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Mac Weldon socks. This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That's me. It's powered by digital media

that is a real company with a funny name. I am here with Craig Finn. Welcome, Craig. Hey, thanks for

having me. You are the very first rock star I've had on this podcast. You are also the only rock star that I went to junior high school with, so I think those two things are connected. Rock star is a big word. I was going to say working musician, but rock star sounds cooler. Working musician. Rock musician is probably accurate as well. You are a professional musician. You play

music for a living. That is true. That's awesome. That is good. Yeah. I mean, and it's something that

came late. I mean, it did not come until I was in the hold steady, which was a band I started when I was

31 and didn't happen probably until I was 33, 34. So, you know, there's something for persistence.

There's something for persistence. And the degree of difficulty gets harder for musicians, period,

right? And I think in 2017, making a living in music is even tougher. I want to talk about

all of that. Yeah. I also wanted to talk about the fact that you have a new album out, it's called.

We all want the same thing. So we're going to time this hopefully, so this will come out around the same time it's coming out, because you want press around an album. I'm going to ask you a bunch of dumb questions. So here's the first one. Why in 2017 does it matter when an album comes out and what kind of press push you get? If I'm, if I'm going to listen to it on Spotify, whenever. So it might not, but, you know, I mean, there's part of it that's rooted in how I think of music. And I, I always feel like I need to pull together 10 or 12 songs to make kind of a grand statement. And that's because I grew up listening to albums. And that's how I think. It's vestigals, or... Yeah, that's how I think of things, and it's important. I think you can release singles, but I also think that they've sort of, I mean, you know, the press push and all that, I mean, even something as simple as hiring a publicist. You know, if you had one song, are you going to hire a publicist to tell the world about the song and go around and do all the interviews? So I think it's a matter of, like, putting something together and then going out, and it's still, an album still feels to me like the right amount of songs together. Because you grew up listening to the albums, you still think of them as sort of the way to make

music?

Yeah, even sequencing the record, I think of like, oh, that's like a great song for the beginning

aside too.

And that's just, you know, younger people probably won't think that way, but I'm probably

going to think that way until the end.

When you sit down and listen to music, do you listen to albums all the way through? Do you play list guy? Mainly, well, both, but I do listen to albums. For new music, I kind of create these shuffles. You know, like I'll drag a bunch of new albums and I'll, you know, listen to On Shuffle on my headphones when I'm on the train or whatever. But at home, I'll put on albums. Yeah. So do you, are you a vinyl guy? I am a vinyl guy, but there's a little bit of an, you know, with New York real estate, there's a little bit of argument over how much vinyl is allowed in our apartment. And we're, uh, it's not much currently in it, but it's already kind of getting to the end. So there's a space issue, and there's also a, how do you actually play music in a New York City apartment, right?

Yeah.

I have this weird, someone gifted me, like, one of those 1958 RCA console stereos, you know, like your grandma might have.

And I thought it was cool.

I mentioned I thought they were cool and all of

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