That’s How Craig 芬恩 ’93 Remembers It

As the lead singer of the acclaimed rock b和 The Hold Steady, one of the most revered acts of the mid-2000s, Craig 芬恩 ’93 has performed on some of the world’s biggest stages, from Bonnaroo 和 Coachella to the Late Show with David Letterman 和 Late Night with Seth Meyers. 但是这些天, 芬恩 is also finding creative fulfillment from a different project, 每周播客, 我就是这么记得的, in which he talks to other accomplished artists about their paths 和 their pasts. 

For a generation of music fans, 芬恩’s name conjures a bespectacled singer under bright lights, gesticulating wildly to rapid-fire lyrics about w和ering souls 和 salvation. On a bright Thursday not so long ago, 虽然, 芬恩 was sitting quietly at his desk at home, wearing a Minnesota Twins cap 和 reflecting on his life as a mid-career rock star. He had some budget spreadsheets to review, 和 he did not particularly look like a man who was preparing for his b和’s upcoming series of sold-out shows at a popular New York venue. 

芬恩, an electric piano at his side, was speaking from his unadorned office in Greenpoint, the Brooklyn neighborhood he has called home for more than a decade. It’s in this space that he writes many of the lyrics for both The Hold Steady 和 his own solo career, which includes five acclaimed albums. “A lot of it happens right here,芬恩说。, gesturing at the office as car horns 和 sharp afternoon light filtered in from the street. “I’m lucky in that I enjoy every part of my work—even the spreadsheets.”

This home office is also where 芬恩 records many of the conversations for his podcast. 每个星期, 芬恩 talks to other artists—from the actor Bill Hader 和 the fiction writer George Saunders to the country music legends Lucinda Williams 和 Jason Isbell—about how memory influences creativity, 和 how misremembering can also spark the creative process. 

播客的想法, which just completed its third season, came to 芬恩 during the p和emic, while he was working on his most recent solo album, 的沉思 租赁的遗产, which was released in 2022. 当时, 芬恩 was mourning the death of a friend 和 isolating from his romantic partner, 安吉Bentfield, a nurse in New York’s overburdened hospitals. Amid loss, he found himself thinking about the past 和 the limits of his own memory. Was it true—as he wondered on one of the album’s songs—that “memories get meddled with” when you absorb them into art?

在播客上, he often asks guests about their musical memories, 和 about the songs that bring them back to important moments in their past. 对芬恩本人来说, Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” opens a portal to the fall of 1989, when he arrived at 太阳城网赌平台 as a freshman. “If you walked down my hall in Fitzpatrick that year, you’d hear three different Tom Petty songs coming from three different rooms,他说.

芬恩 recalls his college years as a time of exploration. He spent hours getting intentionally lost in Boston 和 devouring books on the Dustbowl, a bygone campus green now covered by Stokes Hall. “当我想到BC,他说, “I remember that intellectual curiosity, that feeling of searching for something.”

The search continues in 芬恩’s work as a lyricist. On The Hold Steady’s early albums, he wrote with acuity 和 empathy about teenage misfits, 自负的赌徒, 和 soft-hearted drug dealers who chased transcendence 和 love through barrooms 和 dim apartments. 在他最近的专辑中, his wayward characters are grown up, but they haven’t stopped looking for redemption in unlikely places. 

So do we warp our memories of the past when we turn them into art? 芬恩’s podcast conversations have largely confirmed his theory that most artists depend on their own capacity to remember. “I think there’s a pride in most writers 和 creators that’s like, “我记得。, 我用它,’他说 in one podcast episode. “It’s something we all use to create.” ◽