![]() “The first year I went to them, they were terrifying, and that was part of the appeal. “I said, ‘No, I think that’s going to be too hard for me.’ He said, ‘Well, do you like the Replacements’ album Stink?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s my favourite one.’ He said, ‘I’ll make you a tape.’ And then I realised I was already listening to something like hardcore.”įinn has mythologised his teenage hardcore years in song repeatedly with the Hold Steady, but the “all ages hardcore matinee shows” of 'Massive Nights' made a profound impact. And then another kid at school suggested he try Black Flag. The John the Baptists for him were the Replacements, who sang about streets he knew, places he went. Now that doesn’t make any sense to me, but at the time it was just the two things that I liked”). He’d loved the Bay City Rollers as a kid, then made his way haphazardly into music fandom (“I got my dad to take me to see Styx, and there was a point where my two favourite bands were Styx and the Ramones. I guess I felt there are so many people in this new world that visiting them for a song at a time might be more interesting than putting them through a number of phases.”įinn’s life was changed as a teenager, in the suburbs of Minneapolis, by hardcore punk. “ Crocodile Dundee 3 doesn’t have the power of the first one, and I say that having watched it within the last few years, and realising that it was made 13 years after even Crocodile Dundee 2. “With the Hold Steady, I felt I couldn’t continue on with the characters without it seeming like a sequel,” he says. The solo records return to the character-based writing Finn had largely eschewed on the last two Hold Steady albums, Heaven Is Whenever and Teeth Dreams, even if his characters now are often very different from the recurring figures who peopled his songs for so long. Some of them aren’t necessarily romantic, but they’re teams of people trying to complete something.” But the thing is that if you talk to people you hear them say, ‘We’re such a good team - we get the kids to school on time.’ And so a lot of these songs concern two people. At my age - 45 - some of those are unravelling. ![]() If you are 28, you have that summer where you go to nine weddings. I don’t want to say it’s a cynical view of love, because I think there’s beauty in making those partnerships and making teams, but it’s not the Disney version of love. “A lot of the songs are about people making partnerships or uneasy alliances to get through the world. “I think this is the modern love album,” he says of the new record. He’s gone, though, from writing about the teenagers in the clubs, to the adults who have to negotiate the grey areas in life. Finn’s writing - hyperactive, dripping with internal rhymes and allusions both biblical and pop cultural, often telling the stories of individuals placed in situations just beyond the edge of their control - has been the linking thread in both bands and solo. It’s the kind of story that might have turned into one of Finn’s songs, with Lifter Puller, with the rock & roll band the Hold Steady, who gave him a career, or maybe even one of this three, rather more measured solo albums, the latest of which – We All Want the Same Things – comes out on March 24. Usually I’m just the guy jacking off in the background.’” What he said in reply to that was the best. It wasn’t like something you might say if you met an actor. Then - and I don’t know why I said this, other than to try to be conversational – I said, ‘Is there anything I might have seen you in?’ It just came out of my mouth. Do you do a lot of that?’ He said, ‘Well, I’m trying to break in to it.’ We talked a little bit about it, and he said he mainly had to go out to California for it. I don’t know why, but I felt I needed to acknowledge his performance on screen. “Near the end of the night I find myself in a conversation with said guy. They’re cheering - I can’t work out why - and then I realise the obese guy is at the party. At some point, people start cheering, and I look up, and now on these monitors it’s no longer geriatric people having sex, it’s an immense man, an obese man, and a normal sized woman. But we get some drinks, and we’re settling in, talking to a few people. When we got there, they were playing geriatric porn. “We got invited to this party once the fight was cleared up, and they’ve got these TV monitors up. It was like everyone in the club knew what side of the fight they were on, and they were all fighting, except us, and the cops came.”Ĭraig Finn, back home in Brooklyn on a short break from his US tour alongside Japandroids, is remembering one of the stranger nights with the scratchy, squealing Minnesota quartet he fronted in the declining years of the last century and at the very start of this one. It was this club’s first night open, and it was crazy. “Lifter Puller played a show in Albuquerque and there was a huge fight at the show.
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