In November 2019, shortly before lockdown, I went to see Craig Finn, frontman and songwriter for the Minneapolis band the Hold Steady. At the time, I’d been considering retiring from seeing live shows due to all the hassles dealing with wheelchair seating, obtaining tickets and transportation. No doubt I’d seen some outstanding concerts in my almost fifty years of attending gigs, but after so many shows, I was starting to wonder if it was worth it anymore. Ironically, once I accepted that seeing Finn could be my last live event, everything surrounding it, the seating, tickets and my bus rides downtown and back, couldn’t have gone more smoothly. Finn’s performance was exceptional as well, as he spun his gritty, urban tales like a master storyteller and I’m glad I was there to visit his vividly haunting world.
Although I wouldn’t call Finn a dynamic performer, the vibe of the show reminded me of early Bruce Springsteen. A comparison I like to make to describe Finn’s work is that the Hold Steady is closer to the arena rock of Springsteen’s The River, while his solo catalog is more intimate, reminiscent of Bruce’s Nebraska or Tunnel of Love. Detailed narratives of desperate, lost souls populate Finn’s songs, with threads running through them that often reprise characters, locales and sordid situations. His shows and five solo albums are all novelistic or cinematic in scope. I always imagine his lyrical stories as black and white short films.
I discovered Finn through his first solo album, 2012’s Clear Heart, Full Eyes, recorded in Austin with local musicians he hadn’t met before the sessions took place. The album has a sparse atmosphere that leans on Americana and country. The song that flung the door open into Finn’s poetic headspace for me was “Rented Room.” A steady, dirge-like drumbeat anchors Finn’s tale of the displaced protagonist, wondering how he ended up living above a bar after a breakup. The rest of the band stumbles in and out, reflecting the crawl of time as he remembers the past and realizes the present stuck in his seedy quarters.
She used to take off her tights
Turn out the lights
Get into bed
She fit me just right
My pillow still tastes like her perfume
She used to wake up at dawn
Put on her robe
Walk out on our lawn all sleepy and slow
Now I live above a saloon
I bathe in the dark
It feels like the womb
I know I should be getting over you
Certain things are really hard to do
“Sarah, Calling From a Hotel” is an almost wistful-sounding, heart-wrenching ballad from Craig’s next release Faith in the Future that could be the other side of the relationship depicted in “Rented Room.” The instrumentation is even more stripped back than the previous album, since it was largely recorded by Finn and Brooklyn-based musician and producer Josh Kaufman Over gently plucked guitar and mandolin arpeggios with eerie background keyboard embellishments, the titular character calls an ex-lover to explain how her life is going.
She said lately she’s been thinking
She’s sorry she was ruthless at the ending
But her new friend does much better
Than just get by
And the last thing she said to me
Before she hung up the phone
Was “Here he comes
Oh god, I gotta go”
“Here he comes
He’s got a gun
I gotta go.”
Finn reveals a rare glimpse of optimism in the album’s title, which may be inspired by the song “Newmyer’s Roof.” It takes us back to the place where Finn and a friend witnessed the events of 9/11 in NYC. Swiping guitar chords, a pounding piano and a wicked, frenzied guitar solo mirror the nervous energy and the frantic grasp for hope in the aftermath felt in those dark times.
It was difficult at first for me to get into Finn’s 2017 album We All Want the Same Things. Even though the song arrangements expanded to include electronic keyboards, brass and reeds, the sound here is claustrophobic. This murkiness put me off the first few tracks, since I found Craig’s vocals more difficult to understand than usual. But everything opened up with the arrival of “God in Chicago,” a stark spoken word piece backed by mournful piano fills. It’s a slice of life vignette where the listener enters, observes awhile and then leaves. Following her brother’s death, a young woman finds his drug stash and a wad of bills. She calls an old friend from her past to ask what to do with it. He knows an acquaintance from college that might be interested in taking the dope off her hands. The transaction is quickly made and the woman says she wants to escape her life for awhile, so the two take off for Chicago to “lose ourselves in the glass and light.” The flowing, direct details give this simple, open-ended story enough clear-eyed pathos to fill an entire novel.
On 2019’s I Need a New War, the bright horn arrangements return from the last record, but the production is clear with a much wider soundscape. Finn takes a few different musical turns as well, ranging from 50s doo-wop to R&B and soul. The vivid character studies are still in place though, sharper than ever. At the time of the album’s release, I was going through a stretch of psychological abuse and stress myself and felt as ground down as many of the people in the songs (and then came COVID). The album’s title comes from “Grant at Gelena,” which references General Ulysses S. Grant, who battled poverty and financial failure throughout his life beyond his military and presidential careers. Its lyrics concern a returning war vet, coping with his own personal battles as he finds his life reduced to unpaid bills and walks to a dying mall. “Magic Marker” has a small time criminal doing a job for sixteen grand, but then he “Went out west and tried to double it / Lost it all, tried to recover it / Got pistol whipped in Portland / Oh Lord, I got so much of it / Had trouble with my numbers for some time.” But the most devastating of all, the one that almost brings me to tears, is “Carmen Isn’t Coming in Today.” A descending melancholy melody frames the story of a woman dealing with a crumbling marriage and a dead end job who longs to drive away to another place every morning on her way to work. I Need a New War is perhaps the most satisfying and my favorite of Craig Finn’s aural story collections.
For his 2022 release A Legacy of Rentals, Finn continues to work with Josh Kaufman and their collaboration has settled into an empathetic comfortableness. Nothing seems forced. The arrangements and production fit the narratives like a glove. Lush electronic keyboards and effects, some subtle rhythm loops, ringing guitar chords and vocal harmonies flicker around Finn’s lyrics like the half-forgotten memories that his protagonists struggle to retrieve. “Never Any Horses” adds slashing guitar to the mix, reflecting the uneasy realization that memories often never happened the way you think they did. “A Break from the Barrage” employs sparse percussion, blurry guitar flourishes and cold keyboards to form its sad, desperate backdrop to a relentless loop of lonely tavern nights.
When she showed up at the bar last night
She didn’t intend to stay out late
But here we are again with the sunrise
Scraping at the remnants of a high time
She shuts her eyes and lets it spin and calls in sick to work again
Leaves a message when she knows they won’t be in yet
“Jessamine” conjures up fond memories of a wild girl who “had some dreams, but never really said what they were.” Yet despite its light-hearted acoustic guitar and shuffling drums, the lyrics present another one of life’s casualties.
I met Jessamine in Cherry Hill
Her dress all done in daffodils
The sticker on her skateboard said, “Speed kills”
And yeah, it probably did just what it said
This is what Craig Finn does best. He leaves unexpected details like bread crumbs for listeners to discover throughout his catalog. Like a good book, his storytelling is full of heart-wrenching realism, but every once in a while, a little hope and redemption may slip in through the darkness. Such literary finesse is rare in pop music, which makes Finn’s talents all the more rewarding.
MARCH 22, 2024
Letter to the Vatican 