Quote

I really like narrative songs, but I wonder if that's a thing for some people. Once they've heard the story, do they really need to hear the story again?

Craig Finn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Craig Finn
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: August 22
Musician
Singer
Boston
Massachusetts
Stories
Need
Narrative
Needs
Songs
Thing
Hear
Really
Wonder
Like
Heard
People
Story
Song

More quotes by Craig Finn

Image
People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul.
Craig Finn
Image
Being on a microphone nightly has made me better at what I do, made me better able to sing a little bit, but also more confident at trying it.
Craig Finn
Image
Some people will totally get restless, since you can make demos pretty easy. It's not unreasonable for someone to say, All right, can you just record this and go home and work on it?
Craig Finn
Image
I really want to write a novel. A few years ago I went so far as to do the cliché thing and rent this house in upstate [New York]. I still have the story, but I got 15,000, 20,000 words in and it was like, This is falling apart. I can't figure out.
Craig Finn
Image
I'm not a horror movie guy, but I think the guy that did Saw, or maybe House or something, he was saying you love that age as a storyteller because a nineteen-year-old is still dumb enough to make really bad decisions, but he's allowed to be out on his own.
Craig Finn
Image
Just looking into something kind of analytically can give a lot of ideas.
Craig Finn
Image
I think, Trump ran a very nostalgic campaign. There's an idea of like, to put it bluntly: What if it was like before all our kids got strung out on drugs? You know, what if it was like that? Make America like that.
Craig Finn
Image
Ray Cappo never tried to convert me into a Krishna, although one of his cohorts probably did. I think it was just about being wrapped up in this thing. Hardcore, at one point, meant everything to me. Now you look back, and I still think it's cool, but to some extent I grew out of it. Other things became a bigger priority for me.
Craig Finn
Image
Ironically, when I was playing in my first band, I would deliberately not write down any lyrics. I have a really good memory and I would just keep them in my head.
Craig Finn
Image
At forty-one, now I think it would be really cool to have an A&R guy say, You know what? I don't think you've got this album sequenced right.
Craig Finn
Image
Some people I've talked to have had really an interpretation of this record as being nostalgic. But in some ways, when we were writing Stay Positive, I was really obsessed with age. I kept saying it was a record about trying to age gracefully. This record, I think actually was us aging gracefully.
Craig Finn
Image
It's good to have some kind of California in there. It's almost always appropriate. It's appropriate on a sunny day or late at night. If you grew up on the Grateful Dead, which I certainly did, you listened to 10 million bootlegs. But you realize that American Beauty has some really tight, well-arranged songs that aren't meandering.
Craig Finn
Image
People make maps of all the places I've mentioned. I knew that those people were out there. I wanted to create something for them.
Craig Finn
Image
If we enjoy what we're doing, we shouldn't really need a break. It's fun for us to play music. It's our livelihood, but I don't look at it as a job. It doesn't seem to me to be a problem to constantly be doing this.
Craig Finn
Image
It's really easy, in a band, to overstate - you feel like everything you do is different than the past. I think this is just another Hold Steady record, but at the same time, there is some evolution. Like, How can we make this chorus bigger? What do we want this to sound like?
Craig Finn
Image
I think making the songs is to put strength in the community in some way.
Craig Finn
Image
I made a decision at some point to live a nontraditional life. I've become like, the opposite of a consumer. I just want freedom. I don't want stuff. I don't want clutter. I just want to be able to move freely. I want to be good to the people I love. But I don't want stuff. I just want, you know, love and big ideas.
Craig Finn
Image
I guess the drinking and the drugs are interesting to me because the way we use them and our society uses them, we kind of manufacture highs and lows.
Craig Finn
Image
I think the other thing that shaped me a little bit is that I really didn't have any success in music until my early to mid-30s.
Craig Finn
Image
One thing I have a tendency to do is not write choruses, or write choruses that have different words. The first chorus will have different words than the second chorus.
Craig Finn