Last week, Craig Finn announced that his second solo album, entitled Faith in the Future, was on its way and would be released on September the 11th. This news made me quite happy; far too many solo albums turn out to be inessential side attractions and one-off indulgences, so it's great to see that Finn is actually building a discography of his very own in parallel to his work with The Hold Steady.
Before I go any further, here's Newmyer's Roof, a preview track that was released to accompany the album announcement:
Before I go any further, here's Newmyer's Roof, a preview track that was released to accompany the album announcement:
What I'm particularly curious to find out is whether or not Faith in the Future picks up any of the threads that Finn started spinning on his first solo release, 2012's Clear Heart Full Eyes. Newmyer's Roof isn't particularly promising on that front - Jackson and Stephanie don't feature, and to the best of my recollection, none of the characters who are mentioned were named on Clear Heart Full Eyes - but it's hard to judge a whole album on just one track. Who knows? Perhaps Faith in the Future will flesh out the stories of its predecessor in the same way as Separation Sunday and Boys and Girls in America did for the first Hold Steady record.
That being said, I won't hold a grudge against Faith if it abandons all of the stories from Clear Heart. It might actually be cool if each new Craig Finn album is its own little microcosm of characters and conflicts, a different little world contained within each new disc. Sure, much of The Hold Steady's repertoire was seemingly written as one big, multi-album story, but that doesn't mean that Finn has to do the same thing solo - perhaps each of these albums should be taken as its own self-contained work of fiction* rather than part of a larger whole?
I guess we'll find out for sure in September. Frankly, if it's got anything half as good as Rented Room on it, I'll probably be reasonably happy regardless of narrative.
*I'm pretty sure that Clear Heart wasn't an autobiographical record, and judging by the way Finn is talking about Faith in the Future, I'm pretty sure that *its* songs won't have much grounding in real events either. So, yeah: fiction.
That being said, I won't hold a grudge against Faith if it abandons all of the stories from Clear Heart. It might actually be cool if each new Craig Finn album is its own little microcosm of characters and conflicts, a different little world contained within each new disc. Sure, much of The Hold Steady's repertoire was seemingly written as one big, multi-album story, but that doesn't mean that Finn has to do the same thing solo - perhaps each of these albums should be taken as its own self-contained work of fiction* rather than part of a larger whole?
I guess we'll find out for sure in September. Frankly, if it's got anything half as good as Rented Room on it, I'll probably be reasonably happy regardless of narrative.
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