Craig Finn Quotes

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.

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

Before I had a driver's license, and I lived in the suburbs of Minneapolis and went to high school and came home - I could ride my bike around or get a ride from my parents, but my world was pretty small, limited. Like anyone at that age, I only knew things I could get to.

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'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.

When people hit on feeling a certain melancholy or elation, it's a really exciting moment. I think making that connection is the goal, and what makes something great.

Sometimes people come up and say, "You have this line in this song and it meant a lot to me." You don't always remember that line as the one. You're putting part of your human being on the page so people are going to have different responses - the other humans are going to connect with different parts.

Sometimes things reveal themselves to you a little bit. I think it was Joan Didion that said, "We write to find out what we're thinking." And sometimes that happens.

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 Replacements are the foundation for a lot of what came after in alternative and college rock. Let It Be is their best record and has the most diverse collection of songs. Some pop stuff, some heavy stuff, and some real moments of beauty like 'Sixteen Blue' and 'Androgynous.' It's a record I always go back to.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

When you get into rock 'n' roll myths, like that Rod Stewart blew his whole band and had to get his stomach pumped, it's ridiculous, but everyone's heard it.

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

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

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.

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.

You can think of a number of bands where the first record is by far their biggest record. And that must be hard for people to recapture. Hard for people to live with.

I don't really pursue writing songs for other people. I guess one of the things I always think about is a good line in a song should be something I can hear myself saying.

Just looking into something kind of analytically can give a lot of ideas.

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 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.

The reality is that the shows kind of disconnect from the songs a little bit. You're playing the songs, but they take on a life of their own.

There's this moment sometimes, when you do a crossword puzzle and you have the one really long word. And once you get that, the whole thing kind of comes into focus. Sometimes it's just working things over in your mind and then finding that one line that kind of ties the song together, and now it works. It's a puzzle of sorts.

There's a lot of ways to be honest that don't necessarily involve absolute facts being true. I think that's something I absolutely try to do.

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.

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.

I think the other thing that shaped me a little bit is that I really didn't have any success in music until my early to mid-30s.

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

I think you want to write a song that's like the songs you are into.

You can't get every girl; you get the ones you love the best.

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."

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 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.

Words and music together create powerful, powerful things.

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.

You are hearing this song, and you're 16, and it's a song about love, or a girl. And then maybe there's a girl at school that you like. So you're going to be thinking about that girl. That song is sort of about that girl. The songwriter doesn't know that girl, obviously. He wrote it for something else. But there's the specific meaning with the universal again.

One of the things you do in a band is the more you stay together, the more you play to your strengths.

There's somewhat of a real fascination with American bands and American mythology in London.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.