Staying Positive

What: Franz Nicolay

When: November 5th

Where: Triple Rock Social Club

After The Hold Steady‘s 2006 release, “Boys and Girls in America,” Minneapolis bard Craig Finn had successfully navigated his scraggly gang of blue-collared bar rockers into a comfortable status within the indie rock sphere. Two LPs later, their sound has coalesced into an identifiable indie shtick, with their latest record, “Heaven is Whenever,” resounding the fact that these guys now seem to really be resting on their laurels — a fact that led to longtime keyboardist Franz Nicolay’s exit from the group earlier this year.

“The band reached a comfortable spot,” Nicolay said. “I think once you reach that point, you have to make a decision as a group. Are you comfortable there? Do you just want to maintain that or take another risk?”

So after a final stint of dates with the group last fall, Nicolay has spent the better portion of this year reigniting that rock ‘n’ roll spark. It has been no sort of lazy sabbatical either. Nicolay toured with Against Me! for a good portion of the summer. More significantly, he released his second proper solo album, “Luck and Courage,” in October.

That vaudevillian mystique always emanating from Nicolay’s stage presence during his days with The Hold Steady naturally resonates throughout most of the “Luck and Courage” tracks. That is not to say that his caricature dominates the album. Rather, it is Nicolay’s fluid delivery of verbally crammed verses with such a smooth cadence that elevates most of the songs.

His robust lines do somewhat result from his proximity to such comparably heavy-handed lyricists as Finn. However, where Finn often sounds clunky and half-drunk, Nicolay sounds smooth and deliberate across the tracks — most of which were written during his massive amounts of free time on the road with The Hold Steady.

“Essentially you’re travelling while you’re sleeping,” Nicolay said. “You wake up and then you’ve got all day to kill in some strange city before the show starts, so you create for yourself all these little projects to do.”

Perhaps the greatest feat for Nicolay’s dedication to a solo career will surround the change in performance. His long-lived role as The Hold Steady’s crowd rouser will likely be traded in for a more reserved presence.

“It’s a matter of making the most of your performance time,” Nicolay said. “If I’m going out there by myself, and I don’t have a band behind me, it’s not as loud or raucous. It’s a bit more of a cerebral performance.”

Ultimately, these new frontiers are reiterations of that excitement lost within The Hold Steady’s creative stagnancy. For Nicolay, these challenges are half the fun.

“It’s easier to capture and keep people’s attention if you’re up there with a big rock band than it is by yourself,” Nicolay said. “That’s the kind of risk that I’m talking about that I like to take.”