Concerts

Talk it out with The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn in Somerville

Finn and The Uptown Controllers will spotlight his solo work at Crystal Ballroom Oct. 11.

Craig Finn. Handout

2 minutes to read

To say that Craig Finn looks more like an accountant than a rock singer would be unfair … to accountants.

Granted, The Hold Steady frontman is in his 50s now. But even when his Minneapolis-based band was starting out back in the early-aughts, Finn, with his high forehead and propensity for chunky glasses, sport jackets, and button-down dress shirts, seemed to occupy a more grounded place than some of his wilder contemporaries.

What really made him stand out, though, were his lyrics: at once wry, sad, and literary, full of fleshed-out, mostly downtrodden and sometimes tragic characters (many of them women). It’s obvious that the Boston-born Finn spent his childhood in Minneapolis, his college years at BC, and his time breaking into the music business in New York City keenly observing everyone and everything around him — and, based on any number of his songs, going to a lot of really bad parties.

He’s honed his storytelling skills even further with the five solo albums that he’s produced concurrent with his work with The Hold Steady, with an accent on the “telling” part — the talky singing style he honed with his band is even more effective on his more pared-down solo sad-sack tales, sometimes veering almost into straight-ahead conversation, like he’s sitting next to you at a bar.

Case in point: the exquisite “Messing With The Settings” from his new album “A Legacy of Rentals,” a mostly-spoken lament for a doomed (what else?) tavern waitress named Rachel that alternates between matter-of-fact musings to a sung chorus that declares, cryptically, “Sundown it feels like I’m riding a train I’m not on.”

“I found that something happens, a bit of magic, when you move from the everyday, mundane world of talking to singing, which seems to come from a more mystical, more enhanced world,” Finn told Paste of that approach, which he first broke out in his moving 2019 track “God in Chicago.” “It’s a way of connecting those two worlds.”

It’s likely that “Settings” will join other highlights from Finn’s solo catalog when he hits Crystal Ballroom in Somerville Oct. 11 with his band The Uptown Controllers — recent setlists have spotlighted his latest release, but with plenty of dips into older Finn albums, like the standout “Maggie I’ve Been Searching For Our Son” off of 2015’s “Faith in the Future,” and 2019’s “Birds Trapped in the Airport” from “We All Want The Same Things.” (You’ve got to admit the guy’s got a way with song titles.)