Let’s Overanalyze: ‘Cattle and the Creeping Things’ By The Hold Steady

Let’s Overanalyze is a potentially recurring series in which I overanalyze things. I last overanalyzed “Mission Viejo” by Lifter Puller, a band which included two of The Hold Steady’s founding members, back in the fall of 2023.

The Hold Steady doesn’t waste any time getting into “Cattle and the Creeping Things,” the second track on their 2005 album Separation Sunday. It takes just three seconds for frontman Craig Finn’s voice to come in:

They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things
Said “I’m pretty sure we heard this one before
And don’t it all end up in some revelation
With four guys on horses and violent red visions?
Famine and death and pestilence and war?
Pretty sure I heard this one before

Think about how much has been established in just 26 seconds. The song’s narrator is being preached to, but he is unimpressed. Unimpressed by what? Well, creation, for one thing — “cattle and the creeping things” is from Genesis, from God laying out his whole groovy plan: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

We, the listeners, get a strong feel for this narrator solely through a half-dozen lines of lyrics, helped along by an anxious dun dun dun guitar and piano line. He’s a jittery guy. He can barely get through the opening scenes of the Bible before saying, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before — sounds good, but doesn’t it all end rather poorly?” He’s more bored and jaded than inspired, let alone enraptured.

“Cattle and the Creeping Things” was written by Finn and Tad Kubler, his longtime bandmate in both The Hold Steady and Lifter Puller. The Hold Steady’s songs are almost all about some combination of parties, partiers, addicts, religion, drugs, and music itself. Lyrically, these themes get smashed together in strikingly original and memorable ways, usually over unselfconsciously straightforward rock music.

In The Gospel of The Hold Steady: How a Resurrection Really Feels, an oral history of THS, Finn and his bandmates talk a lot about how, when they started the band, they wanted to differentiate themselves from