Jessamine must have had some dreams / but she never really said what they were.
— Craig Finn
Note: This is the third entry in my little ongoing series on Craig Finn / The Hold Steady songs that take up nightlife, messy adult relationships, and the long shadows cast by fleeting encounters. Parts I and II are available. I’ve also written at length about what I consider Finn’s two greatest songs: “A Bathtub in a Kitchen” and “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight.”
“Jessamine” is track eight on A Legacy of Rentals, Finn’s 2022 solo record, distributed on his own label, Positive Jam Records. It clocks in at a tight three minutes and twenty-five seconds, and once again I am simply overawed by Finn’s concision and his ability to tell a whole story in just a few words. It is my opinion, and I do not say this lightly, that Finn is the greatest short story writer to have ever lived.
“Jessamine” tells the story of a three-week relationship between the narrator, whom we will continue to call C. for convenience, and a goth girl with a need for speed. A Legacy of Rentals contains at least three excellent songs: the crime caper “The Amarillo Kid,” the gorgeous “The Year We Fell Behind,” and “Jessamine.” I would love to write about “The Year We Fell Behind” as well. However, “Jessamine” falls neatly into our conceit of nightlife and adult relationships, although this one seems to depict more of a young person’s relationship. Close enough.
“Jessamine” is folky and lilting, of a piece with Finn’s later work, which tends toward folk and country as opposed to Lifter Puller’s indie fever dreams and The Hold Steady’s soaring rock anthems. The Finn song it most closely resembles is “Esther,” from a 2018 EP by The Hold Steady, which also depicts an intense and short-lived relationship. In “Esther,” a party ends, two people find themselves alone together, and the passing years seem suddenly to catch up with them. The song captures the strange afterlife of an encounter that might have lasted only a night but continues to occupy the mind long afterward.
“Jessamine” opens with C. remembering a girl he met in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Her floral dress and skateboard give us a quick visual impression, while the warning sticker on the board introduces the possibility of danger. C. then adds, with the casual hindsight of someone who knows how the story ends, that the warning might have been right.
Cherry Hill is in New Jersey, where the song is set. Jessamine is probably a younger woman, and a skater. The opening foreshadows her ultimate fate without spelling it out. Incidentally, the first time I visited New Jersey was during my junior year of college, with my Asian Art History class. It was also on this trip that I first visited New York City, the most intoxicating place on earth, which I have written about relatively extensively. I wrote about my art professor in my piece on my senior year at Hamilton College, in relation to a girl I had a total crush on, whom I called L. L. was not exactly goth, but she might have been goth-adjacent. And she was totally intense. More on goths in a minute.
C. next explains that the relationship lasted about three weeks, during which the two were apparently inseparable and barely slept. Jessamine had a slogan painted above her bed, a familiar piece of Trenton civic identity that takes on a different meaning in the privacy of a bedroom.
It is my experience that short-term relationships can be, and probably are, the most intense and intoxicating type of relationships in a sense. The depth that comes with a true crush, while of a completely different valence from a long-term relationship, is, I believe, without parallel. But then again, I’m an action junkie, as is Finn. I wrote about the power of a crush in my Bad Moves piece, where I confessed to a serious crush on their lead singer, Katie Park. I actually sent the piece to the band via Instagram, and they responded, “Thanks for the write-up.” I don’t know, but I like to believe Katie read, or at least saw, my piece! Unfortunately, Bad Moves are disbanding and are, I believe, on their farewell tour.
The phrase “three weeks straight” conveys something more than the duration of the relationship. It suggests that C. and Jessamine were temporarily inseparable, sleep-deprived, and deep into each other. Trenton is, of course, also in New Jersey, and though I hadn’t heard the exact phrase quoted until I listened to the song, it is apparently well known locally and appears in neon on a bridge.
The next verses introduce Jessamine’s fascination with death. C. remembers hanging around her room, where gloom and doom were part of the attraction, where cartoons mingled with macabre imagery, and where even the instruments seemed to belong to some playful little kingdom of the dead. She is sexy, but her interest in bloodshed is more than a passing aesthetic. She regards violence as something that scarcely needs advertising: people are drawn to it already.
Now, I am not really into a lot of bones and blood personally, but I do like me some goth girls. In fact, in the course of my life I have sort of quasi-dated a few, and for whatever reason they are just my speed. I find goth girls sexy, caring, and deeply intriguing. And mysterious, of course. I have a weakness for crazy women; I cannot lie. And already I can totally see Jessamine’s appeal.
At one point, C. wishes he had asked Jessamine about the origins of war and the peculiar attraction of rival gangs who repeatedly turn up at the same parties despite supposedly hating one another. He imagines that the hostility might conceal a kind of attraction. The questions are funny, strange, and a little unsettling. Why would Jessamine have insight into the origins of global conflicts? I’m not quite sure. However, the image of rival gangs being secretly in love is oddly compelling.
It is with the next verse and chorus that the song really gets going.
Jessamine warns against mistaking suspicion for genuine understanding. She sees a world in which machines of war can resemble symbols of peace, while something is quietly threatening the kingdom she has built around herself. She never quite explains the threat. The night gives way to morning, incense burns down, and her dreams remain unspoken.
Here we learn that our goth girl heroine has something going on that is unarticulated, or perhaps inarticulable. “Jessamine must have had some dreams / but she never really said what they were” is such a wonderful and moving line. We all have dreams, I suppose; some come to fruition and some don’t. But Finn is in no way judging Jessamine’s relative inability to describe her dreams. Instead, this aspect of her character only adds to her obliqueness, her mystery.
That mystery is part of what makes her so compelling. Jessamine is not a puzzle the song promises to solve. She has an interior life that C. can glimpse but never fully access. Her dreams may be perfectly clear to her, or they may be things she cannot articulate even to herself. We are not told. The absence of an explanation does not diminish her character. It enlarges it.
The next verse shows that Jessamine, in the end, and probably from the beginning, had the upper hand in the relationship. She returns to the dating scene, meets another man, and finds herself a little more attracted to him than to the boy she was with before. C. has not even seen her lately. The new man appears to have money or connections, although his impressive surroundings may conceal something less respectable. Then the city grows hot, and the people in the story find themselves trying to weather a storm.
Again, Finn is a total master of precision and compression. C. is immature; Jessamine is, to some extent, on the make; her new boyfriend is crime-adjacent—so many of Finn’s songs feature characters on the margins of the legal world—and the whole damn city mirrors the instability of the relationship. The crush is over. C. is dumped, and he never sees her again.
That’s a weird and kind of almost frightening part of short-lived relationships: while their depths are as intoxicating as anything in life, people will just move on. The moment exists only in memory, burned into the fabric of time, but still fleeting.
The next verse turns toward C. getting over Jessamine. Rain comes and goes; thunder makes a tremendous commotion but cannot sustain it indefinitely. The storm is real enough while it lasts, but it eventually clears. The metaphor is straightforward, perhaps, but it also captures something true about the aftermath of a crush. What seems all-consuming at the time may eventually become a memory that can be approached without being overwhelmed by it.
The final movement puts a pin in Jessamine’s story. C. travels west to San Francisco, where a sailor steals his shirt. He is sitting in the passenger seat of a taxi when he first hears that Jessamine was probably speeding and that no one else was hurt.
I love that final detail. It’s hard to fully explain why, but it’s oddly moving that Jessamine, on her way out, with all her attraction to blood and bones, didn’t take anyone with her. The report is tentative, almost casual. We do not get a reconstruction of the accident or a dramatic account of C.’s grief. We get the news, and then the song returns to Jessamine’s dreams.
Finn doesn’t even really register C.’s reaction to Jessamine’s death. Instead, he repeats the refrain, such that she remains beyond C.’s knowledge even at the moment when he learns she is gone. Her dreams remain unknown to him. Perhaps they were never meant to be known by him. He can remember the girl, the room, the slogan on the wall, the intensity of those three weeks. He cannot tell us what she wanted from life.
Overall, “Jessamine” might seem like kind of a minor song. It’s short, and maybe doesn’t have the deep metaphorical richness of a song like “A Bathtub in a Kitchen.” Nonetheless, I love it. My sense is that a writer has to write for years and years before they can get to a song like “Jessamine.” Finn is a few years older than me, and has accumulated the wisdom and compassion to make a song like this look easy. It is not.
I wish to say a brief word about AI, which may seem unrelated. The other night I met up with a few friends, and some friends of friends were there as well. One of them, a slightly older gentleman who used to work in tech, started talking about how much he loved AI music, especially some kind of mash-up of two well-known bands. I appreciated the fact that he liked this music, but I have to confess that I could not have cared less.
The idea of AI music, especially music with lyrics, interests me not at all. This is essentially because I like people better than machines, but also because I don’t think AI, at least at this point, can come close to writing a song like “Jessamine.” I won’t get super political here. However, the idea that AI can replace, or even duplicate, “Jessamine,” “Return of the Grievous Angel” by Gram Parsons, or “Come in from the Cold” by Joni Mitchell, for example, just seems absurd to me.
Finn had to live for fifty years, listen to tens of thousands of songs, and write hundreds to get to “Jessamine.” At three minutes and twenty-five seconds, it is a mini-masterpiece. Its brevity is deceptive. The song carries the accumulated experience of a writer who knows how much to reveal, what to leave unsaid, and when to let a character disappear beyond the reach of the story.
That, to me, is the difference between a technically plausible song and a work of art that continues to live in the imagination. Jessamine is not memorable because we learn everything about her. She is memorable because we don’t.
Dedication:
For goth girls everywhere.
‘Cause it makes a big commotion
But eventually it clears
The next verse and chorus puts a pin in Jessamine’s story, and Finn employs his classic penchant for alliteration along the way. Maybe to get away from the scene, or perhaps for some other reason, C. moves out west, loses his shirt, metaphorically, and literally perhaps, and gets word of Jessamine’s demise.
I went out to San Francisco
And some sailor stole my shirt
I was sitting on the passenger side in a taxi
The first time that I heard
That she was probably speeding
And no one else was hurt
Jessamine must’ve had some dreams
But she never really said what they were
Yeah, she never really said what they were
I love the line here “and no one else was hurt.” It’s hard to fully explain why, but it’s oddly moving that Jessamine, on her way out, with all her attraction to blood and bones, didn’t take anyone with her. Finn doesn’t even really register what C.’s reaction is to Jessamine’s death is, he simply repeats the lines about dreams such that she dies as she lived, unknown to herself and unknowable to others.
Overall, Jessamine might seem like kind of a minor song. It’s short, and maybe doesn’t have the deep metaphorical richness as a song like A Bathtub in the Kitchen. Nonetheless, I love it. My sense is that a writer has to write for years and years before they can get to a song like Jessamine. Finn is a few years older than me, and has accumulated the wisdom and compassion to make a song like this look easy. It is not.
I wish her to say a brief word about AI, which may seem unrelated. The other night I met up with a few friends and some friends of friends were there as well. One of them, a slightly older gentleman who used to work in tech, started talking about how much he loved AI music, especially some kind of mash-up of two well-known bands. I appreciated that fact that he liked this “music,” but I have to confess that I could not have cared less. The idea of AI music, especially music with lyrics, interests me not at all. And this is, essentially, because I like people better than machines, but also because I don’t think AI, at least at this point, can come close to writing a song like Jessamine. I won’t get super political here, however the idea that AI can replace, or even duplicate a Jessamine, or Return of the Grievous Angel by Gram Parsons, or Come in from the Cold by Joni Mitchell, for example, just seems absurd to me. As implied above, Finn had to live 50 years, listen to tens of thousands of songs, and write hundreds to get to Jessamine. At 3 minutes and 25 seconds it is a mini-masterpiece.
Dedication:
For goth girls : If you enjoyed this piece you might also enjoy the pieces below, which also cover the singer-songwriter Craig Finn.
