Craig Finn Of 'The Hold Steady' Plays Not My Job

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PETER SAGAL, Host:

And now the game where we invite people on who are really, really good at one thing, in order to do something else. The Hold Steady has been rocking the bars of Brooklyn for 10 years, meaning their audience likes their music loud, their lyrics complex and smart, and their beer cheap and ironic.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: So everybody put on your skinny jeans and grab a PBR or perhaps a Rolling Rock, because we are delighted to welcome the lead singer of the Hold Steady to our show. Craig Finn, welcome to WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!

(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)

CRAIG FINN: Hey, thanks for having me.

SAGAL: So one thing we hear about you guys is that you are a great bar band, quote, unquote. What exactly does that mean?

FINN: Well, it's something, actually, I put in our first press release. And I think what it meant to me was that we don't, you know, change clothes to go onstage. We just wear what we were wearing that day. It's more about entertainment than, you know, just smoke and mirrors or anything. I think we just get up and play and put our hearts into it.

SAGAL: So you guys started out in bars. I mean, you have to get people's attention, though. They're loud and sometimes obnoxious places.

FINN: Yeah, well I think, you know, there's volume. But I mean, I guess that in some way, that's a testament to how well you're playing - is whether you can get them looking your way.

SAGAL: Yeah, I guess so.

FINN: Away from the bar.

SAGAL: Hey, before we go any further, let's play a little music for the audience in case they haven't heard you. This is from the Hold Steady's new record. It's called "Our Whole Lives."

(SOUNDBITE OF "OUR WHOLE LIVES")

FINN: (Singing) The kids are ripping into sugar packets. Townies taking off their tavern jackets. I'm in the pews sticking bills in the basket. Praying that they're cool when I come pick up the package. Tonight we're gonna have a really good time. But I want to go to heaven on the day I die. Going to make like a preemptive strike. Hit the 5:30 Mass early Saturday night. Ring ring ring goes the telephone. Tell my little lamb that I'm on my way home.

SAGAL: Now, one of the things I want to point out is that you are known for your lyrics, which are pretty complex and poetic and rhyming and clever with a lot of references. That is not typical, sort of pop music kind of lyrical work. We're far beyond, you know, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you ever have anybody like, in the audience raise their hand and go, could you stop and go back again, I missed that reference?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FINN: Well I think they - I have seen footnoted lyric sheets come up on the Internet, so...

SAGAL: Really?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FINN: We're not too far away. But I think that, you know, I think that one thing we'd like to do is make great rock music for smarter people. So in some ways, I think that that's our intent.

SAGAL: Right. So it's great. So like 90 percent of your audience is rocking out, and 10 percent are annotating you. I think that's...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: You...

FINN: While pumping their fists.

SAGAL: Of course, yes. You guys, originally all of you in the band are from Minnesota. But you formed your band in Brooklyn.

FINN: Yeah. Well, most of us had lived in Minneapolis, and two of us are actually from Minneapolis. But when we - I ended up here and wanted to form a band, and I kind of - the quickest way to figure out who was going to be good were people I'd already seen play. And a lot of those were transplanted Midwesterners.

SAGAL: Really? So it wasn't like you were all hanging out in a particular bar in Brooklyn where Minnesota people go to eat cheese curds and drink?

FINN: Yeah, no, it was a Vikings party.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: A Vikings party, we figured it out. But you...

ADAM FELBER: Oh, I've been to that place. That's on Fifth Avenue.

SAGAL: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: But your songs are so often about Minneapolis, which I loved. I mean, is there such a thing as like, a Minnesota vibe? Is there a Minnesota-nice rock and roll?

FINN: Well, I mean, there's certainly a lot of great musical history out of Minneapolis, with Prince and the Replacements and Bob Dylan and Husker Du. But more than that, I think when I write lyrics, I'm just still not comfortable writing as a New Yorker. I feel like Lou Reed does that very well, and I just feel like a poser trying to write a song about New York.

SAGAL: So you're living in New York, and you're writing these songs, and your songs are known for their kind of narrative arc. You have stories, you have characters who recur. You're telling these stories about Minnesotans. You realize that you've become a kind of younger, hipper Garrison Keillor, don't you?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FINN: I'm just glad I'm hipper.

SAGAL: Yeah.

FELBER: Although if you've ever seen Garrison stage dive, it's something.

SAGAL: Yeah, it's intense.

FELBER: It's something to behold.

SAGAL: You are a great lead singer and a great songwriter, and your band is a fantastic rock band. I will say, though, I watched some of your videos this week and I've seen some of your appearances on TV, and I hope you take this the right way. You do not look like what most people think of when they think of like, lead singer in a great rock band. Would you agree?

FINN: You know, my dentist just told me that today.

SAGAL: Really?

FINN: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: What did your dentist say?

FINN: She said, you do not look - she was actually maybe an assistant or a dental hygienist.

SAGAL: Hygienist, yeah.

FINN: She was Russian and she said, you do not look like you can rock and roll.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: That sounds to me like a challenge, actually, the way that she put it. Well what did you say to her?

FINN: I didn't know what to say. So, you know, oftentimes when we go somewhere, the bus driver - usually the bus driver on the tour bus, after a few weeks, confesses that at first, he thought I was the manager.

SAGAL: Really? At least he didn't think you were the accountant.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: It could have been worse. I want to ask you about your lyrics before we go onto the game because, as I said, we've studied your lyrics and there are themes that come up again and again. One of them: Ybor City, Florida.

FINN: Yeah.

SAGAL: What is it with Ybor City? Are you being paid by their Chamber of Commerce, what?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FINN: You know, when it started, I really liked the way it was spelled and I liked saying it. Ybor, it's Y-B-O-R. That's cool, like, right? You know?

SAGAL: Yeah.

FINN: So I just got really into putting it in songs so I got to say it. And then we went and played there, and then it became kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because once we had a couple of songs about it, all of our fans wanted to show up when we played at Ybor City - as if it was some sort of mecca.

SAGAL: Oh really? So it became...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Like to go see the Hold Steady in Ybor City would be like seeing Frank Sinatra at Caesar's Palace.

FINN: I guess.

SAGAL: This is great.

FINN: Yeah.

SAGAL: This is the place. We asked our Twitter followers, who follow us at twitter/waitwait, if they had a question for you. And one that they wanted us to ask was do you ever get mistaken for a math teacher?

FINN: I think I probably get mistaken for a lot of things. The Verizon guy sometimes comes up - you know, can you hear me now, can you hear me now?

SAGAL: Oh, really?

FINN: Yeah.

SAGAL: You know, you do look a little bit like him. Have you ever started a concert going, hey Detroit, can you hear me now?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FINN: No, but I might now. I might now.

SAGAL: You would blow their minds.

KEEGAN: You could use that.

SAGAL: Well, Craig Finn, we love your music, and we're delighted to talk to you. And we have invited you here to play a game we're calling...

CARL KASELL, Host:

p"You're Going to Spend Three Weeks Inside an Airtight Closet with Two Other Guys; Good Luck."

SAGAL: That actually sounds like a tour, doesn't it?

FINN: Yeah, it does.

SAGAL: But no, what we're talking about is the fact that this week marked the 41st anniversary of the first moon landing, back in 1969, so we thought we'd ask you not about that achievement per se, but about what went into getting there. Using Mary Roach's wonderful new book, "Packing for Mars," we are going to ask you three questions about the research that went into the first space flights. Get two right, you'll win our prize for one of our listeners, Carl's voice on their home answering machine. Carl, who is Craig Finn playing for?

KASELL: Craig is playing for Natasha Lanie of Sarasota, Florida.

SAGAL: All right, ready to play, Craig?

FINN: Yeah, I'm ready.

SAGAL: Here's your first question. The first research into what would happen to living creatures sent into the sky goes back a surprisingly long way. Which of these was one of the first such experiments? A, Russian scientists working for Czar Peter the Great shot some monkeys out of a cannon; B, the Montgolfier brothers, balloon pioneers, sent a duck, a sheep and a rooster up in a balloon to see what would happen to them; or C, rocket pioneer Robert Goddard used to take his dog on walks to the top of mountains just to see if how it behaved up there?

FINN: Number two.

SAGAL: You're going to go for the Montgolfier brothers sending animals up in their balloon?

FINN: Yes.

SAGAL: You're right. That's exactly what they did.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: You see, nobody had ever been up that high before. They didn't know what would happen, up to 2,000 feet, so they tested it first on a sheep, a duck and a rooster. The animals were fine when they came back down, although the sheep soiled the basket.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: As you might expect.

FINN: Yeah.

FELBER: Now we have to get another basket.

SAGAL: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: All right, next question: Once the space program began in earnest in this country, a lot of testing went into finding out what would happen when you put people in a spacecraft and sent them into the stars, including a research program specifically into the effects on astronauts of what? A, extreme body odor; B, having an annoying voice constantly in your ear; or C, having to spend a week strapped next to somebody who you cannot stand?

FINN: A.

SAGAL: You're going to go for A, the body odor?

FINN: Yeah.

SAGAL: You're right. That's why you should be confident.

FELBER: Wow.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Researchers put test subjects in a chamber for weeks and wouldn't let them change their clothes or wash. They discovered that B.O. gets worse and worse for about five to eight days. Then the human nose just kind of shorts out and stops noticing it.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: It's a survival instinct. All right, this is very good, let's see how well you do with the last one. When the Russians put the first man in space up in the ship, Yuri Gagarin, they took an extra precaution because they, again, didn't know what would happen. What was their precaution? A, they gave him a handgun, in case he was attacked by aliens; B, they locked the controls, in case he went insane; or C, they gave him an Aeroflot air sickness bag, just in case?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FINN: I'm saying B.

SAGAL: You're going to go with, they locked the controls?

FINN: Yeah.

SAGAL: That's exactly what they did.

FINN: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: They did not know, since it had never been done before, what would happen if you sent a guy that high in the air. So they locked the controls so if he lost his mind, he couldn't ruin everything.

FINN: The Russians wouldn't put an individual first.

SAGAL: No, they wouldn't do that.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

KEY: I love that the Russians just kind of assumed that there might be some condition known as the space crazies.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: So Carl, how did Craig Finn do on our quiz?

KASELL: Craig had three correct answers, Peter, so he wins for Natasha Lanie. Congratulations, Craig.

SAGAL: Well done.

FINN: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)

KEY: Wow.

SAGAL: Hey, before we go, one thing we noticed when you were - when we were watching you on videos and some of your concert footage, you gesticulate a lot when you sing. You're not one of those guys who just grabs the mike and stays there. You're leaping around a lot and gesticulating. Is that something you practice or is that natural?

FINN: No, it's natural. It's more about turning something off in your brain that would, you know, allow you to not want to look like a fool.

SAGAL: Oh, really?

FINN: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: So whatever that anti-fool governor mechanism in your brain is, you just turn it off and...

FINN: Clip it, yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Craig Finn is the lead singer of the Hold Steady. Their new album, "Heaven is Whenever," is fantastic and it is out now. Get it wherever you get your music. Craig Finn, thank you so much for joining us.

FINN: Thanks for having me, it was fun.

SAGAL: Thank you, it was great.

(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)

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