Craig Finn And The War On Drugs Are A Super Team On ‘Always Been’

When I met up with Craig Finn last week at a Minneapolis coffee shop, I was slightly worried that we might have trouble finding one another. We are, after all, two bookish white guys between the ages of 45 and 55. And this particular coffee shop was overloaded with bookish white guys between the ages of 45 and 55. I did a double-take at one faux-Finn immediately after finding a table. I also spotted multiple faux-me’s. Possibilities for confusion, clearly, abounded. Meeting up at a place like this could be like finding a graying beige needle in a graying beige haystack.

Luckily, there were no such identity crises. The frontman for The Hold Steady bumped into me by the counter, and we quickly fell into a conversation about life, sports, and his great new solo album out on Friday, Always Been. While Craig continues to tour with THS, he’s been busier making Craig Finn records in the past dozen or so years. Always Been is his sixth solo effort, though it also represents an exciting departure. After years of fruitful collaboration with producer Josh Kaufman, who is based in New York’s Hudson Valley, Finn switched coasts and threw in his lot with Adam Granduciel, who recruited several of his bandmates from The War On Drugs to give Finn’s songs an unmistakable TWOD vibe.

“It’s one of my favorite bands,” Finn said of The War On Drugs, who first entered his orbit when The Hold Steady tapped them to open a European tour in the late 2000s. Unfortunately, THS had to back out at the last minute after guitarist Tad Kubler was hospitalized with pancreatitis. “They got stuck in Europe with no tour,” Finn recalled. “So that was the inauspicious beginning to our friendship.”

Finn reunited with TWOD for real in 2022 after Granduciel invited him to sit in at one of their annual “Drugscember” shows in Philadelphia. Soon after, their paths crossed again in Granduciel’s current home base in Los Angeles. Finn played him a new song, “Bethany,” on acoustic guitar at his studio.

“I was hooked and we started not long after that,” Adam told me via email. TWOD bassist Dave Hartley and guitarist Anthony La Marca were in town to work on band recordings, and they were also roped into laying down tracks for what became the introductory song on Always Been, along with two other songs, “The Man I’ve Always Been” and “Postcards.”

Craig Finn’s voice and songs plus music that sounds like The War On Drugs — the elevator pitch for Always Been is so simple that it almost seems too simplistic as a description. But that’s basically what this album is. Lyrically, Finn was so inspired by the character he invented for “Bethany” — a preacher with serious spiritual doubts and a mysterious past — that he created a song cycle fleshing out a story that also addresses matters of sin, redemption, reinvention, and murder. And then, with Granduciel’s assistance, he placed those songs in rousing heartland rock soundscapes rife with atmospheric guitar and synth sounds. For an artist who has been compared to Springsteen semi-constantly for the past two decades, Always Been is the closest Finn has come to making an actual Springsteen record. Born In The U.S.A. and Tunnel Of Love, in particular, feel like obvious signposts.

And then there’s the Los Angeles of it all. On the cover of Always Been, Finn alludes to Randy Newman’s 1977 album Little Criminals, the record where he recruited The Eagles to back him up on a song.

Are The War On Drugs Craig Finn’s Eagles? Is Always Been his “LA record”? Once we sat down, I asked Craig these burning questions. (I have also included Adam’s emailed responses in places where his input is pertinent.)

“An inside joke with that album cover is that I always wanted to make an LA record,” Finn told me. Then he added with twinkle, “‘Can you make an LA record when a studio generally doesn’t have many windows?’”

I know what I immediately think of when someone says “LA record.” But what does it mean to you?

Craig Finn: LA artists to me are Zevon, Randy Newman, Jackson Browne. The later ’70s singer-songwriter Asylum records. Disillusioned, LA smog, divorced kind of vibes.

Adam Granduciel: If anything, there has to be a darkness there above all else. Tonight’s The Night is one of my favorite LA records. LA is very alienating and lonely. I think these songs — with their characters searching for meaning and redemption, for purpose, their stories overlapping — makes LA a perfect place to have brought these songs to life.

The War On Drugs have very obvious 1980s LA textures — specifically something like Don Henley’s “Boys Of Summer” and the rest of Building The Perfect Beast. That seems like a new texture for you to embrace.

CF: As a War On Drugs fan going into this record, I thought of them as a guitar band. Then I sat in with Adam at Newport last year. We did a John Hiatt song, and I looked around and they had six synths on stage. And I’m like, “Maybe this is a synth band.”

I’ve always been a Tom Petty fan, but in the past few years, before I sold my car, I really got into the Tom Petty Sirius station. It just didn’t move. And I started to really marvel at his songs because they’re direct. It’s classic songwriting. When I came in with the songs to Adam, I was like, “I want to make a direct record.” And I thought, versus Josh Kaufman, who I love and produced most of my other solo records, we really got into songwriting and he changed maybe a few chords.

In a way, you and Adam working together makes perfect sense, given that you are friends and you have a lot of the same influences. But the way you work seems very different.

CF: I knew from conversations with him that he kind of goes on a journey of sound a little bit. He’ll start making music, and the way he said it to me is that he might start putting stuff down and the tempo might change. And eventually at some point, it comes to the point where it comes into focus and he writes lyrics for it. I’m the exact opposite. I’ll have the story and two chords. So, one of my thoughts was, “What if we met in the middle? And what would that be like?”

AG: I’m always in awe of anybody as prolific as Craig is. I love the worlds and the scenes his characters inhabit. I love how specific and detailed his writing is and how he weaves the stories through multiple songs and even albums. I’m in awe of anyone that can seamlessly write in the third person like Craig does so well — how he can become these characters and tell their stories with ease.

Did Adam help with writing the music or coming up with arrangements?

CF: In “Bethany,” he changed a few chords. Arrangement-wise, he would be like, “Seems like this could breathe here?” Or, “Would you like a guitar solo here?” Figuring out where the space was, I think, was something he really helped on.

AG: Craig was very open to whatever sonic palate I thought to bring to each song. He sells himself short but his guitar playing on the demos he sent me is pretty special. There’s a lot of information and spirit already right there — the voicings and shapes, the countermelodies. I just had to bring them to life, basically. I’d put a few different bands together for the songs. Craig was enthusiastic about all of it. He’d be refining bits of his lyrics the whole time and we’d always be doing new takes of vocals to keep the tunes fresh and evolving. Basically, if I was into the track, he was into it — and if he was digging it then I was happy, so it was really easy and fluid. I’d send stuff to Dave at his home in North Carolina for him to do bass or backing vocals on. He’s always an important part of the process for me, and Craig has known Dave since the Drugs/Hold Steady tours in 2009 as well, so we’re all pretty comfortable together.

We were talking about this being an LA record musically, but lyrically, it takes place mainly in Pennsylvania and Washington state. Also, in keeping with your classic style, the songs tell an interconnected narrative.

CF: I thought of this guy, this character, and “Bethany” was the first song I wrote towards that. It was about a priest who doesn’t believe in God. And because of that, everything comes crashing down. Once I wrote that, I was like, “I love this character. What if I wrote another song about him from a different angle?” “Bethany” is about his wife. The next song on the album is “People With Substance,” where he is pleading to his wife that he’s not depressed anymore. And then also in “Bethany,” he mentions his sister. The third song, “Crumbs,” is where he goes to stay with her. So, I kept him moving around.

I can’t remember at what point I saw this, but I went and saw Paris, Texas in the theater. It may have been after I wrote the songs, but before we made the record. But that movie really kind of felt like something to me — the moving around, the wandering. I liked the idea of that. And not just the classic part where he is in the desert and walking on the side of the road, but also when they move into the city at the end of the movie. I think they go to Houston and there’s these glass buildings and this idea of someone just kind of wandering and trying to find it.

Part of the thing with the record is this idea — which may be an LA thing anyway — is trying on different things and only finding yourself there. Trying new uniforms, trying new locations. The priest might put on the collar, but if it’s not in his heart, it’s not there. And it’s like, wherever you go, there you are. When I was in high school, I remember you’d see Michael Stipe in a photo wearing this T-shirt, and you’d be like, “I got to get that T-shirt.” And you put it on and you look in the mirror and it still does not look like Michael Stipe.

Most of the songs deal with that story, but not all of them. There are these bottle episodes within it. But in my mind, it’s in the same world.

“Luke And Leanna” seems to fall in that “bottle episode” category. It’s about this married couple where the woman is thinking about having a workplace affair. Musically, it has a synth riff that strongly evokes the hits from Born In The U.S.A., which seems like a meeting point for you and Craig. And the combination of this personal narrative and the anthemic music, generally, is very Springsteen.

CF: It’s funny: Born In The U.S.A. is one of those records where if you’re asked, “What’s your favorite Springsteen record?” you almost don’t say it just because it’s so big. But those songs are incredible. I mean, it’s not just a massive record, it’s an incredible record.

All my songs deal with capitalism, with class, with where we’re at. With “Luke And Leanna,” I kept thinking about how if you’re someone’s partner and they have a job, that’s a significant part of their life that you’re never going to understand as well as some other people. We have this term “work wife” or “work husband” because it’s very real. And I think that song is about that, that she finds some other person that understands her life more than her partner does in some way. And they’re also getting older and they’ve been together 10 years. But putting that against such upbeat music was a trick. Because you’re singing along, but it’s only disillusionment, you know?

Where songs take place is clearly important to you. I think every song on this record mentions a specific town or state where the action is taking place. Where does that creative impulse come from?

CF: I’ve always been obsessed with geography. I would look at maps when I was a kid, and before I was in a real band I would plot tours, like, “Oh, my god, you could play Cincinnati one night and Louisville the next night!” When I watch a film, I can’t relax until I figure out where they’re at. I’ll be squinting at the license plates and stuff like that. So, it’s always been a part of my storytelling. I like geography and I like knowing where I’m at when I’m on tour. And I just feel like it’s a way into stories. I like stories where people move around a lot. It suggests being unsettled to me. So, this guy goes from Venice, California to Seattle to the East Coast and Delaware and Virginia and Pennsylvania. And then “Fletcher’s” and “Shamrock” are both set in Minneapolis, which is near and dear to my heart.

You have been very open about your characters aging along with you. And I thought about it while listening to “Crumbs,” in which the protagonist’s sister’s daughter is starting to get into teenager things. And it made me think that girl would have been the main character in a Hold Steady song 20 years ago.

CF: Yeah, exactly. It’s the cyclical thing. She’s going to have to go enter into her own relationships, her own potential heartbreaks. The potential of choosing someone who’s just there, the best available, rather than the best for you, or felt like what she was supposed to do. That’s really heartbreaking to me, the idea of the pressures we put on ourselves like it’s time to grow up, grab a husband.

AG: Craig definitely had a Zevon vision for “Crumbs.” The first time I cut that track, I had a [Velvet Underground-style] guitar and drums thing happening. But Craig was like, “I actually hear it with more of a piano and vocal intro and then going full-band into the tune.” I was like, “Hell yeah, let’s do that.” So, we did and it made that song make way more sense to me than it did when it was in its first Velvets-type zone.

There’s also been an aging of sorts with your musical references. Warren Zevon is an artist that starts to make more sense after your 20s. He’s one of those people you listen to in order to learn how to be a grown-up.

CF: Right. I mean, I absolutely feel that. I knew about Warren Zevon when I was 16. That was not the music I wanted to listen to. Now it’s like, “Oh, my god, these are the records.”

Even just the shift in Springsteen eras you’re using as reference points, from Darkness On The Edge Of Town on the early Hold Steady records to Born In The U.S.A. and Tunnel Of Love on this album. And, of course, there’s the Little Criminals homage on the cover.

CF: Those middle-aged records — Tunnel Of Love, Petty, Randy Newman, Zevon — are the most interesting to me now. Those are deep records. I don’t mean to joke about this term, but I always say it sounds “divorced.” Because it’s a certain complex adult sadness that comes from something that you thought was going to work out, that didn’t work out.

Always Been is out 4/4 via Tamarac Recordings/Thirty Tigers. Find more information here.