Maybe he'll switch to a Nets jersey next year. (Sportress of Blogitude)

Ring, ring, ring goes the telephone/Tell my little lambs that I'm on my way home/Stop by the shop and get a bottle to go/Maybe something stronger if the right guy's on the corner.

So sings Craig Finn on "Our Whole Lives" from two years ago. Perhaps the Hold Steady frontman was thinking of the liquor store at the corner of Manhattan and Nassau avenues in Greenpoint. (You know the one, where the local Polish Greenpointers go to cash their paychecks.)

Turns out that the bespectacled bandleader has settled in the neighborhood after a decade in Brooklyn, and in today's Post, Craig Finn gives a tour of his one-bedroom apartment there at the same time his "quieter" solo album is out.

We learn that among Mr. Finn's prized possessions is his acoustic guitar and a massive console record player a friend got him for his 40th birthday. He also does much of his Dylanesque (Thomas, not Bob) lyrics writing at a bedroom desk.

If there is any question that the notoriously hard-partying indie rocker has mellowed with age, consider where he has decided to live.

The cozy, second-floor walkup sits on what Finn calls “the adult side” of McGuinness Boulevard.

“On this side, it’s certainly quieter, and there are less bars and less Sunday morning vomit on the street,” he says. “Angie used to live on Franklin and Greenpoint, and it gets pretty wild over there.”

The adult side of Greenpoint? And here we thought they were calling this micronabe Superfund North.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

That was last year, though. On their recently issued third album, Boys and Girls in America (Vagrant Records), Brooklyn’s most literary bar band sound a lot sunnier than they used to, as if the breakthrough success they enjoyed on their last outing left them somehow enlightened and refocused. Their winter weariness has given way to warm vibes and summer love. Once their message to the kids was: Be careful! Now it’s more like: Kiss everyone you know!

The uniquely anachronistic sound they perfected on Separation Sunday, a hybrid of avant-garde hard-core and 1970’s classic rock, is still endlessly evocative, bringing to mind Cheap Trick’s barroom riffage, Bruce Springsteen’s heartland swagger and the weepy solitude of the Piano Man. But most of the music on the new album is dizzyingly upbeat: The chords thunder like never before, and the solos ring with unprecedented exuberance.

There are other changes. They’ve abandoned the conceptual narrative that stretched across their first two albums, ditching the vivid characters and intricate plotlines that landed them in The New Yorker last spring alongside storytelling songwriter John Darnielle. And instead of snarling his lyrics like a hoarse and surly bard, as he’s done in the past, Mr. Finn now sings his melodies with the voice of a true pop star. The people he sings about, in turn, seem less consumed by self-destruction. Danger is less of a presence in their lives than it was on the Hold Steady’s previous work, and their troubles, accordingly, come across as less debilitating. Where did all the anguish go?

BOYS AND GIRLS IN AMERICA IS named after a line from On the Road. Mr. Finn mentions this in interviews with baffling nonchalance, as if Jack Kerouac were a perfectly natural, altogether appropriate source of inspiration for a group of five seasoned (if not oldish) men. It’s the first time Mr. Finn has come across as naïve—indeed, part of the reason the last two albums worked so well was that every word he sang seemed to limp from bruises accumulated over the course of a lifetime.

Apparently, the bruises have healed: Mr. Finn now plays cheerleader to America’s “young and awkward lovers.” On the album’s most revved-up number, “Massive Night,” he tells the story of a couple going to their senior prom: “We all kinda fumbled through the Jitterbug / We were all powered up on some new upper drug / And everyone was funny, and everyone was pretty /And everyone was coming towards the center of the city.” As on the rest of the album, Mr. Finn slips the drugs in but makes no big fuss about them. The chorus still roars, the night still ends well and no one gets hurt, even if the chaperone does kick the narrator out for dancing too close to his girlfriend. There’s less to fear and much to celebrate on Boys and Girls—and there’s not much at stake.

As a result, the album feels somewhat slight, and the starry-eyed nostalgia with which Mr. Finn tackles his subjects never quite reaches the state of Dionysian intoxication he’s going for.

Where they once hungered for salvation, the Hold Steady now ache for hugs. Where Mr. Finn was once poignant, he’s now merely quaint. For a band that has proved itself capable of harnessing both nostalgia and teen angst with unmatched class, that’s not enough.

That was last year, though. On their recently issued third album, Boys and Girls in America (Vagrant Records), Brooklyn’s most literary bar band sound a lot sunnier than they used to, as if the breakthrough success they enjoyed on their last outing left them somehow enlightened and refocused. Their winter weariness has given way to warm vibes and summer love. Once their message to the kids was: Be careful! Now it’s more like: Kiss everyone you know!

The uniquely anachronistic sound they perfected on Separation Sunday, a hybrid of avant-garde hard-core and 1970’s classic rock, is still endlessly evocative, bringing to mind Cheap Trick’s barroom riffage, Bruce Springsteen’s heartland swagger and the weepy solitude of the Piano Man. But most of the music on the new album is dizzyingly upbeat: The chords thunder like never before, and the solos ring with unprecedented exuberance.

There are other changes. They’ve abandoned the conceptual narrative that stretched across their first two albums, ditching the vivid characters and intricate plotlines that landed them in The New Yorker last spring alongside storytelling songwriter John Darnielle. And instead of snarling his lyrics like a hoarse and surly bard, as he’s done in the past, Mr. Finn now sings his melodies with the voice of a true pop star. The people he sings about, in turn, seem less consumed by self-destruction. Danger is less of a presence in their lives than it was on the Hold Steady’s previous work, and their troubles, accordingly, come across as less debilitating. Where did all the anguish go?

BOYS AND GIRLS IN AMERICA IS named after a line from On the Road. Mr. Finn mentions this in interviews with baffling nonchalance, as if Jack Kerouac were a perfectly natural, altogether appropriate source of inspiration for a group of five seasoned (if not oldish) men. It’s the first time Mr. Finn has come across as naïve—indeed, part of the reason the last two albums worked so well was that every word he sang seemed to limp from bruises accumulated over the course of a lifetime.

Apparently, the bruises have healed: Mr. Finn now plays cheerleader to America’s “young and awkward lovers.” On the album’s most revved-up number, “Massive Night,” he tells the story of a couple going to their senior prom: “We all kinda fumbled through the Jitterbug / We were all powered up on some new upper drug / And everyone was funny, and everyone was pretty /And everyone was coming towards the center of the city.” As on the rest of the album, Mr. Finn slips the drugs in but makes no big fuss about them. The chorus still roars, the night still ends well and no one gets hurt, even if the chaperone does kick the narrator out for dancing too close to his girlfriend. There’s less to fear and much to celebrate on Boys and Girls—and there’s not much at stake.

As a result, the album feels somewhat slight, and the starry-eyed nostalgia with which Mr. Finn tackles his subjects never quite reaches the state of Dionysian intoxication he’s going for.

Where they once hungered for salvation, the Hold Steady now ache for hugs. Where Mr. Finn was once poignant, he’s now merely quaint. For a band that has proved itself capable of harnessing both nostalgia and teen angst with unmatched class, that’s not enough.