Craig Finn Quotes

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.

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.

The reality is that the shows kind of disconnect from the songs a little bit. You're playing the songs, but they take on a life of their own.

One of the things you do in a band is the more you stay together, the more you play to your strengths.

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.

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.

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.

In the end, when you're writing a really good song, it strikes the right tone.

There's somewhat of a real fascination with American bands and American mythology in London, so I think we've tapped into some of that. Maybe because of the way the press works or whatever, they have extremely knowledgeable music fans over there. People who will sit there and talk to you about some record that came out in 1967 out of Memphis that you've never heard before.

I would never talk to a girl in a bar, like a pick-up thing. But I could talk to anyone if they wore a t-shirt of a band I like.

Someone should have a record that doesn't have any singing. It's my favorite Miles Davis record. I love hanging out in the summer, in New York, when it's miserably hot. I love electric Miles Davis in the summer. Jack Johnson, the songwriting especially, is a premier example of that. It always makes me feel hot in the city. It's also nice to have something not yelling in your ear. For me, as a lyricist, it's nice to put on something without any words.

It's a template record for the intersection between pop and noise, starting out with 'Sunday Morning' - a real beautiful, almost innocent sunny day song. You have a lot of different types of things on one record. It can be really pretty, or it can be really awful inside, depending on where your head's at at the moment. I got it in ninth grade and I think I've listened to it every month since then.

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.

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.

When we started the band, I was really like, "We just want to make a lot of records" - not quite unlike Guided By Voices' schedule. I've always thought that our live thing is what we do best, and having a really robust, big catalog makes for the most interesting live band - especially with people, at this point, traveling to see us night after night. For us to have almost 100 songs to pull from is a really cool thing. The sets can be different. They can be invigorating on an intellectual level. I definitely hope to continue to release records at an accelerated pace.

My style of lyric-writing is very specific and has a lot of details, and I think people react most to that.

I use a lot of specific places in my songs - traditionally, a lot from Minneapolis and St. Paul, where I grew up. Most people, especially when you get into international touring, have not been there. So you say, "Well, isn't it risky to talk about the corner of Franklin Avenue and Lyndale?" If you do it right, someone should say, "God, I know a corner like that." Offering specific details to describe something universal.

One of the coolest things to me about going to a show is you look over, and the guy next to you is sitting there drinking a beer and he's wearing a Donkeys t-shirt. And you're like, "Dude, I love The Donkeys."

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.

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.

I'm able to draw outside my own personal experiences. No one wants to hear the song about what I really did today, which is go get coffee and clean my apartment.

There's somewhat of a real fascination with American bands and American mythology in London.

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.

Just looking into something kind of analytically can give a lot of ideas.

I remember I was really into this British band, The Vapors, with that song "Turning Japanese." I thought that they were really next level genius cryptic weirdos. And then I realized when I got older they are just using a lot of British words, and I didn't know what they meant. But I thought, Oh, they are making up their own language.

Springsteen on that record started writing less about having your wind in your hair and turning the radio up and more about being dragged down by adult things. Regular people trying to get ahead. A little less mythical and romantic, and more real. It's a really spectacular record for that reason.

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?"

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.

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?"

If you wait four or five years between records, it better be a masterpiece, you know? And if you keep putting them out, you're saying, 'Hey, here's 10 more songs'.

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.

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.