In his essay “On Fairy-stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien famously referred to his creative work, and the human creative act more generally, as “sub-creation.” That is, only God can properly be called a creator, the Creator ex nihilo, and none of us under God’s dominion have the power to truly create. Instead, we “sub-create,” working with the materials of God’s handiwork, becoming in Tolkien’s words the “little makers” of our own little worlds, like a child at play with the toys his father has given him.
Tolkien may seem a strange starting point to talk about the songs of an indie rocker, but Craig Finn is something of a strange figure in the world of pop and indie songwriters. Finn doesn’t invent new worlds or languages like Tolkien does, doesn’t insert any magical creatures into his songs, but he creates—or sub-creates—entire lives and the worlds that surround them in miniature. He sketches characters and stories over the span of four or five minutes with the same care and attention of a model world builder.
Frequently, these songs stand alone, but on his most recent album, Always Been, Finn has created a larger world that compounds and expands song by song around its narrator. Like most of Finn’s characters, this narrator is broken, bruised, and down on his luck: a failed preacher and husband who talks about how he became a reverend despite his lack of faith, met his wife in his congregation, and his depression and falling away from both his wife and church. His story is fleshed out in an accumulation of details that builds his world in pieces throughout the album. We learn in “A Man Needs a Vocation,” for example, more about how he became a pastor. Sleeping in his car, he finds a pamphlet on his windshield advertising a cheap twenty-week course in divinity where
He memorized the sacred texts
That earned him the certificate
That led him a place to live
And though he didn’t believe in it
He was quite convinced
A man needs a vocation
The greatest strength of Finn’s writing is his particularity: his ability to write sharply observed, crystalline lines that are both unexpected and perfectly capture some truth. In “The Man I’ve Always Been,” the narrator describes himself as
The guy who’s trying not to cry
In the supermarket aisle
Confused why there’s so many types of juice
Finn’s narrator could tell us (and Dana, his ex-wife to whom the song is addressed) more straightforwardly that he still gets overwhelmed and depressed sometimes. But the specificity of confusion over so many types of juice makes the point more powerfully, viscerally. The listener feels a more particularized embarrassment for him, imagining him standing there in the juice aisle, shopping basket in one hand, the other hand covering his face, crying as a woman tries to reach past him for a bottle of orange juice. We feel the specific empathy of imagining ourselves in that aisle, perhaps thinking to ourselves, “I, too, have been overwhelmed by too many options at the supermarket. I, too, have become emotional and embarrassed in a public place.” All of these aspects work together subconsciously to give the line its emotive power.
“People of Substance” begins:
Dana, I don’t get depressed anymore
Except possibly December at the Delaware shore
Or maybe missing numbers on the motel doors
The toy section at the drugstore
Again, each highly specific line implies a depth of reality and history that reverberates beyond the detail itself. What happened in December on the Delaware shore that triggers depression for him? Why the toy section? Regret at not having children, perhaps, or at least a reminder of the lost possibilities? And even in that line, notice that it’s the toy section specifically at the drugstore, which is typically a cheap and limited toy section compared to those at a big box store or mom and pop toy store. This points out that he’s spending time at the drugstore, possibly for prescriptions for his depression, or for what else we’re not sure. In any event, we don’t associate the drugstore with things going particularly well. So much life and implication are compressed into the line. And in this song, the second on the album, “missing numbers on the motel doors” doesn’t mean much to the listener specifically. But later in the album, we hear about a motel in Washington state and a tragic episode there. The missing numbers end up being a hint dropped early in the album that expands and takes on greater significance later on. This is the micro-level world-building that Finn accomplishes throughout his songs.
This faithless former preacher’s life hits such a low of brokenness and fault that he realizes he needs something else.
Every song on the album could yield examples of this, but I’ll give just one more. The opening song, “Bethany,” features a final verse that expertly blends implication and concrete description in the accumulation of small, well-chosen details:
The devil came in hot
Someone called the cops
I explained to them how much it is you mean to meThe cuffs they made a click
As they wrapped around my wrists
Everybody’s got their version of securityMaybe there’s a life where
The Reverend has his wife
And Jesus has his ministry in GalileeBut the sunset looks like blood
From the window of the bus
Somewhere between Harrisburg and Bethany
The listener experiences here a balance between strong imagery and evocative, less-is-more lines that imply the reverberations of a larger world.
Though the album’s narrator is nondenominational, Finn himself is Catholic—he’s spoken about how formative his Catholicism was when he was young and about returning to the Church in his thirties after falling away from it in his college years. He writes within a cosmology of original and personal sin, of brokenness and our fallen state, but with an affection for his characters and an eye turned toward redemption.
In “I Walk With a Cane,” Finn digs more explicitly than elsewhere into his vision of fallen man as the narrator sings:
The stone in my shoe just reminds me
We’re all born with original sin
. . .
It’s really hard to walk when you’re carrying this cross
To remind you of your greatest sin
Whether or not this was Finn’s intent, the stone in his shoe alludes to one of Catholic fiction’s greatest writers, Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor had a complete artistic vision of fallen humanity and the work of divine grace in the lowest, most broken moments of man. In Wise Blood, after everything in Hazel Motes’s life falls apart, after all his failed attempts to run away from God and start a “Church of Christ without Christ,” he repents in his own broken way and fills his shoes with stones as a penance. In his own story-songs, Finn participates in this tradition of Catholic writers who recognize man’s brokenness at its extremes but still have hope for redemption.
And for the narrator of Always Been, the stone in his shoe is not the final act. In the next song, “Clayton,” we hear that:
I took Clayton as a name
The day they said that I was saved
They said the Lord just reached his hands out and
Formed me out of clay
This faithless former preacher’s life hits such a low of brokenness and fault that he realizes he needs something else. He sees himself as newly formed and sings, “I finally took the stone out of my shoe.” His conversion and his life are still imperfect, but here, Finn gives us a vision not only of sin but of hope. He gives his sub-created world a cosmology of redemption, reflecting the presence of a God who loves us even in our brokenness, but who desires to bring us out of our sin and into union with him.