Photo by Dan Monick
Craig Finn
Craig Finn
There is a moment in Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson’s acclaimed debut novel, when one of the characters talks of feeling “the life of perished things.” I thought of this provocative phrase often while listening to Always Been, the latest solo album from The Hold Steady frontperson Craig Finn. Just because something is gone does not mean that it necessarily lacks presence. There can be a physicality to memory, as we often feel most acutely the things we no longer have.
Finn’s tour with Bob Mould comes to Turner Hall Ballroomon April 18.
For Finn—on Always Been as well as on other albums released throughout his 30-plus year career—that something is often religious faith. The antagonist of Always Been is “The Reverend,” a religious leader who “couldn't shake the feeling/I was faking all the faithfulness.” By the end of “Bethany,” the first song on Always Been, the listener has learned that The Reverend has fallen from grace, “Unaware of all the mess/The pressure and the flesh/Is capable of making in a man.”
Yet as characters like The Reverend come to populate Always Been’s other 10 songs, Finn is insistent that “No one is giving up.” Not surprisingly, Finn is also interested in the ways that resilience and perseverance manifest themselves in our day-to-day lives. Faith in all its shapes and forms is not a constant, consistent thing. As Finn notes of faith, “I think it’s a moving thing throughout our lives.” It is not necessarily something we inherently have; we must find it. “I think you keep reaching,” explains Finn. “You keep looking.”
Looking Forward and Back
Always Been is the sound of such searches. But as we try to move forward, we are continuously looking back. It is in this in-between state that we come face-to-face with our lack of faith and other shortcomings. The Reverend, for example, starts to question his choices while staying temporarily with his sister and her teenage daughter (an arrangement beautifully—and tragically—rendered on “Crumbs”), while the narrator of “Fletcher’s” finds some clarity regarding his past in the hazy aftermath of an all-night rager; the night is over, but the day has yet to truly begin. It is tempting to view these purgatorial states as sites of confinement. But for Finn’s characters such spaces provide the room needed to figure things out. In the process, these spaces ultimately prove liberating.
This does not mean that Finn romanticizes the lives he documents on Always Been. He notes that characters like The Reverend find themselves in some pretty rough spots “because of the choices they have made.” Yet Finn makes the case that such lives are nonetheless worth remembering. “Songs,” he explains, “can be used to build memorials to people that didn’t live such high-profile lives but deserve to be remembered all the same.” In documenting their struggles, their crises of faith and their personal triumphs, Finn is working to “provide dignity and grace for these people.”
One gets a sense of the stakes of such an idea in Shamrock, the final song on Always Been. Following the arrest of her partner for robbing a bank, a now-single mother contemplates her new position as “the only one who cares/For the daughter who keeps asking about her father.” How she chooses to answer those questions, how she chooses to remember this man, will forever shape the way this child understands her father. This is the life of perished things.
