Like a lot of us over the past few years, Craig Finn has had some time on his hands to think. He began writing his latest solo album, A Legacy of Rentals, right in the heart of the pandemic. During that period, a friend of his had died suddenly – unrelated to the Covid outbreak – and it left him thinking about how we remember people, how they influence us even after their passing, and how we carry the stories of those who passed and use them for the tales we tell ourselves going forward.
The themes of the May record inspired The Hold Steady frontman to delve further into the examination of creativity and memory and the connection between the two to create the podcast That’s How I Remember It with Craig Finn. Guests have included singer/songwriter Nick Lowe, comedian/actor Fred Armisen and Mountain Goats leader John Darnielle, all who have sat down and talked about the role memory has played in their art.
“I had a theory going in that everyone was going to say, ‘I have a great memory, and I’m telling the story correctly,’ but that wasn’t the case,” Finn said. “A lot of people were not totally confident in their ability to remember things accurately and understood how that maybe affected their storytelling.”
Finn, who was born in Boston, raised in Minneapolis, and then came back to the region to attend Boston College, takes part this week in our 617 Q&A series (Six questions; One Recommendation; Seven Somethings), where he confronted his own memory. Ahead of tomorrow’s (October 11) North American tour kickoff at Somerville’s Crystal Ballroom, Vanyaland drilled down into Finn’s recollections of the early ‘90s Boston music scene and a brief dalliance with music criticism while he was a staff writer for The Heights, BC’s student run newspaper. UPDATE October 11 at 1:46 p.m.: Tonight’s show has been cancelled.
:: SIX QUESTIONS
Michael Christopher: You were born in Boston and were raised in Minneapolis, but then you returned for college. What drew you back here?
Craig Finn: I had family in Massachusetts, mainly in Western Massachusetts, but even though I grew up in the Midwest, I think because I was born there – I went to kindergarten in Boston – my family would go back to Boston fairly regularly and I sort of associated it as a “bigger” city.” I was always kind of drawn to it that way. I was applying to schools and got into BC and wanted to go somewhere I could see music; I was into music and it seemed like a good place to have one foot in a traditional college thing and also be able to get on the T and go to The Middle East or The Channel or The Rat and see bands.
What do you remember most about Boston in the early-’90s?
It was new to me. I had gone to a lot of shows in Minneapolis but it’s far away from everything; there’s tremendous support for local bands, but there isn’t as much going on night-to-night and there weren’t multiple clubs to go to, etc. When I first came [to Boston] I was really into hardcore, so I was going to matinees at The Rat and at Bunratty’s, and those shows were more violent than I was used to [laughs]. Slapshot, The Wrecking Crew, Eye for an Eye were the bands I was going to see, as well as bands that were coming up from New York. I remember the first show I went to at Bunratty’s, and I thought it was a fight, but people were just dancing. So that was kind of like, “Whoa!”
Eventually I got more into what I’d call the indie rock or the alternative rock of the era. The hardcore thing, maybe partially because of the violence or maybe I just sort of got tired of it, but I started going to see things like Buffalo Tom, shows at Avalon – bigger shows like that. I started going to The Middle East Upstairs and T.T.’s also. I remember seeing, like, the last Bullet LaVolta show – that seemed like a big show at the time – saw a lot of cool stuff at The Middle East Upstairs. Morphine, Buffalo Tom, Lemonheads… things like that. It was all really exciting and it was cool just to have, generally, stuff going on most nights of the week.
Speaking of memory, tell me about That’s How I Remember It and its correlation to the themes of A Legacy of Rentals.
I was thinking a lot about memory and how we sort of build our personal stories on these memories that sometimes may or may not be 100 percent accurate. I wanted to kind of explore that, and a lot of songs ended up dealing with that; about people who have gone and places that have changed and trying to keep these stories going.
Part of it, with the podcast, was calculated. Records these days come out on a Friday and, if you’re lucky, your record gets some press but the next Friday more records come out and you kind of get cleared off the table. I was like, one thing I can do to control the narrative a little bit was why don’t I just get eight to 10 people and talk through some of these themes with other artists and release these conversations and maybe it will stretch out this idea a little bit. It ended up being something that really thrilled me…and it was really illuminating.
One of the most interesting conversations I thought you had was with Emily Haines, of Metric, and how even though she was born and raised in Ontario, she had romanticized 1970s New York City to a degree that when she moved there in the late-’90s, a big part of her wanted to relive something she had never experienced. And you talked about how people think of the thing – the time period – that’s just before us and idealize that. What was the era for you and what do you think you “missed out” on?
I’m obsessed with the Nixon era, in film especially. I was born in 1971, so that’s right when I started to form memories and I think that I love watching movies from that era because things like men’s fashion or the way restaurants looked, the way cars looked, are right at the tip of my proverbial tongue the way memory goes. Like, I think I remember that, but it’s almost confirming that I did. So those years are particularly interesting for me to look at visually.
As a music fan, I think the era of pretty much ’82 to ’84 and what we think of now as the beginning of underground American music. Black Flag, but also R.E.M., Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, etc. That’s stuff that some of it I was getting into music and I was aware of it, but I wasn’t really old enough to participate in. I think that’s Reagan too; there’s a fundamental change happening in the country that’s being celebrated by some but rebelled against by a lot of artists in an interesting way.
How hard do you — or did you– find it to live in the present and not be either stymied or clouded by the past, but to use it as a tool for inspiration? And maybe in a weird way I’m talking about trauma here and moving past it.
I think trauma obviously has the potential to do damage, but sort of these light traumas end up becoming yourself, your psyche a little bit. I’ve never really struggled with real, diagnosable mental health issues, but some people very close to me have and that shows up in my work a ton. Even earlier in my career I would write a lot about people partying – to excess – and suffering the consequences. As I get older, I consider that more of a mental health thing and write at it more as a study of people who are struggling and dealing with escapism and the consequences and also being stuck.
***
:: ONE RECOMMENDATION
Craig Finn: I am going to hawk [the tour] a little bit. We recently had a change in support openers, and in sort of a serendipitous, exciting, last-minute addition, Katy Kirby [joined us]. My agent said, “What about Katy Kirby?” and I said, “If you can get her, I will jump over the moon,” because her record Cool Dry Place I played nonstop for a few months. And she said she’d do it! Now she’s opening the Boston show as well as the number of them up through Toronto.
:: SEVEN OF SOMETHING
When you were attending Boston College, you were a music critic for the student newspaper, The Heights, and reviewed quite a few albums. I’m going to name seven of them and want you to tell me how you remember it and what sticks out to you about it now, then I’ll give you a quote from what you wrote then. [Note: Finn says he may not have been totally in control of the star rating system each release received]
Dinosaur Jr. — Whatever’s Cool with Me
So that’s an EP, I believe. I only remember the title track, but I will say Dinosaur Jr. was a huge band for me getting out of hardcore and into more traditional alternative rock. And I think it’s interesting because J [Mascis] and Lou [Barlow] followed the same path – they started out in hardcore. I imagine I loved that record and gave it a good review.
Two and a half stars. “Some of the experiments fail miserably and border on white noise, but others are entirely successful.”
I would give it more stars now, just because.
A Tribe Called Quest — The Low End Theory
Classic record, classic review. Two things. I went to a job interview some time after college and they asked me to include samples of my writing, and this guy at an ad agency, who was in his 40s at the time, told me that he thought that review was very clichéd. Then a couple years later I ran into my editor, Matt Hendrickson, who had become a pretty big deal at Rolling Stone, and he told me that he still remembers that review as one of the best he had read [laughs]. Two different audiences, I guess. But it’s pretty cool to go down and write on a record that ends up being an absolute classic 30 years later.
Three stars. “On The Low End Theory the band gets courageous and steps outside the party and onto the streets of America in an attempt to turn on even more people to the good time going down.”
It felt like a step up – and it obviously was – however I was trying to communicate that, I’m not sure [laughs].
Green Day — Kerplunk
I was hoping you were going to bring this one up. Some time after this review, within a few weeks, there was a letter to the editor at The Heights and a guy wrote and complained about the music section of the paper and said it’s all these guys are writing these reviews about these dumb bands that no one will ever hear about again, like Green Day. I wish I had that letter. [Note: We do.]
I think right around that time I had seen them at a party in Minneapolis for 20 or 30 people. All the same, I remember going to Newbury Comics and them having quite a few copies of that record on the display. I’m sure I liked it.
Two and a half stars.“Green Day isn’t gonna change your life, but if any band does then you have things out of any sort of healthy perspective.”
That’s probably true – still.
This one I was really happy to see because it’s one of my all-time favorite bands: The Afghan Whigs — Congregation
Yeah, and one of my favorite bands too. A lot of these people you’re mentioning, with the exception of A Tribe Called Quest, I’ve come across as a singer/songwriter/band guy. And [frontman] Greg Dulli is someone I’ve gotten to speak with a little bit now. I’m guessing I gave it a really good review. I was really into that music at the time and still am. It hits a lot of buttons for me; it’s melodic rock, with a great frontman – and good words. They also have that song from the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack on that, “The Temple,” and that pushes some of my Catholic buttons too.
Three stars. “[Greg] Dulli makes parts of this record absolutely terrifying with his much-improved vocals, and I’m not talking scary like Danzig, or a Friday the 13th slasher movie. Congregation freaks me out much like Deliverance did, where things are not quite right, but it has nothing to do with any supernatural force, just some of our own inabilities.”
Yeah – that’s right. I think that’s the kinda writer he is, I guess that’s like the psyche stuff that I’m not sure I would’ve have been able to say when I was that age. It’s adult stuff! [laughs] There’s so much of ‘90s music that was apologetic or didn’t try, it sort of was this Kurt Cobain thing where you didn’t want to be famous, but you did. I think Greg was great – is great – but came off great in that era because he had that swagger. He was like, “I’m a fuckin’ rockstar.”
Superchunk — No Pocky for Kitty
Loved that. That was a record I remember listening to a lot with my friends in school and right around that time we saw them play at the Paradise. I think Sebadoh might’ve opened? And I think there was like a jam where they did “Glue” from SSD, the old Boston hardcore band, with Evan Dando and Superchunk and Lou Barlow.
Great record. That was a very popular band for us the last few years of college and the years after college.
Three stars.“Never before has a pop band experimented with moments of pure noise and has had this much success.”
I think that’s true. I read somewhere that they had certain songs they called “sound smears.” But they definitely always infused it with such hooks.
Ween — The Pod
Oooh… I might not have given that one a good review. I know I was really into GodWeenSatan, the one before, in sort of a stoner way, like smoking weed in the dorms and listening to. I think The Pod may have been to me, at the time, a little bit disappointing. It just didn’t seem as “sprawling” or something. But I can’t remember what I would’ve said then. I love Ween, I remain a fan, but I could see myself panning that at the time.
Two and a half stars. “Ween is certainly capable of writing simple but interesting pop songs which they choose to mutilate with every device imaginable.”
Well that early Ween stuff, that’s probably true. But I know I didn’t like that record as much as the last one before it or probably the one after where they signed to a major label. Absolutely worth going to see when they play and hats off to the career they’ve built out of this – which I would not have foreseen [laughs]. They’re a cult band with a pretty big cult! I go to their shows and go, “Damn, there’s a lot of people here.” They’ve built something that’s really spectacular.
Body Count — Body Count
Oh, I didn’t like that. I know I didn’t like that. You know, that was like… I don’t know if I heard it again I would like it better, but like I said I came up from hardcore and was very protective of hardcore and I didn’t like when bands… since I’d known Ice-T from something else, doing hip-hop, I felt probably at the time that he wasn’t “allowed” to do hardcore. I don’t think that’s good thinking now, but I could see myself thinking at that time. Hardcore is a… it’s… [sigh] it inspires a certain kind of thinking that I probably was guilty of and, so, to have someone I considered a hip hop star who was also very popular dabble in hardcore? I’m sure I reacted poorly whether or not I gave the record a fair shot.
Half a star. “A full length Body Count album has been released, and the results are a complete atrocity.”
[laughs] Seems like that’s dramatic. It’s funny, when I hear this, I think about being in school and having music as my identity, sort of. When I hear you read this, it’s sort of felt like I wanted to be an expert. Like, I wanted people to take me as an expert. As I’ve gotten older my thinking is like, absolutely 180 degrees less rigid. I really don’t even voice opinion about anything because I don’t feel strongly about what anyone else is doing [laughs]. It’s youthful — you know?
CRAIG FINN & THE UPTOWN CONTROLLERS + KATY KIRBY :: Tuesday, October 11 at Crystal Ballroom, 55 Davis Square in Somerville, MA :: 7 p.m., 18-plus, $30 to $35 :: Event info :: Advance Tickets