It's hard to think of a more frustrating pursuit than the search for profound insight in contemporary rock lyrics. But that hasn't stopped Craig Finn from trying.

"It's a little weird to me, because I've always been the exact opposite," The Hold Steady's front man says of listeners' inclination to tune out what vocalists are saying and worry solely about how they're saying it. "I can't really get into anything unless I like the lyrics. I was hung up on Led Zeppelin for a long time 'cause I just couldn't get with the lyrics."

To listen to Finn, the "wide-open," high-voltage garage rock that his Brooklyn-based band serves up is largely a reaction against the elitist approach of its indie contemporaries, as well as "the dance-punk stuff that was popular in New York a couple of years ago." But equally, if not more so, The Hold Steady - or at least the efforts of its pudgy, bespectacled singer - is a reaction against the banality of most modern rock lyrics.

Because of Finn's vocal style - really more yelling than singing, albeit with an unmistakable Springsteen tinge that matches the band's E Street influence - the words are always front and centre. And the songs on Separation Sunday, the acclaimed sophomore disc that made them the first band to crack the cover of the Village Voice in seven years, don't just tell stories on their own. As on the Hold Steady's first release - and Finn's earlier efforts with Lifter Puller, based out of his native Minneapolis - narratives are weaved over the entire album, while recurring characters stagger through a maze of sex and drugs, religion and redemption.

Lyrically, at least, it's one of the most staggeringly ambitious albums of its era - much more so than, say, Green Day's American Idiot, another album with a clear narrative for which Finn expresses a degree of admiration. While on first listen it might seem at odds with his sensational subject matter, his aim is to capture the journey that all of America's suburban teens go through.

"I see it as a teenage record, in that it was inspired by where I was at as someone at that age, in '88 or '89," the 34-year-old singer says. "And as much as it's teenaged, it's suburban. There's sort of this process of getting a driver's licence and being mobile and pushing out beyond where you're from."

While acknowledging that the examples on Separation Sunday are extreme - most kids don't travel from city to city getting high, hanging with pimps and staggering into churches to find religion - Finn sees the album as capturing the universal experience of trying to set a moral compass and stay in control while breaking out from one's roots. "There's freedom and then there's running," he says. "I wanted to deliberately juxtapose those feelings."

Getting a hold on all this, of course, requires more than a cursory listen. "I do think that there's something about our music that's a bit of a grower - multiple listens tend to reveal more about it," Finn says. "There are things that people figure out or come to conclusions about that they might not have heard on their twenty-fourth listen but they do on their twenty-fifth."

For now, it's mostly the indie crowd with whom Finn feels little affinity that's putting in the requisite effort. But his hope is to make inroads with the demographic that could actually relate to his take on the teenage experience - which explains the band's willingness to participate in high-profile Target ads that have raised the eyebrows of some music snobs.

"There's a desire to reach the kind of person that would find out about us that way," he says. "I hope that somebody buys our record at Wal-Mart, who doesn't go to indie record stores or read Spin magazine and really likes it. And I think there are a lot of people who will like it if they hear it."