Craig Finn, 'Always Been' Album Review

Craig Finn Ties it All Together on Always Been

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Craig Finn is the bard of transient America, his stories of ordinary itinerants caught in life’s in-betweens captivating us for decades now. While Finn’s last few records are neck and neck with his best, it feels like he worked himself into a terminus with 2022’s A Legacy of Rentals. It was his darkest work yet, incubated during lockdown when he was unable to get on the road, or be in the same bubble as his hospital nurse wife, while grieving the death of a close friend. The album called on a 14-piece orchestra, producing some of his most striking songs, from the lulling, hypnagogic singalong “Messing with the Settings” to the Cassandra Jenkins-featuring “The Year We Fell Behind,” its poignant centerpiece. But where do you go after a year behind? How do you get out in front again? The answer is to change almost everything.

Trading in his trusted collaborators for an entirely new cast, the Hold Steady captain has landed on a sound that sparkles in vivid, electric-blue hues. Instead of producer Josh Kaufman’s folksy, stoical arrangements, Finn works closely with Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs to create a lightning-bolt sound comprising steadfast motorik beats and tight, palm-muted guitar work alongside warm washes of synthesizer and humming gospel organ. To borrow one of his new lyrics, “The whole thing has momentum.”

Sure, we miss Jenkins’ counterpointing coos, but tracks such as “People of Substance” and “Luke & Leanna” are so uptempo and thrilling that they don’t suffer from her absence—either that, or we’re so pumped we just forget. Elsewhere are out-of-the-ordinary little experiments: “Fletcher’s” is a pensive cocoon of tick-tocking haunted-house piano hissed at by electronic gurgles and fizzes. Finn is also happy to strip back everything to the sighs and creaks of an acoustic guitar, as on the naked, Dylan-coded epilogue, “Shamrock.”

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What’s more, Always Been presents Finn’s most cohesive overarching story. Usually working with capsule standalone vignettes that connect thematically but not directly, he instead constructs an extended epic centered on an ex-reverend. You might say this guy has fallen from grace and God, but Finn tells us “he never really fell ‘cause he was never really convinced.” We meet Clayton—though we only learn his name later on—during the opening track, “Bethany.” This overture brings us up to speed on his living situation (his ancient parents’ summer house or his sister’s place on the fringes of Philadelphia), demeaning vices (necking other people’s drink-dregs at the bar), and source of pocket money (caddying on Saturdays).

While alluding to a past trauma that unravels gradually, “Bethany” also lays out Clayton’s motivations: self-improvement, sobriety, reconciling tradition with progression. From here, Finn muddles the protagonist’s timeline, flashing us backwards and forwards while interjecting other tangents. The songs give up a lot to a soft gaze, but you can also frown into a magnifying glass and connect all the dots, including those ostensible outliers like Luke and Leanna, whose tragic little story of faltering love is accelerated by Springsteen-esque organs and fist-in-the-air guitars that could brighten the darkest of days. Allowing for these different levels of engagement is a tenet of Finn’s genius—his command of the iceberg theory, pumping a whole summer into every line, a winter in every pause.

What’s unique about Clayton compared to other Craig Finn-penned protagonists is that his protracted journey of self-improvement necessitates a rejection of the road. Like his beloved Boss and the the Beats before him, Finn has always written about people hungry for momentum—they’re in train carriages, burning rubber, or sleeping it off in a motel; just stopping by or stuck between stations—and sure, Clayton has been here too, but now he’s trying to commit to something, or at least wait out the war. “It was pretty good right here,” he concludes on “Fletcher’s,” after imploring himself to quit thinking about Seattle.

When he’s at his sister’s place on “Crumbs”—a steady, sunny track that feels like the album’s sonic median—he tells us, “The traffic sounds like water in a river rushing south.” He fixates on minutiae—the years yellowing his sister’s hair, teeth, and skin; the crumbs of toast around his niece’s mouth—to drown out the highway’s “goddamn noise.” He keeps coming back to it, like it’s a taunt more than an interruption, not because its proximity underlines the sister’s poverty, but because of how easy it would be to cave in and take the rushing road south. It’s right outside, waiting. Like on “Fletcher’s,” though, he nudges his brain back to center, settling on the song’s thesis: “We’ll never win this war, but maybe we can wait it out.”

The escape-vs-commitment push-and-pull resolves on the album’s penultimate track, “Postcards.” Backed by a brilliant yet underused Sam Fender (returning the favor after Finn briefly appeared on the Geordie’s recent album People Watching), the reverend embraces the fact that there are places he’ll never go—Poughkeepsie and the Panhandle Coast, Southampton and Switzerland—but, thanks to the postcards, he’ll “go by your word.” (After all, “change smells the same as the paper.”) There’s catharsis—no, liberation—in this, the rhythm section thumping along tirelessly as an endearing synth melody twirls over the coda. Never has a song better encapsulated the loosening-shoulders feeling of telling a loved one, “Wanted you to know we’re doing better.”

Craig Finn gives us more hope than ever within Always Been’s pages, but that hope only arrives after tragedy. It’s not for me to dish out the spoilers. Turn to the track “Clayton” for our flawed hero’s origin story—how he got his name, what he’s running from, why he’s pushing toward change. We’ve all done bad shit and have the stone in our shoe to prove it. But if we put the stone there, we have to be the one to remove it. “The ones we’ve known the longest can pull us down the strongest,” a friend of a friend murmurs during “Fletcher’s,” as her head drops to his shoulder and the sun rises after a messy night. We’ve known ourselves longer than we’ve known anyone, so while the proxy war may be with religion and addiction and love and death and the highway, the real war is within. You might as well give yourself a fighting chance.

And so it comes like a sigh of relief: “I forgave myself for you.”

Hayden Merrick is a UK-based music writer and Features Editor at The Line of Best Fit. You can read him here, there or on Bandcamp Daily.

Craig Finn Ties it All Together on Always Been

Backed by members of the War on Drugs, the Hold Steady bandleader has never sounded so alive. His latest solo work shimmers with an energy that perfectly suits him and his cast of characters.