CRAIG FINN ASTOUNDS WITH HIS STORIES AND SONGS

LIVE REVIEW | CRAIG FINN – ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL, LONDON 12/9/24 by Morris Shamah

“We’ve sung a lot of sad songs tonight” Craig Finn says, before his final song, with a smirk. The use of we is generous – the audience has been almost entirely silent, engrossed and appreciative, seated in Islington Assembly Hall’s beautiful, if slightly civic, main room. Craig goes on to explain that doing this together, singing – or being sung to – about the struggle is an acknowledgement of that particular human condition. “And in that sense when we do this, I find joy and beauty in that.” He then proceeds to end his hour plus set of stories and songs with “This Is What It Looks Like” – also the title of this tour – his ode to fear, faithfulness, the future, big crowds and danger.

There was a point, early in the show, when I thought that Kathleen Edwards would steal the show. Opening for Craig, the Canadian native put on a masterclass over 45 minutes, singing her Americana personal- odysseys with a genuine empathy most Americans would be too scared to deploy. Every song was introduced with a touching or funny story, exactly as promised on Craigs tour poster, and when she stopped singing, her acoustic guitar kept going, all melody and subtly as if a voice unto itself. Kathleen stood alone onstage, but you could feel the big rock boom of a drummer or the sweeping cries of a keyboard player in her new songs, just hiding in the absence – when she explains that these new songs are from an album that’s being produced by Jason Isbell, no one is surprised. And when she receives a genuine standing ovation, no one sat it out. But it only took Craig Finn 5 minutes to wipe away the idea that he’d be upstaged.

Craig opened with a brand new song, “Fletchers”, the first of six unreleased songs he’d play this evening, nearly half his set. If this half-dozen is anything to go by, Craig is continuing to grow as a songwriter, the most underrated folk-tale-teller in modern music. Like all of Craig’s songs, these songs explore the unspoken, the underbelly of life these days – the unanswered call, the missing acquaintance, the stories no one feels comfortable to tell. Craig continues to find the harmony in the sadness, the beauty in the experience of a life that’s maybe not so well lived.

Craig structures his show this tour into four chapters: Part 1, tell them (us) who you (he) is. Part 2, tell them who they are. Part 3, tell them what happened. And Part 4, tell them what’s changed.

For Part 1, Craig plays “Preludes,” a song from We All Want The Same Things, Craig’s third album. Preludes tells the story of Craig in 1994, taking the bus to and from the bars since he lost his driving license. In introducing the song, Craig tells us the full story, which ends with his bike being stolen from him on the riverside, ending with him “..down there in the mud. I stayed there for 20 years and then I wrote this song.”

To tell us who we are, Craig plays “Certain Songs”, from his second band, The Hold Steady. It’s the night’s closest thing to fan service, but even here, Craig finds new meaning in this song – by outspokenly reframing it about us, the audience, he’s bringing us into his tall tales, stripping us of our defenses that oh, these songs are about other people.

Craig then doubles down – tell them what happened. Craig plays “Newmyer’s Roof”, which is his 9/11 story, involving watching the towers fall from his bosses roof, and then going into a years long depression involving drugs, alcohol, and divorce. Preludes is easy to laugh at, a song about a teenager getting mugged and gangsters in Honda sedans, but Newmeyer’s Roof, the only other song to be clearly and explicitly about Craig himself, is impossible to ignore. This isn’t just what happened, this is Craig bringing himself into the sadness and bleakness he’s decided to share with us this evening. It’s no coincidence that this is three quarters of the way into the set – if this set is the Hero’s Journey, which it might as well be, this is The Ordeal that ends the second act. “Newmyer’s Roof” was first released in 2015, on Faith In The Future, and it’s been a staple of Craig’s live shows ever since, but it’s never been presented so bare, so crucially, as it has on this tour.

Throughout the show, Craig’s been peppering stories between his songs. For those who have seen Craig before, some of these are familiar. The context for “The Amarillo Kid”, the 1994 story before “Preludes”, the PTSD of “Magic Marker”. The new songs, of course, come with their own stories – the priest who’s an atheist and can’t handle the guilt, the fundraising text message addressed to the wrong person. For Part 4, tell them what changed, Craig introduces “Messing With The Settings” as a monument to the people who aren’t here anymore. He goes on to explain that generals and politicians get statues of them on horses in public parks… but the regular people, the people he’s been singing about, the people he’s shared with us, their monuments are these songs. So when he closes the show with his little grin and tells us that there’s joy in communal grief, it becomes clear – this whole show is more of a wake than anything else.

Setlist – Craig Finn