By Claas Reiners
Lake Street Bar is one of many bars in Brooklyn’s hip Greenpoint neighborhood. The bar’s name refers to a popular nightlife in Minneapolis, hometown of Craig Finn and Bobby Drake (drummer of The Hold Steady and pub co-owner).
The city on the Mississippi plays an important role in Craig Finn’s work. Again and again the protagonists of his songs return to the Twin City and visit the places where Finn spent his formative years. There he was socialized and influenced by local bands like Hüsker Dü or the Replacements. Other owners of the bar include Spoon bassist Rob Pope and former Freedom Fighters frontman Frank Bevan. Finn has lived in the neighborhood for over ten years and is a regular, greeted by the night’s bartender.
Craig Finn dares a fresh start
It is true that very few of the protagonists from Finn’s songs hang around in bars these days, they are usually too old, too poor or either getting up early or coming home late from work keeps them from doing so, but they certainly visited such bars, when they were young and looking to the future with confidence. That’s why Finn’s second solo album, which was the beginning of a trilogy, was called “Faith In The Future”. However, this confidence of the people was disappointed in the songs, as could be heard on the following two albums.
In any case, the fifth album “A Legacy Of Rentals” does not expand the trilogy into a quartet, but stands for a new beginning, as Finn knows to report after ordering a beer: “The music should be even more cinematic and tell a story. I mean, all my albums have those elements, but this time I wanted it to feel like Gone with the Wind, like a big movie. And then slightly different topics flowed into the lyrics than was the case with me before. On the other hand, I worked with the same producer and with the same people in the band, but still it’s not a repeat, not a fourth part, it’s a first part.”
The title A Legacy Of Rentals has multiple meanings for Finn, who recently celebrated his 50th birthday and lost a close friend early in the pandemic. Most importantly, he’s now at an age and in a situation where he inevitably begins to worry that he won’t be around forever. “How do we remember people who’ve gone, places we’ve seen, the hometown I don’t live in anymore. We don’t own any of it, just our bodies, the rest is on temporary lease if you will,” Finn explains the title.
No religiousness
The unanswered question that arises in this context is who rents our lives from? The only logical answer to that would be by time. Everyone is only on this earth for a certain amount of time. What happened before and after depends on each individual’s spirituality. Although Craig Finn had a certain Catholic upbringing, which played a not inconsiderable part in the early The Hold Steady works, Finn never resorts to religiosity in his solo songs. The protagonists are simply too disillusioned for this to still believe in a god who gives them life or can even take it away. That’s why they feel like their legacy doesn’t belong to them, it’s just rented. So they try to beautify their past to make themselves feel better. It’s very sad, but also very true.
Craig Finn is a prolific songwriter. For the lyrics of the first four albums of his band The Hold Steady he needed only four years before the process got stuck and the breaks between the albums became longer and finally were filled with solo albums. For several years now, new albums by The Hold Steady and solo records have alternated regularly. “A Legacy Of Rentals” is actually Finn’s fifth work under his own name. It was again produced by Josh Kaufmann, who has been involved with Finn’s previous albums and most recently worked as a musician on the recordings of Taylor Swift’s albums Folklore and Evermore. For Craig Finn, Kaufmann is now something like a musical partner who has a significant influence on the music with his ideas.
On the last albums, the Americana outfit, which still forms the basic structure of the songs, was opposed by a lot of wind instruments, this time the use was essentially limited to a saxophone solo in “Birthday”. Instead, the focus is on a lot of electronic gimmicks, a 14-piece string orchestra and the use of a drum machine. The musical progression isn’t that great though, leaving enough room for Finn’s voice and lyrics to keep it unmistakably a Craig Finn album.
“That was my intention, I didn’t want to try something completely new, but I also didn’t want to repeat myself.” Finn, on the other hand, keeps the approach as a writer of short stories to music on this album. While the last album “I Need A New War” was about people who, despite their everyday worries, their bad jobs and bad decisions in life, kept their heads up and tried to make the best of their situation, most of the tracks revolve around “A Legacy Of Rentals”, on the other hand, is about memories in the broadest sense. “A lot of people on the album try to forget what happened in the past. But their own memories and the memories of other people are holding them back.”
How memories determine our identity
This overarching theme was inspired by David Carr’s book A Night With A Gun. Like Finn, David Carr was from Minneapolis and was heavily addicted to drugs before becoming a journalist for the New York Times, befriending Finn and writing about his drug experiences in the book. In one chapter, the author recalled a night when he was threatened with a gun by a friend after an argument, only to find out during the comeback that it was he himself who had pointed a gun at his friend. “I thought about things like that a lot when making the album,” Finn clarifies, elaborating on “how memories shape our own identity. Even small discrepancies can change our foundation, and if at some point we learn the truth or a different perspective, everything can collapse.”
A completely different kind of memory is dealt with in the already mentioned “Birthday”. The song’s narrator talks to one of his few remaining family members, maybe a cousin, but certainly not a close relative, Finn claims, saying, “Every family has its own culture of remembrance. It also has a lot to do with genes, you resemble your father, your children resemble you. And that brings us to mental health, that’s what “Family Farm” (the The Hold Steady song) is about, a lot of my songs have been about it lately, because a lot of people that are close to me are struggling with it. More than me, anyway, and that fascinates and scares me in equal measure.”
Craig Finn and storytelling
This time, Finn wrote short stories about his songs to accompany the lyrics. The idea behind it was that “A Legacy Of Rentals” should be even more storytelling than the previous albums. That sounds a bit strange, because there is hardly a songwriter in the music business at the moment who sets stories to music as consistently as Craig Finn does. First with his band The Hold Steady, which was about a big story of redemption and forgiveness of three young protagonists. Later, on his solo albums, it was more like small everyday observations packed into short stories.
Still, Finn doesn’t see himself as a budding writer: “What I really enjoy is working with my producer, Josh. I think it’s great to take a song to him and talk to him about it. Writing, on the other hand, is pretty lonely. I would like to write more stories, but when I write something, it usually becomes a song. I’m trying to teach myself how to do it, but I can’t say if it’ll work out. At the moment I can think of many more songs.”
Ten of them made it onto “A Legacy Of Rentals”. Two songs are about different car accidents and a total of four songs feature an aquarium. Finn laughs and admits, “Every dealer used to have an aquarium. Even on ‘The Wire’ one keeps popping up. In the very first song I wrote for the album, I used the line every dealer has a fishtank. And then it stuck in my head. A lot of people in small towns want to break out, the aquarium is a metaphor for that.”
For a brief moment during the making of the album, there was room to use the word in the title. But this idea was quickly dropped. Otherwise, the album cover should have written the word “Finn” next to the English word “fishtank”, which is very close to the word for “fin” in English. “That would have been too much of a good thing,” Craig explains with a smile over a last sip of beer.
Craif Finn on tour 2022
- 09/18/2022 BERLIN, COLUMBIAHALLE (LOST EVENINGS V WITH FRANK TURNER)
- 09/19/2022 HAMBURG, NOCHTWACHE
- 09/20/2022 COLOGNE, BLUE SHELL