Above [L to R]: Tad Kubler, Galen Polivka, John Agnello, Bobby Drake

As fans eagerly count down the days until The Hold Steady releases Stay Positive, the follow-up to Paste's #2 album of 2006, on July 15, we thought it would be interesting to hear a little background on the record. So we asked producer John Agnello to reminisce on the recording process of Stay Positive. This is his second post. Read his first here.

The Hold Steady tours a ton. I believe the number of shows they played last year was around 200. That’s amazing, but essential for bands these days. With CD sales lagging and tons of people putting out records, it’s a jungle out there. If you're lucky enough to be Spoon, OK Go or Of Montreal, it’s a jingle out there. Which is a good thing. Over the last few years, that’s been one of the ways bands have put food on their collective tables. Twenty-odd years ago, a band called the Del Fuegos supplied music for a Miller beer ad. And it was widely frowned up by the press, other musicians and the other music biz insiders. But I digress.

The best part about a 32-hour non-stop drive from your hometown of Oxford, Mississippi where you left an on-stage cookout with Dent May and His Magnificent Ukelele where your friend and resident math genius Brian Hall was onstage in his Michelangelo’s David apron cooking delicious burgers which he claimed are so delicious because he rolled them in his “secret ingredient” (brown sugar and onions…shhh! don’t tell!) and you’ve been in the van so long you feel like you’re in a space shuttle speeding onward infinitely, destined to crash land on the moon and you wake up in New Mexico which looks a hell of a lot like a moonscape, all white rocks and flatness and dark, dark, and that’s when your Ipod has gone way past the profound (Chris Bell’s I Am The Cosmos, which is every bit as good as any Big Star record, and I once spent a whole month of insomnia listening to that record on repeat, always joyous to hear the third version of “You and Your Sister,” the one without all the strings, and it’s such a good song I never even minded hearing it three times in a row) and beyond the absurd (Antichrist Superstar in all its sterile junior high rebellion) and you fall into silence, and it’s so dark out when the mountains disappear you can see stars all the way down to the horizon, and it reminds you of that bit from All the Pretty Horses about them being borne “up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and 10 thousand worlds for the choosing.”