Consumer Guide Album

Craig Finn: Always Been [Tamarac, 2025]
The verbal textures, narrative details, and credible characterizations the 53-year-old Hold Steady frontman's sixth solo album meld into its 11 songs achieve a literary pitch that could win this alt-rock lifer a short story prize. His protagonists are all full-fledged adults like him although usually a little younger, many of them onetime clergymen who are still figuring out how and why they'd ended up so, well, unfulfilled. Just because they've passed 30, their tales have gone through enough stages to accrue more incident than Willy Vlautin's, which as a result are starker and cleaner. Feels to me like a lot of these guys and gals were big Hold Steady fans a decade or two ago—which makes me hope at least a few of that cohort had happier endings. So tell me, Craig—is this how things always work out? Or is it just easier to write about than the happy endings I'm betting still sometimes materialize? A