Happy 5th Anniversary to Craig Finn’s third studio album We All Want The Same Things, originally released March 24, 2017.
Five years later, with the social fabric of the United States ripped to shreds, a worsening climate crisis, and war in Eastern Europe, it feels like it’s harder to believe the thesis statement for this album and, arguably, Craig Finn’s whole career as a songwriter: We all want the same things. Listening to this album now is not so much stating that idea as a fact, but as something that we want to believe.
The line itself comes from the album’s centerpiece: “God In Chicago.” The track is defined by spoken-word narrative over a simple piano part, telling the story of two lost acquaintances heading to the city to sell some drugs left behind by a brother who died. The song gives voice to the aching at the center of the album—that everyone feels lost, in their own way, and that there are sometimes fleeting moments where we feel like we’ve found it, and those moments can vanish over the course of a night. The rest of the record is a relentless pursuit of this elusive feeling.
It ends with the threat of failure. The closing track, “Be Honest,” is a heart-rending description of the special feeling of loneliness, mixed with nostalgia, that sets in right before an important relationship ends. In the song’s final couplet, the narrator concedes that “If the revolution is really coming then we all need to be well / So maybe it’s best if we both take care of ourselves.” This is the version of humanity in the face of chaos that Finn is arguing against: a turn toward nihilism when the going gets tough. That’s the couplet that feels the most true, especially in 2022. But I’ve always seen it as the one that “God In Chicago,” and the record as a whole, is arguing against.
I’ve turned this album over loads of times, trying to figure out how the litany of stories about broken, lonely, nostalgic, desperate people fills me with such a sense of optimism. I mean, look at the cover. This is not a sunshine and rainbows album. This is a grey, rainy highway in an anonymous part of America. This feels especially true if we compare this album to the unbridled joy that we find throughout Finn’s output with The Hold Steady. But sometimes, We All Want The Same Things does more for me, or at least assures me differently, than the most bombastic and uplifting chorus in The Hold Steady’s canon.
Listen to the Album:
The power in these songs is in Finn’s vocals, specifically in how he evokes this feeling that he is singing to himself. When we hear the triumphant chorus of “Rescue Blues,” it’s clear that he’s not describing the facts of life but rather what he wants the facts of life to be: “Jamie when we’re sailing off / high above the parking lot / looking off the balcony / well that seems pretty pure to me.” There’s a sad optimism in lyrics like these, in needing to tell yourself that everything is going to be okay. The real magic is in the singing, where Finn sounds like he’s trying to propel himself into this new, safer dimension by the power of his music. And he gets there, even if it’s just for a moment.
Musically, We All Want The Same Things is a step above 2015’s Faith In The Future, the first of Finn’s solo records produced by Josh Kaufmann, which was a little more simplified. Exhibit A is the opening track, “Jester and June,” which opens with a saxophone part that almost sounds like a record scratch, followed by a standalone, dry guitar strum and Finn’s rapid-fire vocal delivery. We’re thrown right into this one.
The empty space that defined the previous album is used later on to great effect on tracks like “God In Chicago” and the unmatched “It Hits When It Hits” (which I think is the only love song to reference Bud Clamato). The difference between We All Want The Same Things and Faith In the Future is that the blankness of these tracks serves to heighten the drama, asking us to lean in even closer than we had before for the smallest and most fragile of these stories.
Near the end of the album is something special: on the heels of the tenderness of “It Hits When It Hits” comes a chaotic three-minute rock song called “Tracking Shots,” which marries everything Finn’s solo work and The Hold Steady have done. It’s abrasive and fast, the kind of song you need to listen to dozens of times to catch all the lyrics and peel back all the layers. The song is fast throughout, but the chorus finds a new gear, careening into a brutally honest lyric on the second go-round: “the righteous path is hard to walk.”
This is an album full of stories, and because it’s full of stories, it’s also full of contradictions. It all orbits around the sad, fleeting couple from “God In Chicago,” who so badly want to do the right thing and find a sense of peace in their lives. And even though they try to connect with each other in the big city, it clearly doesn’t work. We can tell ourselves that we’ve found it, like the guy in “Rescue Blues” does, even though we’re forcing ourselves to believe it because it’s so hard to actually get there. It’s a distinction that runs through every song here, and every life: The righteous path is hard to walk, but we all want the same things.
LISTEN: