Craig Finn and His Trail of Curiosity

Following Craig Finn’s Trail of Curiosity

Craig Finn has never created a character as fully developed as the one at the center of his new solo album, Always Been.

Vivid personalities have long been a focus of Finn’s songwriting, along with Catholic imagery and what happens when they intersect. That’s been a running theme in Finn’s work, especially with his band the Hold Steady. The group’s first few LPs—especially Separation Sunday—revolve loosely around the misadventures of a conflicted young woman named Holly, the drug dealer Charlemagne, and a ne’er-do-well called Gideon as they teeter over the gulf between spiritual salvation and “the scene,” a minefield of sex and drugs.

Songs on Craig Finn’s solo albums have tended more toward one-off character sketches, but the Brooklyn singer brings recurring dramatis personae and religious motifs together again on his latest album. Produced by Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs, it’s Finn’s sixth solo album, and his most novelistic. Many of the 11 songs are interconnected as Finn examines from various angles the circumstances of a former minister and military veteran who has spent his life trying out locations, and vocations, in a perpetual search for himself. “I knew someone who had been a pastor who had kind of run up on the rocks a little bit, and so it was fascinating to me,” he says on a video chat.

Though the protagonist on Always Been isn’t necessarily based on Finn’s acquaintance, imagining an agnostic preacher opened a door into some ideas that the singer was interested in exploring. Among them was whether a mortal person could really presume to represent the divine. “That’s interesting to me on several levels,” he explains. “One is culturally, politically—we have a lot of people putting forth these Christian ideals while not following in the footsteps of Christ. But also, I just think that it’s almost bound to fail. If you believe that you’re born with original sin, then you can only do so much.”

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You get the sense that the main character on Always Been hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about original sin, the Christian doctrine that all humans inherit the sinfulness that Adam and Eve brought upon themselves in the Garden of Eden. For Finn’s protagonist, spirituality is a job more than a calling, and the person he’s looking to save is himself, without understanding that the key to the salvation he seeks lies within, not out in the world. “You can be a priest, you can be a soldier, you can be whatever, but it’s still you, and you’re going to come with wherever you go,” Finn says. “You can move around the country, you can go to Venice Beach, Seattle, Virginia, Delaware, and one of the things that kept coming up for me when I was writing this record is that we try on all these things, but at the heart of it, there’s still this truth that just is.”

Craig Finn’s quest to pin down that truth meant trying some new approaches in the making of Always Been. He fleshed out the minister and other characters in these songs in Lousy With Ghosts, a limited-edition 92-page companion collection of short stories that offer deeper context, and Rashomon-like shifts in perspective, about what’s happening on the album. Finn also changed coasts for Always Been. After working with producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, Bob Weir) in upstate New York on his previous four albums, Finn recorded Always Been in Los Angeles at Granduciel’s studio. Finn and Granduciel have known each other since the War on Drugs opened for the Hold Steady on their first US tour in 2009, saying, “I thought maybe it might be fun for him to deal with something that’s not his own music, without the pressure he might feel about being in a band that now is winning a Grammy, or going on tours where they play Madison Square Garden.”

The first song Finn showed Granduciel, “Bethany,” is the first song he wrote about his protagonist; it’s also the opening track on Always Been. The song is a scene-setter that recounts the minister’s rise and fall, from marrying a parishioner and planning his own mega-church to ending up divorced, defrocked, and gulping down the remnants of abandoned drinks at a bar on the Delaware shore. Finn sings accompanied by piano flourishes while the click of a drumstick on the rim of the snare keeps time. “I got really into this guy,” Finn says. “And so, the next time I went to write a song, I sort of said, ‘How can I write a song about this guy’s story and this situation, maybe from a different angle?’”

That impulse to dive further into his protagonist’s life had a cascading effect as one different angle led to another, and another, as Finn fit the various pieces together. In all, seven of the 11 tracks on Always Been are about the minister and the peripatetic journey that has landed him in his parents’ beach house during the off-season, or crashing with his sister and niece in Philly, or pulling himself together in a friend’s basement. The other songs don’t involve the main character, Finn says, but take place in the same world, like interstitial material in old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons (a reference Finn’s manager told him was outdated, the singer confesses with a laugh).

The idea of recording with Granduciel began to take shape in 2022, when Finn did a few songs with the War on Drugs as part of their annual Drugcember holiday shows in Philadelphia. “We were sort of talking about how we both worked, and that was kind of like the spark for me,” Finn remembers. “He was talking about how he really goes on a journey of sound, like he starts recording music, and it may change tempo, it may change feel, and somewhere along the line it becomes a song, and he gets lyrics close to the end. I’m the exact opposite—I start with words and a story.”

Finn’s attention to story is what makes his songwriting special, says Cassandra Jenkins, who has toured with Finn and sung backing vocals on four of his solo albums. She calls his songs “American epics.” “What makes him great is his curiosity,” Jenkins says, pointing to the questions that Finn asks guests on his podcast, That’s How I Remember It, and also to the openhearted way he treats the people in his songs. “You can tell that he’s not searching for the perfect ending. He’s looking for what each story or person has to teach him, and sharing that with us and getting at some emotional throughline that really hits.”

Jenkins admired Finn’s songwriting enough that she asked him to look over the lyrics she had written for what became her 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. Finn’s perspective, she says, made her songs better—that he took her seriously in a way that “granted her a place to be a collaborator.” “I’m always grateful for that,” she adds. “I really wouldn’t have continued songwriting, I think, without his encouragement.”

Granduciel offered Finn encouragement of a different kind in the studio while working on Always Been. His attention to the musical arrangements was a good fit with Finn’s emphasis on the lyrics and story, and they did less rewriting or tinkering with song structures than had sometimes occurred on Finn’s previous solo efforts. “He really helped me with confidence in the songs,” Finn affirms. “Adam was like, ‘Let’s trust your instincts and let’s just make it sound lush and beautiful.’”

Granduciel and other members of the War on Drugs played as Finn’s backing band, and Always Been includes guest vocals from Kathleen Edwards on three tracks and Sam Fender on one. The arrangements are often rich, but not cluttered, and you can almost hear the musicians locking in on the best way to complement Finn’s lyrics. “Luke & Leanna,” one of the songs with characters other than the preacher, skews big, with interlocking keyboards and guitars barreling along over a muscular beat. “The Man I’ve Always Been” by contrast, is more hushed, with spare drums behind acoustic guitars and a subtle bassline. In Finn’s words, it “was a real good vibe, and it was fun to spend more time with Adam.”

Finn didn’t start work on Lousy With Ghosts until after he had written lyrics for the album, and found himself still wanting to learn more about the people he was writing about. “Lousy With Ghosts was a really fun project for me,” he says. “If you’re really doing a lot of character development, what you’re able to show is only the tip of the iceberg, but you may understand his motivations. You only have, what, 20 lines in a song or something, so you can’t explain it all, but you sort of paint this picture. The book and just writing, writing, writing helped me develop the story and the characters in a better way, I think, than I’ve ever done before.”

If Always Been is Craig Finn’s most novelistic work to date, it’s worth wondering whether he’s thinking about going all-in and writing a novel that’s unconnected to a musical project. He wouldn’t be the first musician to do so: Josh Ritter, John Darnielle, and Joe Pernice, among others, have published fiction in the last decade. “It is my goal to write a novel,” Finn admits. “It’s hard, because I am a social person. So, I think that collaboration on music and songs and stuff drives me a little bit, and sitting down in front of the keyboard, it’s a different discipline, and it doesn’t have the payoff of getting to go drink a bunch of beers with your friends.”

Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Following Craig Finn’s Trail of Curiosity

The Hold Steady bandleader spoke with Paste about the intersection of mortals and divinity, building a world within a batch of songs, and working with Adam Granduciel on his great new solo album, Always Been.