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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

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Craig Finn
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: August 22
Musician
Singer
Boston
Massachusetts
Critics
Fans
Happy
Music
Firsts
First
Really
People
Hardcore

More quotes by Craig Finn

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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There's this moment sometimes, when you do a crossword puzzle and you have the one really long word. And once you get that, the whole thing kind of comes into focus. Sometimes it's just working things over in your mind and then finding that one line that kind of ties the song together, and now it works. It's a puzzle of sorts.
Craig Finn
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Sometimes things reveal themselves to you a little bit. I think it was Joan Didion that said, We write to find out what we're thinking. And sometimes that happens.
Craig Finn
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The Replacements are the foundation for a lot of what came after in alternative and college rock. Let It Be is their best record and has the most diverse collection of songs. Some pop stuff, some heavy stuff, and some real moments of beauty like 'Sixteen Blue' and 'Androgynous.' It's a record I always go back to.
Craig Finn
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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
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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
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One of the things is my process requires a lot of repetition. I can probably drive people crazy because I'm interested in playing a song twenty times in a row.
Craig Finn
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If I'm stuck, I'll sit down and read. That's a big thing.
Craig Finn
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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
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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
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My style of lyric-writing is very specific and has a lot of details, and I think people react most to that.
Craig Finn
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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
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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
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I think you want to write a song that's like the songs you are into.
Craig Finn
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I'm not only a songwriter but I'm a massive music fan and I love going to shows. It's different than reading a book.
Craig Finn
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A conversation with you is a different thing than projecting to a couple hundred people. It's bigger and more animated and it's on a bigger scope, but still in the heart, it's honestly me.
Craig Finn