When Rudy’s niece, a teenage runaway who admires the freedom of his lifestyle, turns up asking to join him on the road, he has to come to terms with the nature of his obligation to family and accountability for his past. In this amazing road tale he captures how it feels for a wandering artist, scrounging in the underground punk scenes of Russia and the Balkanssleepless nights and shaky trains, strong beer and unsavory companions. Forced to confront the limitations of his own talent and ambition, his resentment triggers a confrontation that ends in their estrangement. Franz Nicolay has always been the kind of musician who can sound like he’s roaming the world in the course of a single song. Ryan is generous and supportive of Rudy, but Rudy finds it hard to be grateful. In the doldrums of a career as a cult figure, Rudy has been overshadowed by Ryan Orland, to the point where Rudy is now identified as an imitator of the younger man. SOMEONE SHOULD PAY FOR YOUR PAIN follows singer-songwriter Rudy Pauver, his conflicted relationship with a successful former protégé, and a young niece who wants to travel with him and whose surprise appearance forces a reckoning with himself and his past. SOMEONE SHOULD PAY FOR YOUR PAIN is out now via Gibson House Press and finds The Hold Steady keyboardist exploring the nature of creativity and popular success artistic and ethical influence the pathos of the middle-aged artist changing standards of sexual morality and guilt and penance in a post-religious society.
Following a period of employment as a composer-in-residence at his alma mater, New York. The Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay has published his second novel. Franz Nicolay was born in Center Sandwich, New Hampshire on the 27th August 1977.