It’s Always Been a Craig Finn Album
Craig Finn – Always Been (2025)
Tamarac Recordings / Thirty Tigers
By Kevin Nelson
“I told her how last year I’d gone out to Seattle for a wedding and
My cousin took us sailing on Lake Union.
And in the middle of the stillness, I felt an urgency to live where nobody knows me.
Where all my prior sins couldn’t be held against me.
I keep thinking about just moving there and crashing with my
cousin. Doing landscaping or something. But my cousin has two
children and Seattle is expensive and funds have been elusive.
It’ll probably never happen and that’s probably just as well.”
This two-verse stanza from “Fletcher’s,” on Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn’s latest album Always Been, hits like a knowing punch in the gut for any of the many transplants to this city.
Like its narrator, I too came out to Seattle not knowing anyone decades ago. I’ve personally felt the victories and the losses. Finn captures those feelings so succinctly in this album that I can’t help but love it.
In that way, the title Always Been makes sense—because it has always been a Craig Finn album. The routine references he makes—the small-time crooks, the hopeful dreamers, the religious undertones—are all par for the course of a Craig Finn record (and, to a slightly lesser extent, a Hold Steady album).
That’s not a bad thing. The small-time losers in “I Walk With a Cane” and “Shamrock” (a digital exclusive) fit squarely within Finn’s wheelhouse. It just makes sense to have them here.
But then, halfway through the album, comes “Fletcher’s.” Similar to how “God in Chicago” stood out on We All Want the Same Things, this is the standout track. It’s a story song about an aimless narrator just looking for what’s next—and not finding it. While hanging out at the titular Fletcher’s, some women show up to the party, including Fletcher’s situationship, Steph.
The narrator reflects throughout the night as he encounters Steph, her friends, and some people he used to skate with. None of it seems of note. None of it seems real. At one point, he contemplates moving to Seattle but admits he’ll probably fail there and end up moving back home—just like Fletcher did after burning out in Denver (earning him the nickname “Rocky Mountain Fletcher”).
Listening to the Always Been tracks as a Seattle resident, it’s striking how the city plays a character throughout the album. Various characters reference it as an idealized escape while also acknowledging how expensive and hard it can be.
A key takeaway: Always Been is by-the-book Craig Finn—but again, that’s not a bad thing. He’s carved out his lane as both the Hold Steady frontman and a purveyor of Springsteen-lite character studies that just work. In that way, Always Been has always been what we expected from Finn. And that’s not a bad thing.
Always Been drops April 4, and Craig Finn will open for Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Mould at the Neptune on April 7.
Craig Finn played a show at someone’s house in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood back in 2017. The author (seen below with Finn) came away from that experience amazed that people were walking their dogs in the background while the Hold Steady frontman played in the foreground.
