Franz Nicolay

Franz Nicolay (born 1977) is an American musician and writer. He is best known as the keyboardist and pianist for the indie rock band The Hold Steady, with whom he has recorded seven studio albums. Nicolay is also known for playing the accordion and piano in The World/Inferno Friendship Society; for founding the composer-performer collective Anti-Social Music, and for performing in the Balkan jazz quartet Guignol.

Nicolay has worked as a producer, arranger, session musician, and collaborator with Sincere Engineer, Mischief Brew, Leftöver Crack, The Dresden Dolls, The Loved Ones, and The Living End. He has performed with Frank Turner, Star Fucking Hipsters, and Against Me!

His first book ''The Humorless Ladies of Border Control'', about DIY touring in the former Communist world, was published by The New Press in August 2016. ''The New York Times'' named it a "Season's Best Travel Book". His second, the novel "Someone Should Pay For Your Pain," was called "a knockout fiction debut" in BuzzFeed and named one of Rolling Stone's "Best Music Books of 2021". Hua Hsu, in The New Yorker, said "Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music" (2024) “might be one of the least bacchanalian books ever published about the rock-and-roll life style, but also one of the most honest.” His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, LitHub, Longreads, The Week, VICE, and elsewhere.

He has taught at University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University's MFA fiction program, and is currently on faculty at Bard College.

In 2012, Dying Scene named him the #1 accordionist in punk rock. Provided by Wikipedia