Craig Finn
A Legacy of Rentals
Positive Jams/Thirty Tigers
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When I interviewed Guster’s Ryan Miller last year, he told me that Josh Kaufmann, who produced the band’s forthcoming record and most of Craig Finn’s solo work, is purely interested in emotion. Not everything needs to be perfect—Kaufmann considers a song done when he believes you.
For a narrative storyteller like Finn, who is more of a fabulist than he is a poet, this is a huge ask. We are not being asked to think that Finn is actually any of the people in these songs, but that the many tiny, internal tragedies that he constructs for them actually mean something. If that’s what Finn is trying to do by working with Kaufmann on his fifth studio album A Legacy of Rentals, then that is the metric we should use to assess the work: do we believe it?
The short answer is “yes.”
Album opener “Messing with the Settings” is nearly without peer in Finn’s canon. Only “God in Chicago” from We All Want the Same Things (2017) comes even close to its emotional power. The song is a spoken-word saga of a relationship with a woman named Rachel that drifted apart through circumstance. The narrator still carries it with him, now left to wonder how things could be different, after Rachel’s death. The composition is simple, relying on a four-chord loop and nothing particularly elaborate, but Finn somehow continues to elude cliché and delivers both brilliant prose and a deeply affecting finale.
A Legacy of Rentals revels in these contradictions; whereas Finn’s previous efforts might look to squeeze one very strong emotion out of you (e.g., when you’re doing your best to fit in but still feel empty, like on “Her With the Blues”), this album is putting us in more provocative situations. While it’s easy to get caught up in the drama of it all (the murder in “Curtis and Shephard,” the death of the title character in “Jessamine”), the more interesting questions usually lie in how we read the narrator: what does telling this story do for this person? How are they growing or changing? A Legacy of Rentals is excellent because many possibilities are plausible, none are definite, and all are consistent with the characters.
Enter “Due to Depart,” a musically demure song from the middle of the record, which is told from a completely disaffected voice: the narrator tells us that a hospital has relocated across town and that his brother died in a car accident in the same deadpan voice with uninterested language. Everything is a fact of life to this person, somehow unchangeable.
Finn ends the song with the narrator leaving his wife and daughter, remarking that “you know when you’re due to depart.” He claims to love them, and maybe I believe him, but the more interesting thing is that he treats the end of the relationship as a given, just like everything else in the song. The sense of hopelessness that arises here is, of course, now a matter of fact—his lack of effort is not a result of passivity, but of a feeling of powerlessness. And you just want to shake him and say that nothing is permanent, but of course there’s nothing you can do. This, friends, is master storytelling.
Sonically, Finn plays it safe with this release. He has clearly developed a comfortable sound with Kaufmann at the helm and some of his usual accompanists (Joe Russo on drums, Stuart Bogie on saxophone, Michael Libarmento on bass, and a vocal section of Cassandra Jenkins and Annie Nero). Libarmento deserves a shoutout for his melodic work on “Curtis and Shephard,” while Jenkins and Nero, whose singing elevated Finn’s 2019 record I Need a New War, shine even brighter here.
A Legacy of Rentals also features a fourteen-piece string section that adds color but is not a defining feature of the record. Musically, I’m treating this as ten new Craig Finn stories using generally similar musical terrain that I’ve come to expect. The new ground here is narrative, in Finn’s capturing of the feeling of things being left behind and the complicated feelings that come with loss and abandonment, especially of people, especially those who we are somehow disconnected from.
As to whether or not I believe the feelings: I do. I don’t yet know how I myself feel about them, but that’s what makes this work.
Notable Tracks: “Due to Depart” | “Jessamine” | “Messing with the Settings” | “The Year We Fell Behind”
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