Heaven Is Whenever
| Heaven is Whenever | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by The Hold Steady | ||||
| Released | 4 May 2010 | |||
| Genre | Indie rock, Heartland rock | |||
| Length | 41:21 | |||
| Label | Vagrant, Rough Trade | |||
| Producer | Dean Baltulonis, Tad Kubler | |||
| The Hold Steady chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| allmusic |   |
| AbsolutePunk | (91%) |
| BBC | (positive) |
| Drowned in Sound |   |
| NME | |
| Pitchfork Media | (6.2/10) |
| Q | |
| Rolling Stone | |
| The Skinny | |
| Slant Magazine |  |
| Spin | |
| Sputnikmusic | |
Heaven is Whenever is the fifth studio album by The Hold Steady. It was released May 4, 2010, on Vagrant Records in the U.S. and May 3, 2010, on Rough Trade in Europe. The album's first single, "Hurricane J", premiered on Pitchfork Media on March 22, 2010. Regarding the album's lyrical content, vocalist and guitarist Craig Finn states that: "I kept saying Stay Positive was a record about trying to age gracefully. This record, I think actually was us aging gracefully. Some of the lyrics come from a place of a little more wisdom, being 38 and at this point having a lifetime in rock'n'roll."
Heaven is Whenever debuted at #26 on The Billboard 200 with 23,000 albums sold in its opening week thus becoming the highest charting album by The Hold Steady.
In 2009, The Hold Steady began writing Heaven Is Whenever while touring in support of their previous album, Stay Positive. According to guitarist Tad Kubler, the band "turned the back lounge of the [tour] bus into a makeshift vocal booth where we could also overdub guitars. These songs gradually became the demos for the new record, and we continued writing. It allowed us to work at a pace that was dictated almost solely by our creative output. We just hit record whenever we thought we had something worth putting down."
The band subsequently entered the studio with Dean Baltulonis, producer of the band's debut album, Almost Killed Me, and its follow-up Separation Sunday. Vocalist and guitarist Craig Finn states that Baltulonis is "a real close friend, so it was kind of a more relaxed, less formal way of making a record. We kind of went in for shorter sessions over a longer period of time, and we recorded a lot. There’s a fair amount of songs that didn’t make the record, and that’s always a heartbreaking thing, choosing between your favorite children."
The album does not feature former keyboard player and multi-instrumentalist Franz Nicolay, who left the band in January 2010. Guitarist Tad Kubler and additional musician Dan Neustadt, however, both perform piano and keyboards on the album in a diminished role in comparison to the band's previous two releases. Craig Finn states that: "I think the biggest difference is that a lot of the songs were written with no piano or keys. So there’s a sense of space in it that I don’t think we’ve had since Separation Sunday."
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