Craig Finn is the
best lyricist working in music right now, and has been for years.
As leader of The
Hold Steady (one of the best rock bands around) for 12 years, Finn has
perfected a way of crafting characters and the world they inhabit with a
specificity and generosity that dwarfs anything any other musician (save
perhaps Pete Townshend) can claim. His songs and albums are like David Foster
Wallace novels or John Cassavetes films in miniature – they're populated by
vibrant, broken, hopeful characters with unconventional names like Charlemagne
or Hallelujah. The characters live in run-down cities; towns where everyone
drinks and smokes their way through the days, and find only fleeting comforts
in the touch of other humans. And Finn makes it all sound beautiful.
Faith in the Future,
Finn's second solo album, continues his streak of incredible lyricism while adopting
a warmer tone than the one he usually employs with The Hold Steady. The album
is more acoustic and intimate then any in his band's catalogue, but it hits
just as hard. In Finn's hand, a pen can cut you as surgically as a scalpel or
just smash you like a hammer.
Finn is cut from
the same cloth as Jack Kerouac, another devotee to the down and out, and he
imbibes his stories with the same warmth and humanity Kerouac sought to. He
loves his characters, even if he can't save them. Just listen to the
devastating, "Sarah, Calling From A Hotel," a Spanish guitar-tinged
ode to a woman who may or may not have been killed by a boyfriend. When he
sings, "The last thing she said to me,/before she hung up the phone/was,
'Here he comes./Oh god,/ I gotta go.'" What happens next is left up to the
listener to suss out from the hints in Finn's lyrics, but the song's power come
from the way it connects to the listener. The song is not about being in that
same situation, but rather being helplessly connected to someone and unable to
help them. It's a devastating song, and an album highlight.
Loneliness runs
deep in Finn's characters, and no matter where they go they can't seem to
escape. The narrator in "Going To A Show," looks for solace in the
same crowds at the bars and concerts, and usually comes up empty. "I try so hard not to talk to myself,/
but it's hard cause I'm always alone," he laments, in tones that would be
perfectly recognizable to the singer of the classic, "One for My
Baby." Finn beautifully taps into the melancholic quest for connections,
and rare times one hits pay dirt.
Aside from Bruce
Springsteen, I can't think of another musician who taps into their Catholic
roots as deeply as Finn does. From lines like, "No, I've never been
crucified,/ I've never suffered and died. /Never been shot, /but I've been lied
to a lot," from "Newmyer's Roof," to "St. Peter Upside
Down," Finn mines the history of the church and its power to explore the
things people believe in to get through a life on the downslide.
Faith in the Future
isn't a somber album, though it might seem that way. The people Finn sings
about are fully realized, and are not any one thing. And the music stays in the
70's rock vein of The Hold Steady, while getting a little more polish than
we've come to expect from their bar-rock grunginess. One could practically be
swaddled in the gentle tones of the warm acoustic chords and comforting echo of
the underlying guitar lines on "Newmyer's."
And grace can be
found, if one looks enough. Finn taps into Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks on the simple, sublimely gorgeous
"Christine." The song may well be the most romantic thing Finn has
ever written, and that's saying something. It's all acoustic guitars, simple
bass lines and harmonies, and can just floor you. "Everyone wants
something,/I just want Christine," he sings with the lovelorn hope of a
drowning man who might have just found his life raft. Finn has never been this
bare or open before, and man, does it work.
The only hope,
the only thing Finn and his characters put their faith in, is each other and
that's what makes his work so powerful. After all, everybody is searching for
people they can be themselves with. And if that doesn't work, there's always music.
As Finn wisely observed before, heartbreak hurts but you can dance it off. As
for me, my faith is in Finn. He hasn't let me down yet.
Faith in the Future is out on Partisan.
Also recommended this week:
Gary Clark Jr.'s
soul-heavy sophomore album, The Story of
Sonny Boy Slim.
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