'You Have To Believe It's Going To Get Better': Craig Finn's Faith In The Future

The crowd was too quiet. No one spoke, no glasses clinked. It was a cabaret of sorts, hosted by the New York Times and dotted with Broadway talent. Immediately before his set, a tap dancer performed. Mid-song, backed only by his guitar, Craig Finn thought his hands might start to shake.

For a man accustomed to leading beer-buzzed crowds in song as frontman of the Hold Steady, it was an unfamiliar feeling. But it's one that Finn is getting used to. His second solo album, 'Faith In The Future' is a week old and he's been touring record shops and small haunts, acoustic in hand. These settings suit a set of songs designed with humble narratives in mind, where the sprawling world of Holly and Charlemagne has been replaced by smaller, more everyday stories.

Removed from the glorious six string bluster of his band, Finn's solo sets are altogether more vulnerable. Between songs he spins yarns or knocks his own skills as a guitar player. At London's Slaughtered Lamb he is greeted by another hush, this one more attentive than off-putting. It's regularly broken by cheers between songs.

“I’ve gotten some pep talks," he says beforehand, nestled beneath the peak of a Minnesota Twins cap and surrounded by a busy post-work pub crowd. "John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats is a friend of mine and he saw me in North Carolina, where he lives. It was a pretty chatty show. He was like: ‘Look, it never goes away. I do these shows and I sell out a thousand tickets. All of a sudden half of them are talking.’ You’re like: ‘You guys paid for this.’ That said, I don’t think he gets upset about it.”

‘Faith In The Future’ delivers on Finn’s promise to let his characters have some room to breathe. It’s a sparse record, one that eschews cymbals in fear of detracting from the messages, one where instrumentation was separated into the necessary and unnecessary with the help of producer Josh Kaufman. That lent the songs a fresh energy, with some of them dating back as far as initial sessions for ‘Teeth Dreams’, the last Hold Steady album.

“I’m pretty OK with producer input, so the songs suddenly changed quite a bit,” Finn says. “Not in content, meaning lyrics, but Going To A Show is a perfect example. [Kaufman] was like: ‘That part when you say, ‘I try so hard not to talk to myself’? That's my favourite part. You have to do that a bunch.’ That’s how the song ended up there. I had a version of that song where I said that one time. They become these new things, but they say the same thing.

“In that way, they are new to me. I really like working that way. This, with an acoustic guitar, is as good as I can get it. I’m a limited player, so that’s where I feel like I’ve done my best. Let's bring in some people to help make it better, especially more accomplished musicians or a really good producer’s ear.

"The first solo record [‘Clear Heart, Full Eyes’] I made with Mike McCarthy and I was apologetic over the phone, like: ‘I’m not really a good musician.’ He said: ‘Can you sing me the song over the phone? Then your work is done. You and me will figure out the rest. You got words and a melody and some sort of form? You've got a song. We just need to make it as good as we can.’ That gave me a lot of confidence. I do have a song.”

The overarching theme of ‘Faith In The Future’, as the title suggests, is one of simple, unvarnished hope. Finn’s world isn’t a blinkered, happy-go-lucky one, rather one where tragedy must meet a natural end at some stage. The record was composed following the death of his mother, with the writing process providing a sense of forward momentum.

Its characters, similarly, are grinding through their day-to-day, collecting grains that might eventually add up to some semblance of closure or understanding. The idea of little things accumulating is a regular touchstone. “All your little molecules, add up to something drunk and cute. Computers, kids and chemicals. The flowers and the fruits,” Finn sings on Roman Guitars. “All your little molecules, add up to something beautiful.”

Before the album’s arrival, Finn’s diary featured trips to record shops and stops for beers with fans who pre-ordered it through PledgeMusic. For those who like to put pins in the map of his back catalogue, these detours represent a neat appendix to the album's story. Meeting these die-hard followers - one of whom had popped up at seven Hold Steady SXSW shows in one year, prompting Finn to seek him out - gave the promotional merry-go-round a human edge that’s often overlooked.

“‘Faith in the Future’ is supposed to be hopeful. And optimistic,” Finn says. “But it’s not as grand, obviously, as the Hold Steady. The music isn’t as big. The people are involved in more mundane things. Smaller things. Little bits of life. Finding optimism in watching a guy pick up a stroller and help someone up the stairs of a subway.

"That’s an optimistic, beautiful thing that happens every day. It’s trying to take these small moments that connect people one on one and understand who we are. There’s this digital anonymity. It’s like: ‘I know that guy but I only know him online.’ Take some time in a record store, or bar, or whatever and say: ‘We’re going to take some time here and figure out who you are.’”

It’s not the greatest surprise to learn that Finn carries a notebook with him at all times. The one that’s currently in his bag is relatively new, but as he flicks from page to page it already features hundreds of scrawled words. They form to do lists, setlists, impressions from books recently consumed and snatches of everyday life that might end up threaded through a song. He revisits the pages often, generally after the words have had time to become disembodied thoughts. It’s then that the breakthroughs happen.

“I’m always trying to create a universe for these things to live in,” he says. “You do a draft of a song and it’s: ‘Can we see enough? Can I get this tone to come through a little better? Or this place?’ You’re always trying to do that. In Saint Peter Upside Down, one of my favourite parts of the record is where I say: ‘Mustang Sally’s, Monday morning.’

"Mustang Sally’s is this bar on Seventh Avenue in New York. It’s south of Madison Square Garden. I like hockey and I go there before games. I would never go there if it wasn't right by the stadium. Whoever is in there on Monday morning, God help ‘em. This is a happy hour bar. Right by the train station, too. Those are inside jokes, little jokes for yourself. It’s like doing a crossword puzzle. Sometimes you get the big long one at the bottom and the whole thing snaps into focus.”

Mustang Sally’s isn’t the only drop of real life that makes it through. The ATF agents breaking things up on Maggie, I’ve Been Searching For Our Son are a flight of fancy stemming from a conversation with one of the Hold Steady’s bus drivers, who spent the early ‘60s living in a pre-hippy South Dakota commune. Going To A Show is about Finn, night after night, still searching for that mind-blowing moment when you see something truly special unfold once the amps are on. Newmyer’s Roof is, as you’ve likely already heard, about his experiences seeing the towers fall on 9/11 from a friend’s Brooklyn home, unsure of how to react. Years later he’d fall in love with a woman who escaped the first tower.

“That song’s about being really detached,” he says. “It [the anniversary] rolled around the other day. She's like: ‘I don't know what I'm supposed to feel, I got out. Am I supposed to stop my day?’ It’s not as simple as that. There’s part of it that's with her every day, but there's also part of it that’s just not. It's the same thing as losing a parent. You’re grieving and you miss them all the time, but there’s times you're not thinking about that. There's times you're thinking about being late to go to the dentist, you know?

“I didn't understand what was happening. A few days later, a week, when I went back to work, under 14th Street you couldn’t go down there unless you showed your licence, that you lived there. I lived in Brooklyn. So I was pretty much at the bottom of the island, on 15th. Right there, people had put up posters saying ‘Missing: My Dad. Missing: My Brother.’ The fact that people still had ‘missing’ on it, seven days later, was really sad to me, because they’re hoping against hope that they were hit on the head and were in the hospital. It’s what you have to do. You have to believe it’s going to get better.”

​'Faith In The Future' is out now on Partisan.

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