Craig Finn has made his best ever album with Adam Granduciel of Philly’s The War On Drugs
'Always Been' was recorded in L.A. but has deep Philly roots. From its producer, to its vocalist and setting.
Craig Finn’s Always Been is a tour de force of narrative songwriting, a set of interlocking stories that’s the most impressive of the Hold Steady frontman’s six solo albums and one of the best to be released by anyone in any genre so far this year.
In some ways, Always Been is Finn’s Los Angeles record. On the cover, the singer who will do three Philly shows with the Hold Steady this week — Thursday at the Foundry at the Fillmore, followed by Friday and Saturday at Brooklyn Bowl — poses on the highway overpass where Randy Newman stood for his 1977 Little Criminals.
Always Been was recorded in L.A., as Finn explained via Zoom this week from his home in Brooklyn, in a studio with a “a big poster of Warren Zevon on the wall” and another 1970s Southern California songwriter, Jackson Browne, as an artistic touchstone.
But along with the California love, Always Been has deep Philly roots. The Burbank studio where the album was recorded belongs to Adam Granduciel, of Grammy-winning Philly band the War On Drugs, who produced the album, with Drugs’ Dave Hartley, Robbie Bennett, and Anthony LaMarca contributing.
The woman whose voice graces stellar Always Been songs such as “Shamrock” and “Crumbs,” is Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards, who Finn met on stage at Roxborough-raised songwriter Dave Hause’s Sing Us Home Festival in Manayunk in 2023.
And the album’s finely drawn character sketches — which revolve around a protagonist who Finn describes as “a guy who became a clergy person without having actual faith, and the aftermath of his fall from grace” — are set in the Philly region.
Finn grew up in Minnesota, where he fronted the punky 1990s band Lifter Puller along with Tad Kubler, with whom he founded the bruising, more classic-rock leaning the Hold Steady in New York in 2003.
But he set Always Been on a through line between Central Pennsylvania and the Delaware beaches. The story flows out of “Bethany,” the album’s opening cut, on which the Reverend ministers to his flock in a chapel outside Harrisburg, then tries to pick up the pieces of his life while splitting time between his parents’ beach house during the week and his sisters’ home “on the fringes of Philadelphia” on weekends.
Finn’s songs are not autobiographical, but they are intensely personal.
“I always quote John Gregory Dunne,” he says. “The first character in every novel is the author.”
Lots of storytelling songwriters get tagged as “literary.” It’s legit with Finn, 53, who wrote an Always Been companion book of short stories called Lousy with Ghosts.
Always Been was shaped by the “whiskey priest” protagonist of The Power and the Glory, the 1940 novel by Graham Greene, who got a shout-out, along with Joan Didion, in Finn’s 2012 song “Honolulu Blues.”
Finn says he got the idea to set Always Been on first state beaches because of his close friendship with Brian Dilworth, the Delaware native Philly concert promoter who died in 2020.
He has vacationed on Fenwick Island but moved the action to Bethany, because it’s a biblical allusion but also “just sounds better.” The song fades out to the spoken-sung lyric: “The sunset looks like blood from the window of the bus, somewhere between Harrisburg and Bethany.”
Finn’s friendship with Granduciel dates back to the ’00s, when TWOD was a scrappy Fishtown band and Finn was gobsmacked by “Arms Like Boulders” from the Wagonwheel Blues debut. “I heard that first track on that first album, and I was like ‘Would they want to open for us?”
The Drugs did that on a 2009 tour, and the bands became friends. Finn sang covers of Zevon, John Hiatt, and Bob Seger songs at TWOD’s Drugcember celebration at Johnny Brenda’s in 2022.
He visited Granduciel in November 2023, and played “Bethany” for him. When he was done, the Drugs leader asked Finn if he could be back in 10 days to make a record.
“I was just so impressed with his dedication and his practice, with his writing,” Granduciel says, speaking from his home in Los Angeles.
“Anytime someone can get into the third person the way he does, it’s just very compelling. He was confident in what he had written, and the stories he was telling. I love how they all intertwine. They’re these vignettes about people — maybe he knows them, maybe they’re him — but they’re all connected. And they’re really moving.”
Granduciel is at work on a follow-up to The War On Drugs’ 2021 I Don’t Live Here Anymore and also has recently worked with British songwriter Sam Fender and Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood.
“Adam goes in search of the song,” says Finn. “There’s a lot of joy when he makes music. He loves being in the studio. He loves gear. He loves plugging things in and getting sounds. So I thought it might be refreshing for him, and more fun, if it wasn’t his own music.”
“It was easy, to be honest,” Granduciel says, calling Finn “incredibly talented.” As with Fender, “it was simple to step into their world and help guide them through finishing a record.”
For jonesing Drugs fans, Always Been provides a fix: from the Granduciel solo that launches “Bethany” into the stratosphere, to artful, ambient sounds that bring out the tenderness in the morning-after narrative “Fletcher’s.”
With the Hold Steady, Finn writes lyrics, but the band writes the music. “The music the guys give me tends to be pretty big, so the stories are bigger. This record I made with Adam is a little smaller and more vulnerable. It more resembles my actual life.”
This weekend’s Hold Steady sets won’t include Always Been songs. “The Hold Steady has 138 songs, so they don’t need anymore,” Finn says. But he’ll return to the play the XPoNential Music Festival in Camden with his band People of Substance in September.
That’s good news for Finn fans who feel Always Been is his best work. When pressed, he agrees.
“I think it is the best record I ever made because I think I saw it better than anything I’ve ever done,” he says. I saw it early, and it kept lining up with my vision. It had the excitement and beauty that I wanted it to, and I think it’s got a wide range of emotions. Also, I think I’ve gotten better. At least for my part in it, it is my favorite. Hopefully, I’ll feel the same about the next one.”
The Hold Steady at Foundry at the Fillmore, 29 E. Allen St., at 8 p.m. Thursday and Brooklyn Bowl, 1009 Canal St. at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Opening acts: DJ Jim McGuinn Thursday and Philly bands Labrador on Friday and the Tisburys on Saturday. theholdsteady.net.