I saw the Hold Steady in December 2019, at their annual New York residency at Brooklyn Bowl.
“We’ve all sinned, and we can all come back.” “You know, all these wretches that appear in the Bible get saved, or have the potential to be saved,” Finn told me. Finn calls himself a lapsed Catholic but still goes to mass, and his thesis inverts Sartre: heaven, or as close as we can get, is other people. Fans who track back to Lifter Puller, Finn’s late-’90s origin story, find the same sentiments filed to sharper points, his lyrics tailing a horde of truants who hotwire their nervous systems and forget their nights. His solo output is all existential hangovers, folks meeting up to shake off rough years.
At concerts with his band, the Hold Steady, he shout-sings in an effortful half-octave over two-guitar riffage, telling the stories of lost-and-found souls chasing communal comfort: boozing, getting blitzed and/or baptized, running into whichever arms might hold them. For the better part of three decades, Craig Finn has testified to the power of proximity.