Welcome to the long weekend! Let’s get things kicked off with the second review of a 2025 release in the last three albums. It’s almost like I just keep buying new music, or something…
Disc 1850 is…Always Been
Artist: Craig Finn
Year of Release: 2025
What’s up with the Cover? I’m not sure you could be a rock star and look less like a rock star than Craig Finn.
Here he looks like a guy travelling to a regional meeting of chartered accountants, and getting his photo taken near his airport hotel on his way to the convention centre.
How I Came To Know It: Craig Finn is also the lead singer and creative force behind the band, “The Hold Steady”. My friend Chris got me into the Hold Steady with a birthday present one year (thanks, Chris!) and from there I followed the breadcrumbs to Finn’s solo career.
How It Stacks Up: I have two Craig Finn solo albums. I’m on the lookout for four more but the “how it stacks up” section strictly stacks against albums currently in-hand. Of the two that currently qualify I put “Always Been” in at #1. Which is saying something, considering the other album (“A Legacy of Rentals”) made my Top 10 list of 2022.
Ratings: 4 stars
Somewhere in between the troubadour taletelling of a country singer and the artsy phrasing of a spoken word performer likes the artistry of Craig Finn. The two genres aren’t as far apart as they may appear – you can catch both in a dive bar, both tell stories about characters that are down on their luck, and the main difference is the prevalence of guitar vs. piano, and whether people applaud of snap their fingers between numbers.
Finn walks this thin and dusty line, subsumed into his characters in a way that would rival a method actor. Listening to “Always Been” is to experience Finn disappearing into his stories so completely that you’ll feel like you’re in a virtual reality game (minus the sports and gunfights).
Finn has a warbling and angst-ridden tone that tells you something is being pinched when he sings – usually the conscience or emotional wellbeing of his characters.
Or for most of “Always Been” a single character, and facets and moments from his life. There is a bit of exploration of other folks but for the most part this record is a loose concept album about one man’s emotionally complex life. Finn lets you figure it out for yourself through specific images and moments, rather than a biography, so you have to piece things together.
Near as I can tell our fella is a fallen priest who struggles with his emotions, some PTSD and drugs. Somewhere near the end he gets born again, cleaned up, and watches others not as fortunate in navigating the dark night of the soul end of lost or dead.
You feel the wounds of our ordinary hero in real time. Wince alongside him at his wounds - some self-inflicted, some just the wear of moving through a harsh world – and emerge from the other end, glad to have survived and maybe a little sadder and wiser.
Along the way you will be treated to the mastery of the written and spoken word that is Craig Finn. Finn is a born poet, and he crafts lyrics that transport you with precise imagery and emotional precision, without ever feeling unnecessarily clever. Finn reminds us that there is another level to songwriting. Townes found it, Dylan found it, and Finn deserves his place in that same conversation.
Sometimes it is a small selection of lines that grab you, like these from “Bethany”:
“Drifted through the rituals
Prideful high and pitiful
Pissing off a petty vengeful god.”
Other times, it is the storyline of our character that draws us, as in “The Man I’ve Always Been”:
“There’s men that want to lead you into battle
There’s men that want to hold you down in bed
When I finally left Seattle
I was haunted by the needle
That city always held above my head”
That internal assonance, and delayed rhyme scheme is vintage Craig Finn, and you’ll get a lot of it on this record and, frankly, all his others. It lends itself to narrative tension and gut-punch lines at the end of each stanza.
There will be a lot of this, and a lot to pay attention to, but
the payoff is worth the effort. You don’t read Nabokov just for the story, you
read Nabokov to soak in the mastery of language, and that’s the same when listening
to Craig Finn. If you don’t want to do that – if you prefer a “good banger”
where what the singer is going on about is secondary to the melody – then you
will not like this album as much as I do. You have been warned.
For me, however, this stuff is pure gold. I listened to “Always Been” a good four times in a row this week, and the stories just got more and more compelling with each iteration. Will this be good enough to land on 2025’s top 10? Too soon to tell, but it’s a contender.
Best tracks: Bethany, Crumbs, The Man I’ve Always Been, A Man Needs a Vocation, I Walk With a Cane, Clayton
No comments:
Post a Comment