Best 63 quotes of Craig Finn on MyQuotes

A conversation with you is a different thing than projecting to a couple hundred people. It's bigger and more animated and it's on a bigger scope, but still in the heart, it's honestly me.

An album doesn't mean as much to a lot of people now, compared to just songs.

At forty-one, now I think it would be really cool to have an A&R guy say, "You know what? I don't think you've got this album sequenced right.

Heaven Is Whenever - the Christian version of reward, the ultimate reward of heaven. I guess what I'm trying to say is this is happening every day. We're blessed always. There is struggle and there is suffering in our lives, but understanding that is part of our lives - a part that just is. Suffering is a part of the joy of life.

I am a really obsessive music listener, and I would look for clues.

I can still sing most Eagles songs, even though I never bought a record and never liked the band.

I definitely hope to continue to release records at an accelerated pace.

I don't have a problem rhyming "bar" with "car" - I do it all the time - but sometimes it doesn't feel right.

If you wait four or five years between records, it better be a masterpiece, you know? And if you keep putting them out, you're saying, 'Hey, here's 10 more songs'.

I graduated high school in 1989, and there was no alternative rock radio, and there wasn't really good college radio you could get on a car stereo. Once you get a car at that age, you're spending all the time you can away from home, sometimes just driving around aimlessly. Listening, or not even listening, but subconsciously soaking up this classic rock barrage.

I guess the drinking and the drugs are interesting to me because the way we use them and our society uses them, we kind of manufacture highs and lows.

I'm able to draw outside my own personal experiences. No one wants to hear the song about what I really did today, which is go get coffee and clean my apartment.

I made a decision at some point to live a nontraditional life. I've become like, the opposite of a consumer. I just want freedom. I don't want stuff. I don't want clutter. I just want to be able to move freely. I want to be good to the people I love. But I don't want stuff. I just want, you know, love and big ideas.

I'm not a horror movie guy, but I think the guy that did Saw, or maybe House or something, he was saying you love that age as a storyteller because a nineteen-year-old is still dumb enough to make really bad decisions, but he's allowed to be out on his own.

I'm not only a songwriter but I'm a massive music fan and I love going to shows. It's different than reading a book.

In the end, when you're writing a really good song, it strikes the right tone.

I really like narrative songs, but I wonder if that's a thing for some people. Once they've heard the story, do they really need to hear the story again?

I really want to write a novel. A few years ago I went so far as to do the cliché thing and rent this house in upstate [New York]. I still have the story, but I got 15,000, 20,000 words in and it was like, This is falling apart. I can't figure out.

I remember I was really into this British band, The Vapors, with that song "Turning Japanese." I thought that they were really next level genius cryptic weirdos. And then I realized when I got older they are just using a lot of British words, and I didn't know what they meant. But I thought, Oh, they are making up their own language.

Ironically, when I was playing in my first band, I would deliberately not write down any lyrics. I have a really good memory and I would just keep them in my head.

I think having a coach or an editor or whatever the novelist's producer is could help. If you finish a chapter and you turn it in to him, and he or she said, "That was pretty good, it might go better." Maybe that's what I'll try to find.

I think making the songs is to put strength in the community in some way.

I think the biggest thing - and this I think is true of songs but also of movies and books and art in general - is when you have this moment where you hear a song or whatever and you say, "Hey, I've felt that exact way as a human being," and there's no easy way to describe it.

I think, Trump ran a very nostalgic campaign. There's an idea of like, to put it bluntly: What if it was like before all our kids got strung out on drugs? You know, what if it was like that? Make America like that.

I think when you are doing a song you're trying to give people enough details that they connect.

It's a template record for the intersection between pop and noise, starting out with 'Sunday Morning' - a real beautiful, almost innocent sunny day song. You have a lot of different types of things on one record. It can be really pretty, or it can be really awful inside, depending on where your head's at at the moment. I got it in ninth grade and I think I've listened to it every month since then.

It's good to have some kind of California in there. It's almost always appropriate. It's appropriate on a sunny day or late at night. If you grew up on the Grateful Dead, which I certainly did, you listened to 10 million bootlegs. But you realize that American Beauty has some really tight, well-arranged songs that aren't meandering.

It's really easy, in a band, to overstate - you feel like everything you do is different than the past. I think this is just another Hold Steady record, but at the same time, there is some evolution. Like, "How can we make this chorus bigger?" "What do we want this to sound like?

I use a lot of specific places in my songs - traditionally, a lot from Minneapolis and St. Paul, where I grew up. Most people, especially when you get into international touring, have not been there. So you say, "Well, isn't it risky to talk about the corner of Franklin Avenue and Lyndale?" If you do it right, someone should say, "God, I know a corner like that." Offering specific details to describe something universal.

I've tried to write songs for other people and it usually requires them singing it and then changing the phrasing. I can put a lot of words in a song, and one of the reasons is, I'm not that good of a singer, so I don't hold a lot of notes.

I've written a lot about drugs and alcohol. I wouldn't say it's because we've gotten bigger or anything, but I kind of feel a little bit done with it. There are other things to talk about.

I was really obsessed with age. I kept saying it was a record about trying to age gracefully.

I would never talk to a girl in a bar, like a pick-up thing. But I could talk to anyone if they wore a t-shirt of a band I like.

My big thing is to get onstage sober. Whatever happens from there happens. But you get onstage drunk and it's not going to be good. It takes a while. I have to sing a lot, so I can only drink so much. So most nights it's fine; even if I drink as much as I possibly can, I can't get that drunk.

My style of lyric-writing is very specific and has a lot of details, and I think people react most to that.

My wife is very happy about me keeping all my music in my pocket.

One of the coolest things to me about going to a show is you look over, and the guy next to you is sitting there drinking a beer and he's wearing a Donkeys t-shirt. And you're like, "Dude, I love The Donkeys.

One of the things is my process requires a lot of repetition. I can probably drive people crazy because I'm interested in playing a song twenty times in a row.

One thing I have a tendency to do is not write choruses, or write choruses that have different words. The first chorus will have different words than the second chorus.

People make maps of all the places I've mentioned. I knew that those people were out there. I wanted to create something for them.

People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul.

Ray Cappo never tried to convert me into a Krishna, although one of his cohorts probably did. I think it was just about being wrapped up in this thing. Hardcore, at one point, meant everything to me. Now you look back, and I still think it's cool, but to some extent I grew out of it. Other things became a bigger priority for me.

So maybe it’s just a part of who we all are, and always were. My worry now, though, is that we are starting to nurture these neuroses of ours, and treating them like pets. That can’t be a good thing.

Someone should have a record that doesn't have any singing. It's my favorite Miles Davis record. I love hanging out in the summer, in New York, when it's miserably hot. I love electric Miles Davis in the summer. Jack Johnson, the songwriting especially, is a premier example of that. It always makes me feel hot in the city. It's also nice to have something not yelling in your ear. For me, as a lyricist, it's nice to put on something without any words.

Some people I've talked to have had really an interpretation of this record as being nostalgic. But in some ways, when we were writing Stay Positive, I was really obsessed with age. I kept saying it was a record about trying to age gracefully. This record, I think actually was us aging gracefully.

Some people will totally get restless, since you can make demos pretty easy. It's not unreasonable for someone to say, "All right, can you just record this and go home and work on it?

Springsteen on that record started writing less about having your wind in your hair and turning the radio up and more about being dragged down by adult things. Regular people trying to get ahead. A little less mythical and romantic, and more real. It's a really spectacular record for that reason.

The Catholic influence just comes from being raised Catholic, going to church every Sunday, being confirmed, going to church on holy days. So it's coming from where I am. It serves the purpose of having people who have a base or foundation where they know what's right.

The critics and hardcore music fans, those are the people you have to get to first, so we're really happy about it.

There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and Girls in America / Have such a sad time together.