All These Little Molecules Add Up to Something Beautiful: Finding Good in the World with Craig Finn

Craig Finn / Photos courtesy of Craig Finn

Naturally, when I meet him, Craig Finn is wearing a Minnesota Twins baseball cap. Finn’s a vocal baseball fan, and, as anyone with even a casual interest in the music he’s been releasing for close to two decades might surmise, he’s still fiercely loyal to his home state. This year, as it happens, the Twins are having an unusually good season. They’re within striking distance of making the playoffs, and Finn is, of course, following closely. It’s “gotten me way more into baseball as a whole,” he says after he greets me warmly and we find a place to sit in the coffee shop by his apartment where he’s chosen to meet. “When your team’s playing pretty well, you pay more attention to the other teams, too.” As a fan of the long-beleaguered but recently excellent Pittsburgh Pirates, I can relate, and we chat about baseball for a while because Craig Finn’s the kind of guy with whom you want to chat about baseball—or music, or books, or just life itself, for that matter.

That said, there’s not much baseball—or much Minnesota, even—on Craig Finn’s new solo album, Faith in the Future, released September 11 (try his contribution to baseball-themed indie rock supergroup The Baseball Project instead). But there’s plenty of musing about life itself, as well as a few motifs that will be familiar to fans of Finn’s main band, The Hold Steady. His music is, as always, full of couples who are down on their luck or who don’t quite connect, portraits of worn out Americana and confused Catholics, and the enduring presence of magazines and live shows. Yet there’s something more personal about it, too, even compared to his previous solo album, 2012’s Clear Heart Full Eyes.

Written in the wake of Finn’s mother’s death, the songs on Faith in the Future all exist within a similar emotional space, one that is broadly observant of the world, pensive, and ultimately hopeful. “All your little molecules add up to something beautiful,” Finn triumphantly declares on “Roman Guitars,” offering up the album’s tacit thesis of quiet appreciation. Compared to the bombast of The Hold Steady, this music comes across more like a thoughtful chat with a friend—perhaps most of all on the most directly first-person songs, “Newmeyer’s Roof,” which describes Finn’s reaction to 9/11, and closer “I Was Doing Fine (Then a Few People Died),” a song about grieving that takes the form of the type of late night bar conversation you can imagine Finn is particularly good at. Yet if anything that shift is something fans should appreciate.

“I mean, like, let’s be honest, a lot of people will hear solo album and be like ‘my ears have shut off.’ I’ve done it too. But it’s a way to keep working,” Finn told me at one point, adding that he’d love to put out an album every year. Let’s hope he does: Finn’s music may not seem as novel at this point in his career, but it’s consistently excellent, and that’s probably more impressive. Faith in the Future is yet another testament to his role as one of America’s most perceptive and consistently rewarding contemporary songwriters. Craig Finn is someone from whom you always want to hear more.

Continued below…

Noisey: Do people write you crazy theories about your lyrics?
Craig Finn: Sometimes people over-dissect them. Like “that guy knows that guy, who knows that guy,” and it’s like, I didn’t think of that! Maybe! A lot of people really want to know, the one that came up a lot was on Separation Sunday, Holly, a lot of people thought that was them. Not a lot, but a few people thought that was them specifically, and I was like “no, that’s something I kind of made up.” People spend a lot of time with it, but it’s kind of why I do certain things: Some of these things are meant to be gifts to the person who listens 75 times. Little in-jokes, things that appeal to the obsessive. Because that’s how I was when I was a kid. I’d just go over these lyrics. I believed, even when it wasn’t there, that all lyrics had sort of coded messages. Because a lot of them were coming from a different universe, and there wasn’t any internet, so you were trying to figure things out. I especially remember British bands, they just had a different language, so to speak. The Clash would say “STEN guns in Knightsbridge,” and I’d be like I just don’t even know what that is. I don’t know. I know that Knightsbridge is a part of London maybe, STEN gun is like a machine gun, I think. It took me years to figure out what that was. Even “London’s burning, dial 999,” I didn’t know that’s their 911. It was like “oh yeah, you dial 999 just for the hell of it? Or you send up a weird message to all the other punks and everybody runs out of their house?” I don’t know. I was young. But it’s trying to share that kind of obsession that I had for things.

And that’s harder to do now because you can just go online and Google what something means. You have Rap Genius.
You have that. Although I have looked at that for the Hold Steady. Some of it’s amazing, and some of it’s inaccurate. But the internet’s always going to be like that. Wikipedia’s like that, too.

Let’s talk about this album you’re putting out. It’s cool. I like it.
Thank you. I’m really excited about it. As an artist, you’re always like “It’s way different!” And it’s only like four percent different, you know? But because it’s new it feels different, and this one does feel a little different to me. The songs are all kind of narratives, and we made a lot of decisions based on that. Even though the drums can be hotter on a few songs, there’s no sticks. It was just brushes and mallets the whole way because we found that that interferes with the vocals less. There’s almost no cymbals. We really tried to get the stories to come through. That was the sonic goal.

At the beginning of the process I met with Josh, the producer, and I was like “I really want to make something that’s elegant and hopeful.” By elegant I mean sort of age appropriate, you know? I’m 44. I wanted something that was dignified. I hope it’s hopeful, I hope it’s optimistic. I probably pushed it a little that way by naming it Faith in the Future. Not all the characters are in great situations during songs, but I do think it’s hopeful.

That word “elegant” is really interesting. Because it must change. You have to ask yourself, “how can I be an artist with poise at different points as I grow older?”
Absolutely. The Hold Steady started, and pretty early on in the band I went through a divorce. And I felt like all right, well, I tried a little bit to do a traditional thing, and it didn’t work. So now I’m going to reject traditionalism as well. I’m going to go on tour; I’m going to throw beer around. And that was fine. That’s what I needed to do at 33, but at 44 I don’t feel like throwing beer on anyone—or at least very rarely. But I still feel like writing songs, and writing songs is still sort of my reaction to my life. It’s how I process all the things that happen to me or around me. In some ways it’s a sparse record, and that goes back to what I sort of think is elegant as well.

The other thing is, I feel like you’re always looking back. A lot of the Hold Steady stuff I was 33 looking back at the interesting things of being 20. And now at 44 I’m not sure I can see back to 20, but I can see back to 30, and there’s interesting things about that. I think that really great songwriters— Bruce Springsteen, someone who I obviously look up to—to write songs about adults is the particular challenge and one I’m very interested in. Because adulthood is complex and scary and sad in the same way that being 19 is. And maybe it’s less fun, but maybe there’s also some bigger questions.

I’m 26, and I feel like I’m just beginning to grapple with adulthood. That was something that I heard in there and I feel like I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, is acceptance. Like, this thing happened and it’s good or it’s bad, but I’m just going to accept it. It is a thing.
There isn’t a lot of judgment on the record. My mom passed away in April of 2013. I was with her. It was very sad, of course, but it was not without its moments of beauty, seeing someone leave, after living a good life. But I got back here and, predictably, I had grief that I was dealing with and struggling through, and I just kind of started to not do anything. Taking my laundry in would be like a day. And I was like, this isn’t going to get any better unless I start doing something. So I started just punching the clock and writing songs. Going to the space and saying “I’m going to write one or two songs before I leave this room.”

And you’re able to do that?
Yeah, I’m able to do that more and more. Some of it you go into with a plan, and some of it reveals itself to you. I didn’t write—I still haven’t written—a song about my mom passing or anything like that. That’s just sort of too big. But when I look back, a lot of the songs I wrote were about people persevering after tragedy or change. So there was sort of this thing about faith in the future, just going to work. And I started thinking about it a lot. Almost without exception, very few people give up. Most people are like “I’m going to go to my job today, and I’m going to go do what I do because I think if I do, things get better.” In the case of people that are single, I feel like love plays some role in this. People get up and go out on Friday night in part to drink beers with their friends, but in part because there’s something out there. And even after finding a committed relationship—I live with a woman—I think that love is part of this thing we’re looking for in the future. On the record there’s a song about going to a show and wanting to see something awesome. And it’s not always awesome. But I’m going to go to shows probably ’til I die. I still go out a lot, and mainly alone. Because a couple times a year you’ll see something that just blows your mind, and it feels really good.

There’s a line on “Newmeyer’s Roof”—even though you said this album is not about your mom—it feels really clearly about grief. It’s “yeah we were frightened / yeah we were drinking.” I read your story of that day—that you sat on your friend’s roof during 9/11 drinking beers and watched the towers fall—and you said that it’s kind of fucked up to look back on it, but it’s also like how else are you going to process something?
We were out of work. And also I really believe that in moments like that, like 9/11, there’s just no emotion to access. You’re not processing it. It just didn’t seem weird to be drinking beer—it was 9:30 in the morning, keep in mind. It wasn’t like we were doing this at 4 PM. Or we were, still, but yeah, we were drinking all day. It was very scary. My girlfriend was in the tower—we weren’t dating then—but she says the same thing. Like 9/11 comes around every year, and there’s all these tributes and everything, and she’s like “I can’t connect the same; I can’t feel the way that I’m supposed to feel.”

There’s this thing with grief, that I’ve had anyway, where you’ll be almost mad at yourself, like “why am I processing this like this? This seems almost disrespectful to be doing this thing I’m doing.”
Right! Like drinking a full bottle of wine the night before mom’s funeral by myself. It’s like “she wouldn’t want this!” But like, then, that’s just how—it’s like “this doesn’t seem very appropriate,” but then it is. Or just not being totally 100 percent consumed by it. Just being like “well, I’m going to go to this baseball game because that sounds fun.” And you feel guilt about that. The other thing is, I always say there’s nothing about my mom in the record, and I was looking back and the first line on the whole record is “there’s a darkness in my body.” Which, she passed away from cancer, so obviously it’s on my mind.

We were talking earlier about how the audience for the Hold Steady is so male. What do you think it is in that music that appeals so much to dudes?
Rock music as a whole is just not what it used to be in terms of audience and the big picture. When I was growing up, if you sort of didn’t care about music, you were into jam bands because there was just a scene where you could take drugs. Those people are into EDM now. With rock, a lot of who’s holding onto it is males over 30. I think with the Hold Steady, we’re a believable band to a lot of people because we are pretty normal. I also think there’s a nerdiness to it, an obsession that appeals to males. My girlfriend has this thing where she’s like “I don’t like when you guys go out and start doing the listing, like sometimes you guys just say names to each other. You just say names, and there’s not even a verb.” All these musicians and sports people. There are women who are obsessive about things, and there are women in our audience, of course, but I think some of that obsession is male. I think it has to do with rock and roll, too, just where rock and roll is right now, it doesn’t have all its power and glory. Although it’s funny I still meet kids all the time who are like 20 and really into rock.

Kids now idolize Nirvana. It’s not a huge generation gap, but it’s kind of the way I guess people my age looked at Jimi Hendrix.
It’s the same thing. I was born in ’71, so Hendrix was dead, and do you know how many Jimi Hendrix T-shirts were in the halls of my high school? A lot. Now it’s Nirvana T-shirts. Even kids that like the rest of their thing is like hip-hop, Nirvana is this thing. And I’m old enough that like Nirvana was cool to me, like I was excited when they came out that they had all that mainstream success, but I was already deep into other things. It almost took him dying in some way to cement the legacy, it feels like. He never made a bad record.

It’s different, but it is impressive, like we were talking about, for an artist to get older and do things that still feel age appropriate.
Especially the way music is covered now, you have a record arc. A lot of people it’s like the second record comes and people are like “I need something new. Something new, something new.” So having longevity and sticking around is a harder and harder goal. I’m more and more impressed by the people who can do it, by the people who do do it. Because I think it’s difficult. But it is just like putting in a body of work. You look at Dylan: There was a time in my Dylan fandom where it was like, oh, those 80s Dylan records are awful because they have those cheesy drum sounds on them. And now it’s like well, it’s still Bob Dylan, let me put that one on. And I’m sure glad he made ’em. I think of, like, this Titus Andronicus record came out, it’s a triple record. And I started to get really annoyed when I’d see people online being like “it’s too long; could have been a great single record.” That’s the easiest thing in the world to say. Of course he knew what he was doing when he made a triple record! The Clash had the same thing when they made Sandinista, but in 2015 I’m sure glad that that’s a three-record set because I have that many more Clash songs that I can put on. And I’m glad for all of them.

Kyle Kramer is an editor at Noisey. Follow at Noisey.