Music

The Hold Steady's Craig Finn talks solo album and the disappointing reaction to the band's last album

by Nicole Villeneuve

Craig Finn has been pumping out verbose Americana with bands Lifter Puller and most notably the Hold Steady for almost twenty years, but as we noted earlier in July when he appeared on Twitter and Tumblr, he’s just recorded his first solo album.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Finn says that sitting down to write songs for this album by default made it a solo project. “[Guitarist] Tad [Kubler] writes all the music for the Hold Steady. I don’t really write much music, so this is stepping outside.”

Finn describes the new tunes, which he recorded in Austin with a varied group of musicians—Josh Block from White Denim on drums, Jesse Ebaugh from the Heartless Bastards on bass, Will Johnson from Centro-matic singing, and pedal steel guitarist Ricky Jackson from Phosphorescent—as Finn-friendly (he uses the word Americana), but a departure from Hold Steady records. “It’s less rock, a little more reserved. I was paying attention to more traditional songwriters like Townes Van Zandt, and the simplicity of words and melody.”

There’s no release date set for the album yet, and even after a lukewarm reception of the Hold Steady’s last album Heaven is Whenever, they’re excited to get back to writing and playing, saying that the lack of enthusiasm for the record never translated to shows. “Possibly because we just kept coming out with records, and it was just another Hold Steady record, you know? The good news is that people were still coming out to the shows. We get together in September to write our sixth record. We write pretty quickly so, ideally, we’d be recording before the end of the year.”

You can read the whole interivew at here.