First premise: Playing in a band with Craig Finn must be hard. His songs are elaborate stories that demand a listener’s attention, but his melodies are often static, sometimes drifting toward speaking (or yelling). Instrumentation must be interesting enough to shape the melody, but not wholly upstage the narrative.
His main band, the Hold Steady, are an iconic alternative/heartland group because the instrumentalists weave around and embellish his outlandish tales. “Hornets! Hornets!”, the lead track on their magnum opus Separation Sunday, mostly features Finn screaming at the listener with the group shaping the melody and the drama on his behalf. Melodically, it shouldn’t be a great song, but the band makes it so.
Second Premise: Finn’s songwriting has focused on small stories throughout his solo career. Gone are the elaborate, spiritual parties of the Hold Steady. Instead, the narratives dwell on nostalgia, pointless jobs, hangovers, and impending divorces. At their best, these stories end with James Joycean epiphanies (“God in Chicago”, “Grant at Galena”) or devastating turns of events (“Be Honest”, “Messing with the Settings”), finding the same spiritual highs as the Hold Steady without the drugs and good times.
So, one can assess a Craig Finn album on two axes: how well the instrumentation supports his unique songwriting voice and how frequently he touches the divine through his songwriting. Always Been, his sixth solo effort, is a mix of both.
Sometimes, the two dimensions come together beautifully. An early winner is “Crumbs”, which tells the story of a gently dissolving marriage via small, angular details. The ensemble, led by Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs, punctuates the narrative to bring a quiet story to high drama. The group’s dynamic range adds pace and depth to the story, turning the story into raw emotion. The refrain hits hard the first time and means something new the last time.
Other standouts on Always Been include “Shamrock”, which channels Bruce Springsteen‘s Nebraska with a crime ballad over sparse instrumentation, the kind of track that distills the subject’s isolation into a sonic experience. There’s also “Fletcher’s”, a spoken-word track that dwells on that feeling of thinking you should be somewhere else, but you have to come to terms with staying wherever you are. The instrumentation on “Fletcher’s” is almost indifferent to the narrative, with no significant changes to punctuate Finn’s zingers, like how the city you live in doesn’t do anything when you decide to stay or leave.
In other instances, Granduciel’s production interferes with Finn’s narratives. Judging this album feels more like judging the War on Drugs than Craig Finn. The drum loops at the front of the mix that define War on Drugs songs like “In Chains”, “Holding On”, “An Ocean Between the Waves”, and “Harmonia’s Dream” leave very little sonic or mental space for anything else.
That is a lethal combination when combined with Finn’s percussive vocal delivery. “Luke and Leanna” is the worst offender on Always Been; the drum loop is paired with a mind-numbing, repeating synth riff. Meanwhile, Finn speaks in sentences broken in half, which might be construed as verses in a song with any momentum or structure. Instead, with both singer and band operating in a straight line, the track forgoes dynamics and narrative and is merely abrasive.
Craig Finn would always sing like Craig Finn; the trouble is that Granduciel seems caught off guard by this. Gone are the moments of bar-band drama brought by the Hold Steady or even the jazz-inflected dynamic playing of producer Josh Kaufmann and drummer Joe Russo (who supported efforts like 2019’s remarkable I Need a New War). Instead, the repetition of Granduciel’s style leaves tracks like “People of Substance” or “A Man Needs a Vocation” to flail in search of a connection to the emotional core that their characters claim to have.
For his part, Finn delivers the typical fare of his solo records: small stories of people at dead ends who sometimes find a glimmer of hope. He is at his strongest when his characters are teetering on the edge of revelation, and he sometimes reproduces this feeling on Always Been, particularly on “Bethany”, the aforementioned “Crumbs”, and “Postcards”, on which songwriter Sam Fender supplies an excellent backing vocal.
Other tracks, like “The Man I’ve Always Been”, struggle to differentiate themselves from the legions of similar stories on Finn’s records. They will satisfy only the dedicated fans looking for new versions of old favorites. That is the story of Always Been (a more self-reflexive title than it intends to be): an LP that finds Finn doing what he usually does, sometimes as spectacularly as he usually does it, but with little to make it stand out from other iterations.
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