When Craig Finn wants to make an L.A. album, he doesn’t mess around. He might be best known as the Minnesota-via-Brooklyn frontman of the Hold Steady, a punk bar-band wordsmith specializing in down-and-out tales with a Midwest flavor. But on his great new Always Been , he takes inspiration from Southern California, steeped in the style of old-school soft-rock troubadours like Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, and Randy Newman.
The Secret History of Coca
Just how Seventies L.A. is this album? Finn poses for the cover photo on a bridge over the Harbor Freeway — the exact same bridge where Newman posed on the cover of his 1977 classic Little Criminals . Like Newman, Finn stands with the shrug and the shades of a born storyteller, lurking amid the classic combo of palm trees and traffic jams…