The universe of Craig Finn meshes together imperfectly, like multiple exposures overlaid in the same frame. Its signposts take the form of proper nouns: names, cities, bars, car brands. Occasionally these recur, but in Finn’s recent work they’re more often blurred vignettes—a dancer with a penchant for violence, a troubled former child star, a drug dealer with a vengeance. Finn seems keenly aware of the character details; as the frontman of the Hold Steady, he’s built a career on codifying rambunctious personas in his band’s shout-along choruses. The more intimate lyrics in his solo work extend those characters’ narratives, building on existing frameworks without crafting wholly new stories. “I guess I felt...that visiting them for a song at a time might be more interesting than putting them through a number of phases,” he said after the release of 2019’s . On , a Record Store Day collection of outtakes, demos, and acoustic reworkings from his three previous solo records, he returns to the small towns and smaller relationships he’s built over the past five years, carving notches in the edge of the puzzle where he can affix new pieces.