Release: Craig Finn - A Legacy Of Rentals

Craig Finn - A Legacy Of Rentals

A statement from Craig Finn (The Hold Steady) : 

Release date: Friday, May 20th 2022

V2 Records

I woke up at dawn on New Years Day 2020. As I walked towards the kitchen to get some water, I spotted a mouse laying on it’s back, cartoonishly announcing itself as especially dead. Our cat Tanti sat beside it, beaming with pride. It was the only mouse I’d seen in our apartment in a decade, dead or alive. I disposed of it, hoping that it wasn’t an omen for the coming year, and went back to bed. I declined to tell my partner Angie about it. I still haven’t. She won’t read this.

A few hours later, I awoke again to a number of texts. A friend’s mother had been killed the night before in a drunk driving accident in Arizona. The year was off to a strange and brutal start. It kept coming.

           

In early March, on the flight home from from three Hold Steady shows in London, I got word that my close friend Bryan Dilworth had passed away suddenly. He was 51 and left behind a wife, a teenage son, and several million amazing stories.

 

When we landed in NYC, the pandemic had fully arrived with both its realities and its conspiracies. Within the month, Angie (a hospital nurse) was working directly with Covid patients.  As an advised precaution, I moved out of our apartment and in with family nearby in Brooklyn. I stayed there for six weeks, until she returned to her normal nursing shifts. It was in this temporary home that I started writing these songs.

 

In May 2020, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis and my beloved hometown was on the news 24-7. I watched from afar as former haunts burned. I saw faces that I recognized in the throngs. I was angry at the injustice, but also mourning some part of the Minneapolis I once knew.

 

I kept writing throughout the year, trying to find purpose and clarity through the work. I got together with producer Josh Kaufman in early 2021 and decided which songs to pursue. This new material was exploring the line between song and straight storytelling, so we talked about bending the music to the stories to make something cinematic and grand.

 

We recorded mostly in May 2021 with a familiar group of talented friends, and then worked with Trey Pollard at Spacebomb who arranged and recorded a 14 piece string orchestra, bringing a drama and elegance that sets this apart from anything I’ve done before.

 

This record is about memory- how we remember friends that are gone, places that have changed, major events that are part of our past. The songs are memorials, incantations, affirmations, legends and prayers. Like all stories, they are subject to the imperfection and limitations of memory, the distortion that happens to our own histories when stretched by time and distance. These small adjustments become part of the stories themselves.

 

The title A Legacy of Rentals acknowledges that we can never completely hold any of our possessions, and that our bodies are merely a temporary residence for our souls. All moments are fleeting. After the destruction of the past few years, I believe that there is joy in each and every living action, however mundane- walking to the kitchen, missing a train, spilling coffee, cleaning it up, meeting a friend for a meal. We all want to be remembered. We all want our time here to be consequential. In taking these daily actions, we engage in hope, and we guarantee our unique place in history.

 

I am honored to be here to share A Legacy of Rentals with you. This is what it looks like.

For more information contact:Stefan.Hayes@v2benelux.com