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NPR Music: Tiny Desk Concerts
Tiny Desk Concerts from NPR's All Songs Considered features your favorite musicians performing at Bob Boilen's desk in the NPR Music office. This is the AUDIO only archive.Are you a fancy A/V nerd and need video? Visit our new Tiny Desk Concert video channel. Eye-popping video and all of the music you've come to expect.

Craig Finn: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published February 9, 2012 at 12:23 PM MST

For all the fetishization of Craig Finn's words — which he's spit out in knotty bundles on many albums by rock bands The Hold Steady and Lifter Puller — he's usually careful to dress them up in brash, populist sounds. His desperate, damaged characters may live their lives on the brink, keeping one eye trained on the redemption brought about by some combination of God and rock 'n' roll, but Finn rarely leaves their stories unadorned. His words are usually propped up by the bruising guitars of Tad Kubler and positively Springsteenian bar-band arrangements; listeners can revel in his world-weary wordplay, pump their fists in time with the music or, for maximum effect, combine the two.

But on his new solo album, Clear Heart Full Eyes, Finn kicks himself free from the crutches of rock. It's a sad sort of breakup record, barren and broken and informed by the wisdom of age, but his instantly recognizable speak-singing ramble remains. Finn's starker side is, of course, nicely conducive to stripped-down arrangements behind Bob Boilen's desk at the NPR Music offices: All these mournful, inward-facing songs (including the unreleased "Jeremiah's Blues") really require is Finn, his acoustic guitar and the indispensable pedal steel of Ricky Ray Jackson. There'll be plenty of time for Finn to blow speakers when he's back with The Hold Steady — all in due time.

Set List:

  • "Apollo Bay"

  • "Western Pier"

  • "Jeremiah's Blues"

    • Credits:

    Producer: Bob Boilen; Editor and Videographer: Michael Katzif; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; photo by Doriane Raiman/NPR

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Tags
    Tiny Desk ConcertsCraig Finn
    Stephen Thompson
    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
    See stories by Stephen Thompson