The Hold Steady Songs - On With The Business Lyrics

The Hold Steady - On With The Business

The Hold Steady - On With The Business Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Teeth Dreams
Released: 2014

On With The Business Lyrics

On With The Business

This blast of electric guitar and vocal delay finds Craig Finn evaluating people that are big on "beautiful kitchens" and "plastic and magic." He told The Sun newspaper that this song defined the direction of Teeth Dreams. "It took me a long time to get the words to 'On With the Business,' but once I got them. I thought we might have a thesis statement for the record," he said.

"It's a song about the evil that people do to reach other in order to acquire more consumer goods," Finn continued. "There's one line. I got from an interview with the writer David Foster Wallace. He speaks of 'that American sadness,' which is the realization that no amount of stuff from the outside – alcohol, consumer stuff – can fill the void we all feel on the inside."

A key influence on Teeth Dreams was David Foster Wallace's dystopian American satire Infinite Jest. Finn read the novel twice during the recording of the album. "It's a brilliant book, and a very anxious one, but you read it and believe that Wallace had it all figured out," he told The Independent. "But then he went and killed himself, and I find that very hard to reconcile."