Craig Finn Shifts His Focus on A Legacy of Rentals

After finishing a trilogy of solo albums full of songs about survivors, Craig Finn turns the focus of his latest album to the ones who didn’t make it. A Legacy of Rentals, Finn’s fifth LP outside The Hold Steady, is a collection of songs centered around memory as his characters recall people who are no longer there and bygone exploits. Finn’s characters in the past haven’t always been the most reliable of narrators. This time, they’re doing their best, even as time and distance distort the accuracy of what they’re able to recall.

Exploring the vagaries of what people remember, and how, is a fraught concept at a moment when the world looks vastly different than it did a few years ago. Finn wrote these songs early in the pandemic, which coincided with the unrelated death of a friend. That time period also overlapped with police officers in Minneapolis, his hometown, killing George Floyd on a street corner, surrounded by onlookers. These 10 songs contain no direct reference to any of those events, but they loom in the background, almost as if they were the catalysts for many of the themes Finn pursues on A Legacy of Rentals.

As usual, the people in Finn’s songs are vivid and compelling; few lyricists can match his talent for sketching such fully realized characters within the confines of a four- or five-minute song. He’s a master of oblique references, casual asides and offhanded observations that add up to complex people with complicated inner lives. “It never really mattered that she was 12 years older except for when we talked about the 1980s / Because I was still showing up to Modern European History while she was trying to hold on to her baby,” his narrator says on album opener “Messing with the Settings,” and there are worlds contained within those two lines.

Like any good fiction writer, Finn builds his stories so that each choice leads to the next until the choices run out, and the climax becomes inevitable. That’s the case on “The Amarillo Kid,” a taut bassline and synth and guitar accents framing the story of a small-time drug dealer who skips town with the stash. A sense of futility anchors “A Break from the Barrage,” where the protagonist ends up literally back where she started, with nothing to show for it but a wasted day and depleted sense of self. There’s not a lot about these stories, or the characters in them, that qualifies as feel-good, but all of it rings true, and sometimes that’s the weightier measure.