Craig Finn - We All Want The Same Things (2017)

Shortly after the release of 'Faith in the Future' in September 2015, Craig Finn got together with producer Josh Kaufman to talk about making another record. He had been writing a ton, and wanted to follow up quickly on the last album. He had been thinking about love and partnership in modern times, and had written a lot of songs about couples. Love seems like the biggest mystery in our modern days- no amount of science or advances in technology can help us fully understand the notion of love and the role it plays in our lives. But Finn also thought about the search for love as an antidote for loneliness, and how so often modern partnership can be an alignment of self interests. We make teams with each other to combat the world around us. There is a beauty in that for sure, but it also can fray around the edges. We lean against each other to keep ourselves upright, make uneasy truces, and push forward into uneasy times. The songs Finn had written dwelled on this. Finn and Kaufman started working in short sessions starting November 2015 and kept it going over the next year. As on ‘Faith in the Future’, percussionist Joe Russo and engineer Dan Goodwin were prominent parts of the sessions. They had developed a vocabulary and a style of working that felt comfortable- maybe like a band making their second or third record. That said, they also wanted create something different and new, so they invited a lot of other people to collaborate. They held a big session at The Clubhouse in Rhinebeck NY in Spring 2016 that yielded most of the songs that made final cut, and finished by inviting friends and family to help with overdubs over the summer in Brooklyn. Before long they had a record that they loved, and Finn's most melodic album to date. They named this collection “We All Want The Same Things” after a line in the song “God in Chicago”. It seems like a bit of dark humor in these turbulent political times, but it also rings true: no matter our differences we all have some very basic wants and needs that line up with each other. The characters in these songs are normal people trying to help themselves, trying to move forward, and in some cases trying just to survive. All the while they are negotiating what space the others in their lives can occupy. Craig Finn will be on tour with Japandroids this February and March 2017 ahead of the album's release. The NY Times describes Finn as "a poetic storyteller and portraitist of people adrift and clawing their way forward in a depressed American landscape," and Noisey has called him, "one of America’s most perceptive and consistently rewarding contemporary songwriters. Craig Finn is someone from whom you always want to hear more.”