Words Are Enough: Craig Finn

Certain songwriters compose their lyrics with such florid intelligence and carefully constructed combinations of adjectives and verbs that you can't help but be dazzled by their work; they bash you over the head with their gift, and you can't help but be grateful, if a little jealous.

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Others throw their fists through walls and make it sound like the essence of rock and roll. If you're not initially impressed, it's because you're having too much goddamned fun.

The Hold Steady's Craig Finn falls into the second camp. His work is luminously smart and viciously funny, but it takes a while for you to catch on; at first, you're too busy rocking out and enjoying the drug references.

"Your Little Hoodrat Friend," from Separation Sunday, is regarded by many casual listeners as the best track on a strong album:

Your little hoodrat friend's been calling me again / and I can't stand all the things that she sticks into her skin / like sharpened ballpoint pens / and steel guitar strings / she says it hurts but it's worth it / tiny little text etched into her neck / it said "Jesus lived and died for all your sins" / she's got blue black ink and it's scratched into her lower back / it said: "damn right I'll rise again" / yeah, damn right you'll rise again

The genius of Separation Sunday is the album's balls-out juxtaposition of Twin Cities youth culture and religion. Religion and addiction, if you follow Finn's lyrical drift, are two sides of a single coin, deeply interlinked and both worth writing songs about. And within "Your Little Hoodrat Friend," both themes come at you hard and fast, but neither is obviously condemned or endorsed. Finn's lyrics are ambiguous — his heroes and heroines are scraping by on the streets (or in the gutter) and they're not perfect people. But neither are they one-note caricatures, whether they're pimps, drug addicts or born-again Christians.

Like Elvis Costello, Finn has a penchant for extreme cleverness that can arguably get out of hand. The fact that NPR hired a nerd to decode "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night" indicates that when Finn decides to sling references, he's not just goofing around — he's cooking with gas.

Nelson Algren came to Paddy at some party at the Dead End Alley / yeah, he told him what to celebrate / and I met William Butler Yeats / Sunday Night Dance Party summer 1988 / at first I thought it might be William Blake

So, yeah — three Twin Cities music references and three literary references dropped like bombs within a mere 44 words. This would get annoying if it was Finn's only trick, but it isn't — it's a flourish deployed with both tact and tactical wisdom.

Finn's normal strong suit is a verbal dexterity and parsimonious economy of words that leaves listeners breathlessly surging along with the rapidly flowing tide of images and commentary:

She said: City Center used to be the center of our scene / now City Center's over / no one really goes there / and then we used to drink beneath this railroad bridge / some nights the bus wouldn't even stop / there was just too many kids

From a technical standpoint, roll that first sentence out of your mouth once or twice. "City Center used to be the center of our scene." All those hissing soft c's and s's are a veritable tongue twister. It sounds even better in context.

And then back up and look at the whole brief lyrical paragraph — within its squat confines, you get:

a) Where the scene used to be
b) The sense that the scene moved on and where it moved to
c) A vivid picture of teenagers drinking somewhere dark and dangerous
d) Established society — the bus — passing them by as though they were a pack of wild animals.

All in short, Anglo-Saxon words, punched out with economy and force. Finn writes poetry with a no-bullshit manner that makes for great rock lyrics. For example, his re-rendering of Genesis as contemporary scenester gossip in "Cattle and the Creeping Things":

I guess I heard about original sin / I heard the dude blamed the chick / I heard the chick blamed the snake / and I heard they were naked when they got busted / and I heard things ain't been the same since

It's an eerie echo (and update) of the best work done by the Pixies, who could have you screaming along with "Gouge Away" six or seven times before you stepped back and realized they'd written a modern-English interpretation of the biblical story of Samson and Delilah.

But where the Pixies had a strange detachment — a maturity, you could call it, that made them both part of and floating above the world of their fans — Finn gleefully wallows in the world of substance-fueled debauchery, drawing strength from the chaos:

I was a teenage ice machine / I kept it cool in coolers / and I drank until I dreamed / when I dream I always dream about the scene / all these kids they look like little lambs looking up at me

I was a Twin Cities trash bin / I did everything they'd give me / I'd jam it into my system / she got me cornered by the kitchen / I said I'll do anything but listen to some weird talking chick who just can't understand that we're hot soft spots on a hard rock planet / baby take off your beret / everyone's a critic and most people are DJs

Winners may not generally do drugs, but it's pretty clear that they write songs about them, and in the course of writing those songs, they probably do a good deal of hands-on research. It's hard to endorse that kind of thing, but Finn makes a pretty strong case.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)