How Craig Finn Made the Seventies L.A. Record of His Dreams

Yahoo

07-04-2025

When Craig Finn wants to make an L.A. album, he doesn't mess around. He might be best known as the Minnesota-via-Brooklyn frontman of the Hold Steady, a punk bar-band wordsmith specializing in down-and-out tales with a Midwest flavor. But on his great new Always Been, he takes inspiration from Southern California, steeped in the style of old-school soft-rock troubadours like Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, and Randy Newman.
Just how Seventies L.A. is this album? Finn poses for the cover photo on a bridge over the Harbor Freeway — the exact same bridge where Newman posed on the cover of his 1977 classic Little Criminals. Like Newman, Finn stands with the shrug and the shades of a born storyteller, lurking amid the classic combo of palm trees and traffic jams.
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'I've always wanted to make an L.A. record,' Finn says, with his hearty laugh. 'That Jackson Browne album For Everyman is what I was listening to on the drive to and from the studio. At one point I was saying, 'You know how that early Seventies stuff has the suites where one song goes into another? We gotta do one of those!''
Right now he's a few thousand miles away from that bridge, sitting on a park bench in his longtime Brooklyn neighborhood, coffee in hand. Always Been is his sixth and finest solo album, his most ambitious narrative concept yet. He sings a set of interconnected songs, with characters who recur from tune to tune, giving different views of the same story. At the center is the Reverend, a disgraced pastor heading into a downward spiral of drugs and despair. We meet his sister, her ex, their daughter, a whole cast of doomed drifters.
But bleak as it gets, it's about people trying to hold on to faith in the future. 'Faith is obviously part of my work overall,' Finn says. 'But to me it also means just the faith to get out of bed, the faith to move forward, the faith to fall in love. 'I Will Dare' [by the Replacements] is my favorite song. I always thought it was so romantic. 'I will dare to meet you there. I'll dare to take this leap.''
Craig Finn has always been the kind of songwriter who obsesses over the details. That's why a philosophical conversation about his new album gets derailed into a loud and pointless argument over a lyric from an old hit by The Who (one of their worst songs, 'You Better You Bet') and whether the line that rhymes with 'to the sound of old T. Rex' is 'ooooh, and Who's Next' or 'ooooh, havin' sex.' (Finn is totally right and I'm wrong — it's 'Who's Next.') But he's a fan who intuits how the most trivial sonic details connect to the big-picture emotional impact of a rock & roll song, in the lives of people who hear it. That's a crucial reason he's inspired such a hardcore following over the years, with his impact on younger songwriters from Phoebe Bridgers to MJ Lenderman. (Listen to 'Kyoto' or 'Wristwatch' for a taste of their Finn fandom.)
Yet he didn't start making his own solo albums until he was already a couple of decades into a career fronting bands. His Nineties art-punk jesters Lifter Puller never made a ripple outside the Twin Cities. So he relocated to Brooklyn in 2000, got a real job, and just for kicks, started a new band with Lifter Puller's Tad Kubler. The Hold Steady made more than a ripple. They became a word-of-mouth sensation, with Finn ranting his wildly funny tales of drugs and Catholic damage and the Midwest blues, over the punk-rock bar-band blast. They weren't shy about shooting for Springsteen-level scale, with the motto, 'Tramps like us and we like tramps.'
The Hold Steady might have started as a goof — 30-something indie dudes feeling all washed up, so they get together to cosplay as The Band in The Last Waltz. But they made converts all over the planet, from early classics like Almost Killed Me and Stay Positive to recent bangers like The Price of Progress. No other band has come close to writing this many great songs in the 21st century. Their 2005 masterwork Separation Sunday, the one that everyone agrees is their zenith, turns 20 in May, and they're celebrating with a sold-out Minneapolis residency. If you know a Hold Steady fan, chances are they're a bit of a lunatic about it.
At first Finn's solo work was just a scheduling issue — he was ready to make an album, his bandmates weren't, so he plowed ahead. His 2012 debut Clear Eyes Full Heart was full of hard-luck tales like 'Western Pier,' forcing him to find his own voice. But since then he's built up his own major songbook, mostly famously with a pair of heartbreaking spoken-word drug elegies, 'God in Chicago' and 'Messing with the Settings.'
'I had to understand songwriting, versus playing in a band,' he says. 'Paying attention to real songwriters like Jackson Browne, that was kind of eye-opening to me. Warren Zevon can sit down at a piano, or John Prine with a guitar, and the story is always going to come through — they're going to be able to tell that very directly. And your chance of making an emotional connection is stronger, maybe. They can wreck you a little more, with the restraint and control. I mean, I love indie rock, but as you get to be an adult, John Prine or Warren Zevon might wreck you a little more than Archers of Loaf.'
Always Been is definitely an album where he's setting out to wreck you. 'What I'm interested in is making that emotional connection, trying to get to the point where someone says, 'Oh, I've felt that way, too.' Noisy guitar rock can do that too, but I feel like great songwriters are more likely to make you weep.'
'Bethany' sets the scene, with the story of a pastor who tried to preach the gospel, but couldn't make himself believe in it. The Reverend falls from grace, with a broken marriage and a criminal record, until he's just another loser caddying at a golf course on the Delaware shore. As he confesses, 'I was faking all the faithfulness/Every single sermon was a fraud/Drifted through the rituals/Prideful, high, and pitiful / And pissing off a pretty vengeful God.'
'I wrote that song about a priest who didn't believe in God,' Finn says. 'The next song I wrote was about the same guy. It just opened up the whole record. It was the entrance to a different world, so I could pursue a narrative that just kept giving. I was like, okay, so he goes to crash at his sister's house in Philadelphia. Then the third song, 'Crumbs,' is gonna be about that house. I just kept putting a microscope on the story and saying, 'There's another song here.''
When times get tough, these characters mostly run away — 'pulling a geographic,' as they say in A.A. 'I always like stories where people move around a lot,' Finn says. 'But there's some isolation in there. Moving around, changing the places we live — trying to find something that isn't ever going to be there until you love yourself. It's gotten so extreme since the pandemic. You know — we're all so alone, nobody has any friends, no one's going to church. So these people move around trying to find those things. But wherever you go, there you are.'
Before now, his peak solo albums were 2017's We All Want the Same Things, with its spooky late-night vibe, and 2023's A Legacy of Rentals, where he taps into the classic Sixties orchestral pop sound of 'Wichita Lineman.' Always Been seems to form a trilogy with those two, in these tales of grifters and hustlers on the fringes of capitalist society, like 'Postcards,' 'The Man I've Always Been,' the synth-pop love triangle 'Luke & Leanna,' the spoken-word skater-party reverie 'Fletcher's.'
After a string of collaborations with producer Josh Kaufman, Finn had a different idea for Always Been — Adam Granduciel from the War on Drugs, longtime friends and tourmates of the Hold Steady. 'The first time I performed with the War on Drugs, we did 'Accidentally Like a Martyr' by Warren Zevon, and 'Walk On' by John Hiatt,' Finn recalls. Other War on Drugs dudes play on the album: bassist Dave Hartley, pianist Robbie Bennett, and drummer Antony LaMarca, along with guest vocals from Kathleen Edwards and Sam Fender.
But the main appeal of this collaboration was Granduciel's drastically different creative process. 'I knew the way Adam works when he's making a record — he goes on a journey of sound, where the music changes, the tempos change. Then when he finally gets somewhere, he writes lyrics, but it's a journey to get there. I'm the exact opposite; I have two chords and a story. So I thought, what if we meet in the middle? That turned out to be one of my better ideas ever.'
Finn expands it in the companion book Lousy with Ghosts, with eleven short stories set in the same fictional universe. 'I certainly hope before I die that I write a book,' he says. 'But I didn't want to be like, 'This is my literary debut.' I wanted it to make it more like a zine — I don't even know if the punctuation's right.' (He previously published a 2019 collection of lyrics, I Can't Keep Saying Thank You.) But he wrote these POV pieces just to know these characters better. 'That's something I've learned from novelists—sometimes stuff that doesn't end up in the book helps you understand your characters. So I kept writing and writing and writing about them — stuff you can't fit in when you have 20 lines to work with.'
He's always been a fan of longform rock narratives; it's why he takes so much delight in The Who singing about Who's Next in 'You Better You Bet.' 'That's the kind of music fan I was, or I am,' he says. 'When I was a kid, I thought EVERY record was like a rock opera. I was always looking for connections because there were all these words and terms where I didn't know what they meant, especially on English records that I thought were clues. I thought The Vapors [Eighties new wave one-hit wonders who sang 'Turning Japanese'] were sending me messages. I believed it was like A Clockwork Orange—they'd made up their own language. It turns out they just used a lot of British slang that I didn't know. Their second album, Magnets, with its whole concept about the JFK assassination — that kind of world-building always excited me.'
The last time Finn did that kind of world-building across a whole album, with a unified cast of characters, it was 20 years ago, on Separation Sunday. Does he see these albums as linked? 'I guess they are, in a way,' he says. 'Separation Sunday seems like a younger crowd. Maybe this is the mid-life Separation Sunday, which is a lot less sexy. When you're casting it, everyone's less hot. But that's very interesting to me, as I get older, to write songs about people of my age.'
That's one of the timeliest things about Always Been — the sense of Gen X angst in these songs, especially middle-aged loneliness. 'That's something I'm seeing a lot in my 50s,' he says. 'A lot of people I knew started to split up. And when you're over 50, you just realize that maybe it's nobody's fault. We're human.'
It's a long-running theme for the 53-year-old Finn. 'I think it might be the pandemic, or it might be the 50s,' he says, 'but I feel like there's people in my life that just sort of stopped. My big joke sometimes is how I can't tell if certain things are from the Nineties or the Midwest, when it comes to that slacker thing of not trying. 'Sorry, I'm not tuning my guitar' — is that Nineties or Midwest? I don't know. But I feel like right now I'm always asking, 'Is it 50s or post-pandemic?' Like when you have friends who just disappear? Or they stop going to work and you think, wait, what's the plan? I think that's a theme on the record.'
Finn is on tour this spring, opening for one of his Minnesota punk idols, Bob Mould. He's also doing another season of his podcast That's How I Remember It, where he's interviewed guests including George Saunders, Bill Hader, Hanif Abdurraqib, Lucinda Williams, Fred Armisen, and Duff McKagan.
Meanwhile, the Hold Steady have a typically busy year ahead. They've kept rolling through some weird twists over the years, opening for the Replacements and the Stones, playing TV shows like Billions and Game of Thrones. When they played a Bruce Springsteen charity tribute at Carnegie Hall — they did 'Atlantic City' — Springsteen unexpectedly showed up and casually asked, 'Who knows the words to 'Rosalita'?' Finn did, which is how he ended up singing with Bruce that night. The Lord had mercy, indeed.
But over the past decade, they've almost accidentally invented a whole new model for how to keep a sustainable career going as a veteran band, rethinking old ways of releasing music and performing live. Instead of touring, they now play multi-night residencies in destination cities: 'Massive Nights' in Brooklyn, 'The Weekender' in London, 'Constructive Summer' in Philadelphia, and their four-night Separation Sunday 20th anniversary blowout in Minneapolis.
'I don't understand why more bands don't do it,' Finn says. 'I feel like there's this thing where a lot of bands think if you don't get out there and just suffer through Omaha on Monday night, you're not a real band. So much in the industry has changed — not to make adjustments feels suicidal in some way.'
The group's longevity is surprising even to him. 'When I think about the Hold Steady being around for 21, 22 years, we're the least likely band to do that, because we started in our 30s and we drank like crazy. It doesn't seem sustainable. It's not like we started when were 18 — the fact that we're in our 50s and still going seems insane. But I think it's because we made that adjustment, and the community around it makes it possible and fun.'
But of course, the only way you can get away with not touring is if you have the kind of rabid audience that's eager to travel for these curated events. And somehow, the Hold Steady has no shortage of those fans. 'It's always such a beautiful thing to see how all these people show up from around the world, and have all these friendships,' Finn says. 'I guess the final level is when we don't have to play anymore and everyone can just get together. It'd be a lot cheaper if we don't have to bring the gear.'
In the band's best-known hit, 'Stuck Between Stations,' he opened with a quote from Jack Kerouac: 'Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.' But Always Been is full of older men and women, having even sadder times all alone. It's a tribute to his touch that he makes it feel uplifting by the end, rather than depressing. 'I'm an optimist,' he admits. 'A lot of my songs are bleak, but I always feel like they're human. The fact that these people can get up and move forward and forgive themselves — that's a hopeful thing. Forgiveness is the most beautiful thing we have. I mean, it's love, grief, and forgiveness, right? Of all the things we have, it seems like those are the three big ones.'
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