Craig Finn has never written a song like “God in Chicago.” Sure, the plot points should be familiar to anyone who’s followed his work since Lifter Puller or the Hold Steady. There’s kissing in the streets; there’s salvation in an unexpected place; there’s drugs; there’s a busted boombox playing Led Zeppelin III. But in “God in Chicago,” the spoken-word piano ballad centerpiece of Finn’s stunning new album, it feels heavier, like all his songs are contained in this one. Detailing a journey with a near stranger to settle the score for her dead brother, it illustrates the consequences of Finn’s reckless, dangerous characters with a newfound penchant for realism. When the central drug deal goes down, it happens swiftly and silently. “This isn’t the movies,” Finn explains—a distinction that would have been moot in earlier songs, where real life and rock’n’roll cliché blended into bar-band euphoria.
Through much of his career, Finn’s work has come with the coziness of a weekend spent returning to a college town: filled with old friends, inside jokes, and a bittersweet struggle to move forward. While the best moments of his previous two solo albums felt like little more than stripped-back versions of solid Hold Steady songs, We All Want the Same Things is more subtle and strange. Finn’s weathered voice is at its most expressive, tied to songs that take him as far from his comfort zone as he’s ever tread. It’s a remarkable record not for sounding like a return-to-form, but for feeling like entirely new territory without sacrificing its thrill or familiarity.
Finn’s writing in these songs often feels like an exercise in empathy, seeking out people who’ve never gotten the spotlight in his work. The male protagonist of “Tangletown” is a wealthy divorcee who works a boring job, goes to bed early, and surrounds himself with luxuries that poorly mask his inner turmoil. You never learn his name, but it’s almost certainly not “Charlemagne” or “Gideon”: it might be “Craig.” In “It Hits When It Hits,” Finn sounds lonely and lost atop a slow-pulsing rhythm. “I can tell that today is gonna be a celebration,” he repeats while the music drags at his words, suggesting that today will, in fact, be just the opposite. His call for hard-won joy is miles away from Hold Steady anthems where celebration felt like a divine right: “This summer, grant us all the power,” he once sang, “To drink on top of water towers.” Here, his characters have a hard time summoning the power just to make it through the day.
Finn has referred to these new songs as “co-dependency jams,” and the relationships he describes in them are complex and colorful, from the partners-in-crime of “Jester & June” to the grieving road-trippers of “God in Chicago.” When people are called by name, he simply affirms their presence in the world, his characters grateful for not being alone. “James, I’m glad that you’re here,” Finn sings through the synthy Kaputt-pop of “Birds Trapped in the Airport”; “Nathan, you’re my only friend,” he urges in “Ninety Bucks.” Of course, the sincerity of any of these statements is tenuous. In “Ninety Bucks,” Nathan responds to his friend by loaning her money, knowing she probably won’t use it for MRI-certification. All the while, a single piano note plods in the background as their monotonous dynamic starts sounding something like stability. “Sometimes I can push ahead,” Finn sings, “Some nights the wheels just spin.”
The entirety of We All Want the Same Things is steeped in a mournful haze that makes the “wild kind of sadness” Finn sings about in “Jester & June” come to life, and helps these songs transcend from short stories into action-packed anthems on par with his finest work. Bruce Springsteen, particularly his character-driven early work, has long been a reference point for Finn’s music. But here, he seems more inspired by Bruce’s darker material: the haunting fadeout of “Racing in the Street,” the layered vocals in “Stolen Car,” the muted trumpet in “Meeting Across the River” that made its star-crossed drug deal sound doomed before it even happened. In “Preludes,” Finn sings about driving through a storm, accompanied by flutes that sound like snow against windshield wipers. In “Rescue Blues,” Stuart Bogie’s horn ascends as Finn comes closer to finding a sense of resolution. “I guess we all/Get by in different ways,” he sings tenderly, more confident with each repetition. Finally, Craig Finn sounds like he’ll be all right, like he’s got somewhere to go when the party’s over.
