Craig Finn – new album

Craig Finn - new album

Craig Finn’s new solo album Faith in the Future is out now on Partisan Records and he will be coming to the UK this week to perform a solo acoustic show at London’s Slaughtered Lamb on 15th September as well as a string of in-stores around the country in support of the album release.

Craig Finn has also just shared the video for the first single ‘Maggie, I’ve Been Searching For Our Son’. Directed by Caroline Jaecks and premiered by Rolling Stone, the video is a collection of nearly 300 video clips and photos supplied by close to sixty Craig Finn fans. Finn reached out to the fanbase in July asking the fans for assistance in creating the music video. As he said in the announcement, making videos is never as much fun as it might seem, lip-syching is never enjoyable and coming up with ideas for clips can be a bit daunting.  Finn then sent the lyrics of the song to fans a week before ‘Maggie, I’ve Been Searching For Our Son’ was released to radio and they started sending in videos. Jaecks then crafted a narrative around the clips and re-projected them into different backgrounds.

Josh Kaufman produced the record in the cosy, rustic confines of Woodstock’s The Isokon recording studio and helped Finn stretch the boundaries of his songwriting with confidence, invention and ambition to realise what will be a defining moment in his career.

At times stark and spare, at other times vibrant and dynamic, ‘Faith in the Future’ is Finn’s most compelling collection thus far, each song a powerfully alluring and subtly nuanced composition wedded to his distinctive short story narratives. Much of the material on ‘Faith in the Future’ was written after the passing of Finn’s mother, and while none of the songs directly address that loss, the themes of perseverance and finding redemption can be found throughout the album.

“I had both the music and lyrics to these songs, though they changed a great deal in the studio,” Finn explains. “There’s a grandness to The Hold Steady that tends to make me write about bigger, more dramatic themes. Some of these songs are more mundane, with minor slices of life that wouldn’t best be supported by the hugeness of a rock group. It wasn’t always about what we wanted to put in, but what should we leave out? We didn’t want to sermonise or moralise. Just let these songs, and characters, be.”

Artist’s website: http://steadycraig.tumblr.com/

Watch the video: