Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Craig Finn
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: August 22
Musician
Singer
Boston
Massachusetts
Stories
Figures
Stills
Novel
Upstate
Still
Went
Clich
Writing
Story
Rent
Thing
Words
Falling
Years
Fall
Apart
Really
Write
Figure
Like
House
York

More quotes by 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
I think having a coach or an editor or whatever the novelist's producer is could help. If you finish a chapter and you turn it in to him, and he or she said, That was pretty good, it might go better. Maybe that's what I'll try to find.
Craig Finn
Image
I am a really obsessive music listener, and I would look for clues.
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
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
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
I don't have a problem rhyming bar with car - I do it all the time - but sometimes it doesn't feel right.
Craig Finn
Image
I've written a lot about drugs and alcohol. I wouldn't say it's because we've gotten bigger or anything, but I kind of feel a little bit done with it. There are other things to talk about.
Craig Finn
Image
An album doesn't mean as much to a lot of people now, compared to just songs.
Craig Finn
Image
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
Image
My style of lyric-writing is very specific and has a lot of details, and I think people react most to that.
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
The critics and hardcore music fans, those are the people you have to get to first, so we're really happy about it.
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
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
I've tried to write songs for other people and it usually requires them singing it and then changing the phrasing. I can put a lot of words in a song, and one of the reasons is, I'm not that good of a singer, so I don't hold a lot of notes.
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
I think you want to write a song that's like the songs you are into.
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
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