Craig Finn is the poet laureate of people who just can’t make it work. His songs are full of burnouts and failures, hard drinkers and rough sleepers, the lagging and the left behind. Their successes evaporate, and their mistakes linger. The narrator of “God in Chicago” has to move a baseball-sized package of heroin left behind by his dead friend Charlie. Every part of the deal—his unemployment, his busted car, the dealer who ruined his chance at college—reminds him of how poorly his life has gone. He makes the trip with Charlie’s sister, they sell the drugs, they get drunk and spend the night together. By the time they get home, she’s sobbing. There is no escape, no solution, no catharsis, and he knows it. “This isn’t the movies.”
This unsentimental compassion, with its humanistic care for those making wrong but necessary choices, is maybe my favorite thing about Finn’s music, but then there’s a lot to like. He’s been making music for more than 30 years with the bands Lifter Puller and the Hold Steady, and he’s been putting out a solo record every two or three years since 2012. Deploying a distinctly novelistic irony, he allows his listener to indulge alongside his characters, and then pulls back to survey the wreckage.
In other words, he’s a storyteller. Musical storytellers balance prose and poetry: Too much of the former, and the beauty is lost; too much of the latter, and no one can follow the story. The particular admixture differs artist to artist. Townes Van Zandt could turn a perfect phrase. Warren Zevon wedded bitter humor with blinding moments of self-revelation. Joanna Newsom presents her narratives through a river of language, winding its way between puns, internal rhymes, and mythic touchstones. Yet in a song like “Only Skin,” the appearance of Sisyphus, the atom bomb, and Saul Bellow is used to speak to the battle between romantic and familial love in the life of two sisters. From her vantage in the cosmos, she drops a thread down to earth. Finn presents resonant references—John Berryman’s suicide, Led Zeppelin III, the Grain Belt Beer sign and the Book of Revelation—in a plainspoken style, conveying transcendent ideas through embodied language. The seeming normality of his characters allow the abnormality of their experiences to approach the mystical.
Along with fellow subculture survivors John K. Samson and John Darnielle, Finn mines musical pathos from the struggles of his characters, delivered in the space and form of a song. We might identify these lyrics with the singer, or assign them to a character. But in the best story-songs, a listener senses that something larger than the music has been created: a life, a way of being in the world. They make us feel, even before we really clock what is being said. Samson tells the stories of people on the outs with the world: rural loners, sanatorium inmates, migrant workers cast about by the boom and bust of the fossil fuel economy. He sings for the defeated, forced to turn to the stuff of their everyday lives for consolation—hence the strong political edge. Darnielle’s cosmology has a broader imaginative range, inhabiting the lives of prehistoric humans and extinct animals. Yet his most famous songs are about abuse, and loss, and the loneliness of the drug addicted, grounding even his wildest flights in an abiding humanity.
Both songwriters transform idle listening into an active experience: of empathy, compassion, identification. These are the stock in trade of certain kinds of realist fiction, with the close attention to the hard stuff of life, and it makes sense that all three have taken various stabs at literature. Samson has described himself as “a bit of a thwarted fiction writer,” and Darnielle has now put out three novels, to wide acclaim. Finn has taken stabs at fiction writing in the past, and now he has put out a collection of short stories, entitled Lousy With Ghosts. This slim book accompanies Finn’s latest album, Always Been, a widescreen LA record full of big synths and soaring guitars courtesy of producer Adam Granduciel. It’s also a narrative cycle, telling the stories of a group of interconnected characters. At the center is a man named Nathan, a veteran, divorcee, and one-time pastor now wasting away at the end of a bar in a seaside town. Handsome, charismatic, and handy with a miracle, he had a shot at the big time, once, with a group of developers planning a community around his church. But the money fell through, and his marriage failed, and now he’s drifting. His path crosses with his single-mother sister, an actor on the decline, and a petty criminal named Shamrock, illuminating a run of lives where happiness comes with hard limits.
This isn’t exactly new territory for Finn. The Hold Steady’s classic Separation Sunday also served as a kind of Dubliners for the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, telling the stories of skinheads and petty thieves and friends with names like Charlemagne and Hallelujah. Finn’s storytelling is always plainspoken, no matter how debauched the particular story. Call it a humanism of extremity, extending a weary but inexhaustible grace to whoever needs it. But where those songs were bold, brassy, even a bit lurid, Finn’s solo work has become increasingly warm, and his portraits more sympathetic. The burnt-out revelers on Springsteenian rave-up “Luke & Leanna” might work boring jobs and spend dull nights watching TV at home, but their companionship is a real balm for the disappointments of life. “Crumbs” tells of Nathan’s sister’s battle to get alimony from her ex-husband. But he’s more interested in the aftermath than the damage, on how she has managed to live with all this disappointment. He hopes for her. “We’ll never win this war,” he sings, “but maybe we won’t get destroyed.”
The album’s best song, “Shamrock,” closely observes a relationship between two people failing to go straight. The pair shares a motto: “If you pool your funds together / you’re barely ever broke.” She takes twenties from the register of her retail job; he tries hanging drywall, but his fingernails keep falling out. Their baby sleeps in a dresser drawer. She drops out of school. He robs a country credit union, and goes to jail. The song ends with their motto, modified: “They pooled their funds together / but somehow she’s still broke.”
Lousy With Ghosts only enhances the album’s literary qualities. Some of the collection’s stories fill in the space around certain songs, others function more as a portrait, providing backstory and expressing Finn’s deep interest in these particular characters and their travails. Daniel Greene goes from a tragic reference in “Clayton” to a man with a party problem and a failed career on a shitty ER knockoff. Same with the bank-robbing Shamrock, revealed to be Sean, young target of a schoolteacher’s rage. Nathan’s ex-wife even gets a chance to explain herself, and to venture into a life beyond him.
There’s plenty of continuity between Finn’s musical and literary styles. His short stories have a pleasantly vernacular feel, like a collection of monologues. In “A Kick Through the Sheets” he goes on a lengthy run about overconfident talk-radio callers that feels specifically observed by a man who has spent his fair share of time driving coast to coast. And Finn allows himself moments of real unpleasantness, like a description of a town “infested with these skittering meth kids, crammed into shitty motels, sometimes six or more to a room,” which he perhaps could not comfortably record in his own voice. As a matter of fact, in many cases they work better on the page than as music, where the shadow of a larger narrative can occasionally dim individual songs. Like the components of a rock opera, these songs deliver information, when you really want sensation.
Yet I have a hard time imagining someone who has not heard of Finn picking up Lousy With Ghosts and being entirely satisfied. I like how brief these stories are; they break off, incomplete, with the jaggedness of a Denis Johnson. But for Johnson, the brevity of a story was like a straitjacket, compressing all manner of manias until they ripped their way free. Finn’s stories freeze somewhere between story-songs and full narratives; they buttress the record, and only occasionally stand on their own.
In his own fiction, Darnielle has embraced overtly literary forms—the monologue, the post-modern nested narrative—exploring ground not available in the space of a song. He differentiates the two as distinct forms, telling stories that would most likely feel cramped when set to music. Finn has his characters, his experiences, his closely observed details. But so far, his humble humanism is proving a better fit for music. On the page, a sentence like “they all get high and pass out on the floor” reads like plain description; sung by Finn, it cuts right to the bone.
By limiting his stories to a supplementary role, Finn prevents them from expanding beyond the bounds of the songs they support—and prevents his songs from transcending the story-cycle they compose. Of necessity, fiction requires development, progression, and change. By focusing on people trapped in the rubble of their own decisions, Finn’s stories scan as static, or at the very least recursive: perfect for the verse-chorus repetition of a four-minute pop song, ending just a half-step from where it began. The form suits his characters, who do the best with the hands they’ve been dealt, but never end up in the black. “We can maybe wait it out,” he sings on Always Been. “But we’ll never win this war.”
I get why Finn is tying his stories to his songs, and his debut collection to his new album. He’s dipping a toe into the publishing world, while remaining safely within the musical promotional cycle, and the support of his existing fans. Yet if Finn were willing to move beyond these short and static forms, he could probably match Darnielle for literary output, and his words could reach readers unfamiliar with his music and his history. His easy-going deployment of language, and his familiarity with the extremes of experience, have their home in the American literary canon—see Johnson, see Gaitskill—but in order to stand out from the mass of crime novelists and slice-of-life mid-listers, the stories alone aren’t enough. He needs to inhabit fiction as a unique medium, separate from his proficient songwriting skill. Even if his characters can’t make it work, I have faith that Finn can.