Franz Nicolay

Franz Nicolay (born 1977) is an American musician and writer. He is best known for playing the accordion and piano in The World/Inferno Friendship Society and keyboards in The Hold Steady from 2005 to 2010 and again from 2016 onwards. He is also notable for founding Anti-Social Music, a composer/performer collective based in New York City, and for performing in the Balkan jazz quartet Guignol.

Nicolay has worked as a producer, arranger, session musician, and collaborator with 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". His writing has appeared in The New York Times, 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.