep understanding of the nostalgia that we need.

Mike is a part time trivia host and full time dad from Syracuse, New York. He’s spent the last two years making sure his daughters understand the appeal of Bruce Springsteen. When not doing dad stuff, he can be found collecting fitted hats and crewneck sweatshirts. He can be found on Bluesky @themikeheld.bsky.social.