The Timely Comforts of Craig Finn's <em>We All Want the Same Things</em>
The Hold Steady singer’s new album collects small, graceful fables about the downtrodden raising each other up.
When Craig Finn returned from college in Boston to Minneapolis in 1994, he developed a very particular preoccupation. “I just remember thinking the whole trick of this is going to be, ‘I can’t get a DUI,’” the Hold Steady singer recently told Steven Hyden for Uproxx, adding that he realized that the guys he saw riding bikes around town weren’t necessarily doing so “for exercise.” He sings about this period in his new song “Preludes,” in which he recalls, “I got stuck in a snowbank / I was too drunk to drive to Edina.”
As a cheerful rock arrangement laden with
