“Rented Room” is as close as Finn has ever come to writing a song describing a universal condition without character names or geographical details, and it’s lonesome as hell. If we were really to diagnose Finn’s state of mind from the handful of first-person songs, we might imagine he’d gone through a rough patch. Who needs the DSM-IV manual when you’ve got Craig Finn to explain things? “She said depression is an ocean and it’s prone to tides and swells.” The more afflicted title character, though, suffers from something different: “Anxiety’s persistent/It’s an ambitious politician/It keeps knocking at your door until you come and let it in.” “Stephanie was long on looks and short on mental health,” Finn sings. “Jackson” offers a pair of characters whose psychological maladies are fascinatingly contrasted. Moral judgment doesn’t play such a big role across the rest of the album. So we get the nitty-gritty from “Wendy at the Wagon Wheel” (a bar that pops up in another song, too) and how the song’s villain “went running back into Maria’s arms/You said it’s really just the best thing for the baby.” Somehow the specificity seems to spur Finn on to even greater fits of righteous rage. “When No One’s Watching,” one of the standout tracks, is a riveting indictment of “a weak man living off of weaker women.” But Finn would hardly be content to lob generic broadsides at promiscuous sexual predators who abuse their power and status.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2023
Categories |