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On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”

New Note: It has been a little while since I last posted this piece, and I’m glad to bring it back into view. It remains my very favorite essay on the Kyoto Kibbitzer, and has continued to circulate far beyond what I ever expected, with many hundreds of reads over time. In an entirely unscientific but pleasingly persistent corner of the internet, it still seems to rank #2 in search results for the term “Katie Park Bad Moves,” just behind Wikipedia, which is pretty cool. I have no idea what to make of that, but I’m not complaining.

The piece itself—on Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”—has always felt to me like one of the most complete things I’ve written about music, scenes, and subcultures, and I’m grateful for the continued readership and responses it has received. Reposting here in full for anyone who missed it the first time around, or wants to revisit it.

Original Note: This piece is about an absolutely amazing song by Craig Finn called “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” released in 2020 on All These Perfect Crosses from Partisan Records. We will also expand on the song’s theme, which is how subcultures (and “scenes”) operate. Finn is, in my opinion, the greatest lyricist working today (not the greatest living lyricist, that’s still Dylan). I’ve written about about Finn before here, and here.

Craig Finn himself has commented on this song and says that “It’s Never Been A Fair Fight”:

“Is about the extreme difficulty of staying true to the rigid rules of a subculture as you get older. The character in the song revisits an old peer and finds struggle and disappointment in the place he left behind.”

In this case, the narrator had been part of the punk/hardcore scene in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has left the scene, and reflects on his time there and what it meant as he meets his old friend—and we suppose former lover—Vanessa. I’m not sure I understand the entire chronology of the song, as it engages in some apparent time jumps that can be a little hard to follow. Overall however, it is pretty clear what the song is about.

The opening verse sees the narrator (let’s call him C., because while we will grant Finn the understanding as an artist that his characters are characters, in this case the song feels pretty autobiographical) checking in with Vanessa. The song opens in the present day.

Finn has C. meet her “right in front of her building,” Vanessa “vague in taste and drowning,” telling him she’s “got a new man…in a new band,” and “they’ve got a new sound.”

We get the impression that C. has been out of the scene for a while, while Vanessa is very much still in it: new man, new band, new sound, same old place. Vanessa’s man, we assume, is in a hardcore band, and I believe it is the case that Finn came up through the hardcore scene before forming his first band Lifter Puller. Lifter Puller is not a hardcore band, and I don’t know if Finn was actually in a hardcore band or just in the scene.

Then comes one of Finn’s perfect little deadpan truths. C. shrugs that “hardcore’s in the eye of the beholder,” a funny line for a number of reasons (it also reminds me of the classic David Berman line: “punk rock died when the first kid said / punk’s not dead.”) The humor hits because it’s both self-aware and scene-aware.

After C. recalls his “broken heart from 1989,” Finn pivots the timeline. The song shifts back—back to when C. was attending hardcore shows, hot and sweaty, elbows in his eyes. The chronology bends, but the emotional logic stays firm.

Vanessa says there are “threads that connect us,” and “flags and wars we should never accept.” Angelo’s off seeing “snakes in the smoke” from someone’s cigarette. And Ivan? He isn’t concerned at all — for him it’s mostly just about “what you wear to the show.” C. admits he “heard a song…on the radio” that he liked, which we can assume violates at least one of Vanessa’s unwritten rules.

Finn is an absolute master of sketching characters in just a line or two. Here, he uses a sort of pointillistic approach to introduce us to two additional members of the scene, Angelo and Ivan. With just a few short verses we already understand a great deal about “the scene.” Here is what we can deduce:

i) All four members of the scene have very differently valenced loyalties. Put another way, they want different things from it. Vanessa is a purist; for her being part of the scene is like being part of an tribe, an army, and we take her to be a fierce protector of the in-group/ out-group aspects that tend to arise in subcultures. Angelo, it seems, is a little out there; he’s seeing snakes in the cigarette smoke and probably not all that interested in the ultimate nature or meaning of the scene. Ivan likes the t-shirts and jeans, likes the look. He’s not a purist either. And C., well he likes a little pop music, an inclination we assume is strictly verboten for folks like Vanessa.

ii) Probably because of the differences in ideas and ideologies between the scene members, C. sees things coming to an end, both with the scene and between he and Vanessa. Here we are reminded of the difficulty of keeping any kind of group together, whether a scene, a band, or just a group of friends. Everyone knows the feeling of having a group of friends who tell each other they will be tight forever, however life doesn’t usually work that way. The best film about this dynamic is Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, which depicts a young group of friends in Manhattan who come together and then slowly, but inevitably, come apart over the course of a winter. There is a great moment in Metropolitan where the main character, Tom, looks around and realizes the scene is dead. Where did it go? It was here one day, gone the next. Scenes are like that, and this is what Finn is writing about.

iii) The inherent differences between people which make keeping the scene together are also something that Finn celebrates to a certain extent I think. One of the most salient features of Finn’s writing is his compassion. Finn has compassion for Angelo and his snakes, Ivan and his jeans, and for Vanessa, in all of her rigidity. As of the time of the song we know for sure that Vanessa is still in the scene and C. is not. I guess that neither Angelo nor Ivan is still around, however if only one of them is my money’s on Angelo, if he’s still alive.

Through the course of my own life, I have been involved, for a shorter or longer time, with a variety of subcultures. One category of subculture that I have frequented is what we could broadly call “new age.” My explorations of this category have been reasonably extensive. Back in my early 20s, I was involved for about 4–5 months with a Tibetan Buddhist group back in Washington State. I would get up at 4 AM, drive an hour across town to a beautiful old house on the hill, and meditate with the folks there. This group also organized some outings, such as mountain hiking.

I enjoyed the group and the meditation. The group leader, a slightly older woman who was lovely, asked me to pay like 6 dollars for a little book with chants in it, which I did. There was a total cross-section of people in the group of different ages and backgrounds, and all in all I liked it there. However, I peeled off from the group after a time for reasons very similar to those discussed by Finn. There were two specific things that led to me leaving. The second I’ll discuss a little later. The first was one day I was chatting with one of the members on the street outside after meditation. He was telling me how his daughter used to play chess, however he would no longer allow her to do so because it was interfering with her studies of Tibetan Buddhism. “There’s just not enough time,” he told me.

I had talked with this guy before and he was a perfectly nice guy, but I didn’t agree with his approach. I felt, in fact, that it was bad action. Now, I understood that people joined the group for different reasons and had different levels of investment. I was not looking to become a Tibetan Buddhist or anything—I was just “checking it out.” To circle back to Finn, the valence gap between this fellow’s take on the subculture and my own was vast, and his entire approach turned me off. This was the first step in my deciding to leave.

The next three verses of “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” see C. trying to keep the door open to Vanessa even as he edges out of the scene. He wants to meet her and if she agrees he will know that she like him feels that “punk is not a fair fight.” Finn doesn’t say, but I’m guessing Vanessa doesn’t show.

If things change quickly/ just remember I still love you/ and I’ll circle ’round the block tonight/ between 9 and 10 o’clock tonight

If you’re still standing here, I’ll take that as a sign/ that you agree it was a sucker punch/ punk is not a fair fight/ it’s never been a fair fight

We said there weren’t any rules/ but there were so many goddamn rules/ we said that they’d be cool/ but then there were so many goddamn rules

Verse VII is the hinge-point of the song and basically its thesis. Finn’s point is straightforward: the appeal of the scene is the potential for freedom, exploration, rebellion, however once inside the subculture C. finds himself increasingly hemmed in by the strictures of that culture and the requirements necessary to remain within it. The very thing that drew C. to the subculture (flight from an over-determined social reality) is that thing that ultimately drives him away. “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” appears in two versions on All These Perfect Crosses; the main version is horn driven and upbeat, and there is also an acoustic version. On the main version, Finn, realizing perhaps that the repeated line is a bit poetically unorthodox, spits out a laugh on the “then” in “but then there were so many goddamn rules,” and in the process underlines the centrality of the sentiment to the song as a whole. It’s a great verse, and one which tells us something fundamental about C.’s nature: he likes the action, and as such needs to be free to pursue it wherever it may be. Action is not limited to the Minneapolis hardcore scene, after all.

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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships IV: Sixers

Note: This short reflection began simply as a reaction to hearing “Sixers” from The Price of Progress by The Hold Steady. Over time, however, it became clear that the song belongs to a larger lineage in Craig Finn’s writing: the quiet, observant songs about adult relationships that never quite come together.

Listeners familiar with Finn’s work will recognize echoes of earlier pieces such as “Spinners,” “Tangletown,” “Esther,” and especially “Jessamine,” where a brief encounter carries emotional weight far beyond its duration. What interests me most about these songs is not romance itself but the fragile moment where two people briefly imagine a connection that may or may not exist.

“Sixers” captures that moment with remarkable economy. Like many of Finn’s best narratives, the drama unfolds not through big revelations but through small gestures, passing observations, and the social physics of an evening that slowly runs out of momentum.

The song feels unmistakably rooted in the atmosphere of the pandemic and its aftermath—a period when many people were cautiously trying to reconnect with the world after long stretches of isolation. In that sense the characters in “Sixers” are not unusual figures but recognizable ones: two lonely people improvising a small pocket of companionship inside a quiet apartment building.

That the connection ultimately proves fleeting is not really the point. The attempt itself—the knock on the door, the drinks, the conversation—is what gives the evening its meaning.

I came to The Hold Steady a little late. Around 2016 I first heard “Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered in Memphis” from the 2008 album Stay Positive—probably through the Spotify algorithm, which occasionally earns its keep. That was the gateway. Even though I had missed the band’s original wave of excitement, I quickly made up for lost time and worked my way through the entire catalog.

A couple years later I went deeper and began listening seriously to the solo records by Craig Finn. That opened another rabbit hole. My early favorite was “Three Drinks,” but over time songs like “A Bathtub in the Kitchen” and “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” began to feel like the real center of gravity in Finn’s songwriting. The solo records are quieter and more novelistic than the Hold Steady albums, and in some ways I’ve come to think they are even stronger.

Around that same time a music-obsessed friend I met at two Hold Steady shows at Brooklyn Bowl told me that if I really wanted to understand Finn’s writing I needed to go back further, to his earlier band Lifter Puller. He was right. Lifter Puller turned out to be a wilder and more manic version of the same storytelling instinct. The songs move faster, the rhymes pile up in breathless clusters, and the characters—people like Nightclub Dwight—feel sketchier and stranger than the ones who would later populate Hold Steady songs about figures like Charlemagne. Tracks like “Nice Nice” and the closing songs on Fiasco are still some of the most exhilarating music Finn ever made.

All of which is to say that Craig Finn has gradually become, for me, the greatest living songwriter—even if I still concede that the all-time crown belongs to Bob Dylan.

What makes Finn particularly fascinating is the emotional terrain he covers. Early Hold Steady songs often dealt with youthful chaos—parties, drugs, Catholic guilt, and the reckless mythology of young adulthood. But over time he has developed another genre that may be even more compelling: songs about messy adult relationships.

These songs usually revolve around people chasing the thrill of a connection even when they suspect, somewhere deep down, that the connection will probably be short-lived. The crush, the fling, the brief dalliance—these impulses are deeply wired into human psychology and deeply embedded in the culture and art we consume. Finn understands that instinct perfectly. His characters repeatedly pursue moments of intimacy that are intense, fleeting, and often slightly ill-advised.

You can hear that theme in songs like Spinners, Tangletown, Esther, and perhaps most perfectly Jessamine. What distinguishes Finn’s writing is the concision with which he captures these emotional situations. Few songwriters are better at compressing an entire relationship dynamic into a handful of lines. In that respect “Jessamine” may be his masterpiece: a small, perfectly observed sketch of longing, timing, and missed possibility.

It is within that lineage that the song “Sixers,” from the 2023 album The Price of Progress, finds its place.

The Price of Progress feels unmistakably like The Hold Steady’s COVID-era record. Finn has described the album as a set of narrative songs about people trying to survive modern life—navigating isolation, economic pressure, technological dependence, and the strange psychological residue of the pandemic years. While the previous album Open Door Policyhad largely been completed before the lockdowns, The Price of Progress was written in the wake of that disrupted period when people were cautiously trying to rebuild their social lives.

“Sixers” captures that atmosphere perfectly.

The entire story unfolds inside an apartment building where two strangers live stacked one above the other. Both are alone. Both are restless. Both are coping with their evenings through small chemical adjustments—beer, pills, and cocktails.

The woman downstairs begins the night with a six-pack from the store down the street and a prescription meant to help her focus her attention. The man upstairs has just returned from another steakhouse dinner with coworkers in asset management, a job that is, as Finn notes dryly, “as thrilling as you’d think.” The two have seen each other before at the mailbox, one of those semi-public urban spaces where strangers develop a faint familiarity without ever truly knowing each other.

The encounter begins with a pretext. She knocks on his door and tells him she thought she heard footsteps upstairs.

The truth, of course, is that she is simply lonely.

Like many Finn songs, the story unfolds in the semi-public spaces of urban life—apartment hallways, mailboxes, shared walls—places where strangers gradually become aware of each other without ever becoming fully connected. Finn has always had the instincts of an urban anthropologist, observing the small rituals and awkward encounters that define city living.

For a while the evening works. They talk about work and school. They discuss how the city has changed. They make drinks in the kitchen—he measures gin while she crushes pills on the counter. At one point he is “muddling the mint,” a beautifully precise detail that captures the strange domestic intimacy that can arise between two people who barely know each other. Soon they are dancing, sending out for takeout, and even sharing inside jokes.

For a few hours the night begins to resemble a small, improvised relationship.

And then comes the hinge of the entire song.

Sunrise into sundown, sending out for takeout, sharing inside jokes now
He finally tries to kiss her and she says that it’s not like that.

With that single line the entire evening collapses.

Everything that seemed like romantic chemistry turns out to have been a misread signal. The connection was real enough to sustain conversation, drinks, dancing, and jokes, but not the kind of connection he thought it was.

One of Finn’s recurring themes is the almost-relationship—encounters where two people briefly imagine a connection that never quite materializes. Songs like Jessamine, Spinners, and Tangletown inhabit that fragile territory. “Sixers” belongs squarely in that tradition.

Finn doesn’t dramatize the moment with an argument or confession. Instead he shows the social physics of awkwardness taking over: everything slows, the conversation falters, and the energy drains from the room.

The next gesture is even more telling.

She cleans off the countertop and says she should probably go.

It is a tiny domestic act, but it carries enormous emotional weight. Cleaning the counter becomes a way of resetting the scene, erasing the traces of the evening before leaving.

Like many Finn songs, “Sixers” tells its story through objects as much as through dialogue. The room fills with small details: the six-pack from the corner store, the pill bottle in the cupboard, the carefully mixed drinks, Sinatra on the stereo, and one quietly devastating observation about the apartment’s décor.

At one point she notices a Nagel poster hanging on the wall in a silver frame and thinks it looks kind of lame.

It’s a perfect Finn detail. In a single line we learn something about the guy’s taste, his slightly square professional aesthetic, and the quiet judgment forming in her mind even while the evening unfolds.

Months later she sees him again in the hallway. This time he is standing with his fiancée, whose name she can’t quite remember—Kelly or Katie.

The moment closes the loop of the story. Whatever possibility once existed between them has long since evaporated. The evening that once felt full of potential turns out to have been only a brief improvisation between two lonely people passing through the same building.

The song ends where it began, with footsteps.

But this time the sound isn’t real.

She thinks she hears footsteps
But now they’re not really there.

The knock on the door that began the story was an attempt at connection. The footsteps at the end are only the ghost of that attempt, echoing in the quiet of her apartment.

Like many of Finn’s best songs about adult relationships, “Sixers” isn’t about catastrophe. Nothing explodes. No one storms out. The drama is smaller and more recognizable than that.

It is simply about lonely people improvising connection in a time of trouble.

And sometimes getting it slightly wrong.

Note: If you like this essay, you may also like the essays below which also deal with the singer-songwriter Craig Finn and his band The Hold Steady.

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships III: Jessamine
Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships II: Killer Parties
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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships II: Killer Parties

Killer Parties (Live) — Nights That Almost Killed Us, Nights That Made Us

Note: This is the second part of our series on songs of The Hold Steady that take up the intertwined themes of nightlife and the complexities of adult relationships. Part I is available. This piece will deal with “Killer Parties,” specifically the live version from A Positive Rage.

“Killer Parties,” written by Craig Finn, closes Almost Killed Me (2003) and provides its title line. But the 2008 live version is the definitive one for me — a 10-minute slow burn that opens not with guitars but with an invocation. Finn’s spoken intro sets the terms for who this band is, who the audience is, and why these communal nights matter.

I. The Invocation

Before a single lyric, Finn does what Finn does: greets the tribe.

He jokes, he rambles, he self-deprecates, he misdirects — and then he lands it:

There’s so much joy in what we do up here. Thank you for sharing that joy with us.

That’s the thesis of The Hold Steady.
Everything else is commentary.

The band isn’t just a band; Finn isn’t just a frontman. The Hold Steady is a community, a lineage, a shared memory palace built out of long nights, near-misses, inside jokes, loud guitars, and people who actually want to be there.

When I saw them twice at the Brooklyn Bowl in 2018, I wrote:

Hold Steady fans are pretty much fanatics… They were super possessive of their space, they all seemed to know each other. One guy sized me up and said, “I want to not like you, but there’s some kind of aura around you, man.”

That’s the thing: the fans are a little cliquey, but the band itself is radically welcoming. Finn means it when he thanks people. He means it when he says he’s met half the room. He means it when he collapses the distinction between performer and audience:

“We are, and you are, The Hold Steady.”

That’s what the spoken intro really says.

II. Charlemagne and the Unsaid

The song opens with a classic Finn move — an elliptical report of something that happened, but we’re not going to get the details:

If they ask about Charlemagne,
be polite and keep it vague —
another lover lost to the restaurant raids.

Charlemagne is the old recurring character, drug-dealer-adjacent, always on the edge of calamity. Did he OD? Get busted? Get swallowed by his own myth?
Finn doesn’t tell you. He protects the dignity of the fallen.

This is identical in spirit to the opening of “A Bathtub in a Kitchen.”

I’ve known people like this. You’ve known people like this. Someone falls off the map, and when they resurface, it’s a new person in the same body. The specifics get blurry; the compassion gets sharper.

III. Leaving, Loving, Running

The next verses broaden out:

We left because we were young and in love.
We left because we needed space.
We left because we heard about this mythical country called the United States.

When Finn sings that line, he’s not being literal — he’s describing the classic American story: the pilgrimage to the realbig city. The wide open possibility. The idea that somewhere else — New York, especially — is where the real life is.

I relate.
I left my hometown and moved halfway across the world.
Finn moved from Minneapolis to New York; I moved from Spokane to Asia.
And like him, I sometimes feel pangs for what I missed.

But I needed space. I needed something bigger.

IV. Killer Parties

Then we hit the geography of sin:

Virginia for lovers.
Philly for brotherhood.
Pensacola for pills.
Ybor City for the nights that go too far.

And then the line we can quote directly:

“Killer parties almost killed me.”

Finn doesn’t romanticize this. He’s looking back at the nights that were ecstatic and dangerous at the same time. Nights that reshaped his body chemistry. Nights that made him who he is.

I’ve had my run at nightlife — nothing like Finn’s, but enough to understand the way one night can rewrite your wiring, for better or worse.

V. The Blur and the Transcendence

The final verses repeat themselves, because that’s how memory works:

We partied (I think?).
We departed from our bodies.
We woke up in Ybor City.

The nights are a blur — Finn partied but gets the details secondhand. What he does remember is the transcendence, the weightless moment when the body gives out and the self floats somewhere above it. And then the long, punishing hangover that follows.

For me, Ybor City has always functioned like El Dorado — the mythical endpoint of the American night. Maybe Finn has been there; maybe he hasn’t. Maybe you can only reach it by running the gauntlet of long days and longer nights. Maybe you can only get there by losing yourself a little too fully.

I’m not sure Ybor City would be good for me.

VI. The Ex-Introvert Who Still Wants the Night

And here’s where my story threads into the song:

I am an ex-introvert reinvented as an extrovert — something I’ve talked about with several friends. I’m too old for some of the clubbing I once did, but I still love the nightlife, still love running around, talking to strangers, seeing where the night wants to take me.

And it takes you to strange places.

I think this is the real theme of “Killer Parties”:
the appeal of the night, the call of the road, and the deep human need to leave the known world and find out what’s waiting elsewhere.

I return to this song in all kinds of circumstances — when I miss the road, when I need a reminder that the self is porous, when I want to remember what it felt like to be new somewhere.

VII. The Circle Closes: Community

And yet — for all the mythology and all the escapism — Finn always brings it back to community.

The Hold Steady isn’t just Finn narrating the lives of misfits. It’s Finn saying:

We survived the killer nights.
We made it home.
We found each other.

The live intro becomes the retrospective moral:

There’s so much joy in what we do up here.
Thank you for sharing that joy with us.

And so the whole arc — the wandering, the leaving, the nightlife, the blurring of memory, the near-death nights — ends where it must:

With the people who showed up.
The people who stayed.
The people in front of the stage.
The people who are, themselves, The Hold Steady.

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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs

I. Setting the Frame — What the Song Is “About,” and What Finn Says It’s About

“Most People Are DJs” appears on Almost Killed Me (2003), track three if you don’t count the spoken prologue. If “Killer Parties” is the band’s thesis on community, “Most People Are DJs” is the thesis on the scene—why it’s fun, why it’s corrosive, and why it matters.

Finn himself once said:

“Just a reaction to life in NYC in the 2000s… The part I don’t get is when I get emails that start with ‘Come see me DJ’ and end with ‘Here is what I’m going to play…’ I think DJing, like rock criticism, tends to be a way for people to participate in the ‘scene’ without the risks to the ego that go along with producing art.”

His hedge—“Of course, I don’t apply this to all DJs”—isn’t convincing. And that’s okay. Artists don’t owe us diplomatic consensus statements. What he’s really saying is: there is a gap between creating and curating. Between risk and commentary. Between the ones who make things and the ones who play things.

Now: I don’t fully agree with him.
And that’s part of what makes this song fun to write about.

Because the truth is:
Finn is reacting to a very specific time and place—New York in the early 2000s—where the “scene” was swollen with people who wanted proximity to art more than they wanted the agony of making it.

But he also wrote a song so overflowing with confidence and adrenaline that, even if you disagree with the premise, the song still wins.

II. Alliteration, Lineage, and the New York Scene (Early 2000s)

One thing that hits immediately in “Most People Are DJs” is the density—the alliteration, the internal rhyme, the almost cartoonish velocity of the lines. Finn came out of Lifter Puller, a band whose songs were so tightly coiled with alliteration they were practically tongue-twisters set to guitars. That sonic fingerprint carries directly into Almost Killed Me.

“Jet skis into the jetty,”
“skipping off the good ship,”
“searching for the merchant”—
this is Finn still flexing the Lifter Puller muscle.

But something is different now.
A subtle pivot.

With The Hold Steady, the alliteration stops feeling like a hallucinatory fever dream and starts to feel like a narrator in full command of his mythmaking. LP was chaos; THS is authorship. LP was young-person disorientation; THS is a guy in his early thirties cataloguing his own survival.

And that survival intersects directly with Finn’s take on the early-millennium New York City “scene.”

If you didn’t live there then, it’s hard to reconstruct the vibe, but from the outside—I was never a New York resident, just a visitor—it felt like every bar and backroom was filled with:

  • people wanting to be seen
  • people curating themselves more than expressing themselves
  • self-mythologizing in real time
  • and a thousand micro-scenes stacked on top of each other

New York has always been a city where people come to reinvent themselves, but in the 2000s, with the rise of the internet, music blogs, Vice magazine, and the early social media era, there was suddenly an audience for every aesthetic micro-gesture. DJ nights proliferated not necessarily because people loved vinyl but because DJing let you participate in culture without risking the humiliation of failure that comes with creation.

Finn clearly bristled at this dynamic—at least enough to write this song about it.
But crucially: he’s not sneering. He’s needling.
He’s amused and annoyed in equal measure.

Because he had just spent years in a band (LP) that nearly no one outside Minneapolis cared about. He’d paid his dues in the purest sense—tiny clubs, no money, hardcore kids, bad drives, worse mornings—and so when he encountered the Manhattan version of a “scene,” it must have felt surreal. A party ecosystem where participation wasn’t dependent on talent or risk, just aesthetics.

And so the song becomes a little manifesto:

Some people create.
Most people curate.
I know which side I’m on.

But I don’t fully agree with Finn here. DJing, like criticism, can absolutely be an art. Plenty of DJs are actual geniuses of sequencing, mood, texture, and propulsion. And Finn’s own songs rely heavily on the idea that everyone constructs a soundtrack for their life. He lives inside the psychology of people who soundtrack their heartbreak, their addictions, their breakthroughs, their mistakes.

So his jab at DJs is both sincere and playful—an elbow thrown by someone who knows perfectly well that without DJs, nightlife wouldn’t exist.

Still, the tension is productive.
It pushes the song forward.
It gives it its bite.

This is where Finn’s shift from Lifter Puller to The Hold Steady becomes clear:
LP described nightlife as a labyrinth; THS describes it as a world he made it out of, barely, and will now narrate for the rest of us.

Almost Killed Me is a debut in name only—it’s actually a rebirth.

III. The Ice Machine, the Trash Bin, and the Myth of Mis-Spent Youth

If the early verses of “Most People Are DJs” sketch out the external landscape—Ybor City confetti, jet skis, five-second dealers, Phil Lynott doppelgängers—then the center of the song turns inward. The gaze shifts from the scene itself to the person who once tried to survive inside it.

And it starts with a line that sounds like a joke until it doesn’t:

“I was a teenage ice machine…”

It’s metaphorical, but also literal in the sideways way Finn always manages:
a kid who kept it cold, kept it contained, kept taking in whatever the night handed him. Drinking until he dreamed, and when he dreamed, dreaming only of the scene. It’s the way youth can feel like preparation for nightlife, not the other way around.

Then comes the image of the little lambs looking up at him—those younger kids just entering the arena. There’s no arrogance in it; it’s simply the moment you realize you’ve shifted from participant to veteran, from the kid on the floor to the older presence leaning against the bar. It’s an eerie, recognizable sensation for anyone who came up in tight little music worlds, whether Minneapolis hardcore or the DIY venues that orbit all cities.

And then the next admission hits harder:

“I was a Twin Cities trash bin…”

Here Finn stops ornamenting the story. He talks frankly about taking everything the scene gave him and jamming it into his system. He doesn’t romanticize those years—he frames them as messy, hungry, adrenaline-charged, and sometimes self-destructive. It’s the classic Hold Steady blend of humor, regret, and affection for the person he once was. Anyone who’s lived through their own version of that era understands the mixture of pride and embarrassment that comes with looking back.

Then the song shifts again, suddenly back in a room, back in a body:

“She got me cornered by the kitchen…”

It’s one of those instantly recognizable nightlife moments—some stranger with a lot on her mind talking too closely, too sincerely, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Finn’s response, “I’ll do anything but listen,” is both funny and revealing. It’s the impatience of a younger self who wants motion, wants noise, wants the next thing, not the emotional monologue of someone he’s just met.

But the real anchor of this section comes next:

“We’re hot soft spots on a hard rock planet.”

This is the line that echoes back to the earlier “tiny white specks” but deepens it. We may be insignificant on the grand scale, but we’re still soft, still human, still easily bruised. For all the bluster and late nights, there’s vulnerability baked into every corner of the scene. Finn recognizes it, even here, even in a song that pretends to be about DJs and parties.

And this middle section becomes the emotional axis for the entire track. The drug years, the clubs, the kitchens, the impatience, the kids, the tiny planets we all carried around–it’s Finn turning his own biography into something mythic and still somehow intimate. It’s the moment the song stops being an anecdote about nightlife and becomes a portrait of the person who lived it.

IV. “Teenage Ice Machine”: Finn’s Youth, My Youth, Everyone’s Youth

This is where the song really cracks open — the run of verses where Finn folds his own misspent youth into the larger portrait of nightlife. It’s the part where the memoirist in him steps forward.

“I was a teenage ice machine / I kept it cool in coolers and I drank until I dreamed…”

Finn describes his early years in Minneapolis with blunt clarity: he was taking whatever the night handed him, jamming it into his system, chasing scenes and dreams and any story worth telling. He’s frank about the drugs, the bravado, the hunger. And that image of “kids like little lambs looking up at me” shows the strange dynamic of growing older inside a scene — one day you realize the new kids think you know something. They think you’ve made it out of the maze.

And Finn knows these kids. He knows their impulsiveness, their devotion, their need to be part of something burning and bright. He knows it because he lived it.

“I was a Twin Cities trash bin / I did everything they’d give me…”

It’s funny, and a little raw — Finn admitting he was just shoveling it all in, whatever “it” was. And the lines about being cornered in the kitchen and doing “anything but listen” land perfectly. This is the social physics of nightlife: the way adrenaline and self-invention outrun patience or reflection. The kitchen confrontation is a tiny scene, but it captures the whole era — Finn always moving, always dodging, always hungry for the next thing, the next rush, the next room.

And then the knockout line:

“We’re hot soft spots on a hard rock planet.”

This connects back to the earlier perspective shift — from Minneapolis sidewalks to this tiny-blue-dot cosmic backdrop. It’s Finn’s version of existentialism: the world is hard, unforgiving, indifferent; we are temporary flashes of warmth against it. But the point isn’t despair. The point is urgency. You don’t get that many nights where it all lines up. You don’t get that many years where your body and your heart and your recklessness harmonize. You take the nights when they come.

This is where the song clicks for me. That line is the thesis.

V. “Everyone’s a Critic and Most People Are DJs”: The Thesis and the Tension

“Baby, take off your beret
Everyone’s a critic and most people are DJs
And everything gets played.”

This is the line that gives the song its name and its pulse. Finn has already sketched the landscape — Ybor City’s chaos, New York’s 2000s absurdities, his own Twin Cities coming-of-age — and now he turns outward, toward the observation that set this whole song off in the first place.

Finn has said himself that this was his early-2000s response to the particular New York ecosystem where everyone wanted to be adjacent to culture without the exposure of making anything. The emails that said “come see me DJ, here’s what I’m going to play,” the ubiquity of people who curated rather than created. And he delivers the line with this mixture of mockery and affection — like a guy who remembers how much he once needed subcultural scaffolding and who also knows how flimsy that scaffolding can be.

But I don’t totally agree with the dismissiveness, and that’s part of why the line hits so hard for me. I think critics can make art, and DJs — literal or metaphorical — can shape the emotional weather of a room. I DJ my own life, like anyone who uses music to modulate their mood or define a moment. Spotify is my deck. The commute is my booth. There’s a pleasure in that autonomy that isn’t fake or lesser, just different.

Still, I get Finn’s point. There’s a risk he’s insisting on: the risk of putting something authentic into the world, the risk of failing publicly, the risk of making something instead of just spinning something. And this is the part where he plants his flag:
he is a maker, not a curator.
And he’s calling out everyone else — kindly, but unmistakably.

The song is gentler than the critique. It’s not a scolding. It’s a reminder: life isn’t a playlist you assemble from the safety of the booth. You have to actually step into the room. You have to actually take the hit.

This is where the song becomes more than a snapshot of early-2000s New York. It’s a life instruction.

Get in the game.

Because eventually everything gets played — your choices, your nights out, the people you loved, the things you messed up, the mornings you woke up on the floor of a city you barely knew. And at the end of all that, you want to be able to say you did it, not that you watched someone else do it.

VI. The Night Rolls On

The final verse snaps everything into focus. Finn works backwards through the chain of a night out—doctor to drugs, packie to taxi, taxi to club—like retracing the evidence after the damage is done. It’s funny and a little grim, but honest: this is how people actually live when they’re young, restless, and trying to outrun something unnamed.

A thousand kids fall in love in these clubs; a thousand end up bleeding.
Two thousand don’t sleep; two thousand still feel pretty sweet.

That’s the gamble of the night. Always has been.

And this is where my own life sits closest to Finn’s. I’ve said before that I’m an ex-introvert reinvented as an extrovert, and the night has been part of that transformation. I’m long past the age where I should be closing clubs, but I still love the energy of being out in the world, meeting people, letting chance decide the direction. The night takes you to weird places, sometimes beautiful and sometimes sketchy, and if you’re wired like me—or like Finn—that current is hard to resist.

And then there’s Ybor City, which in the Finn cosmology feels half-real, half-mythic. A kind of El Dorado of the American night. Did he actually go there? Maybe. But in the logic of the song, it doesn’t matter. Ybor City is where you wake up when the night has taken you further than planned. A place that might kill you or crown you, or both. I’m not sure Ybor City would be good for me. I’m not sure it’s good for anyone.

But the truth is:
the pull of that world—the risk, the release, the possibility—is part of what makes these songs hit as hard as they do.

VII. Closing Thoughts

In the end, Most People Are DJs isn’t one of Finn’s masterpieces, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a mission statement disguised as a party track. An early announcement that he wasn’t done writing about the night, about the kids who rush into it headlong, about the way music becomes a map for people who don’t quite know where they’re going but desperately want to get there fast.

The song is chaotic, generous, a little arrogant, and very alive—exactly what Almost Killed Me needed to be. It sketches the outlines of the universe Finn will later fill with addicts, romantics, bartenders, prophets, screwups, saints, and that long list of people who show up again and again in his songs because he sees them clearly. Because he was them once.

I keep returning to it not because it’s Finn at his deepest but because it’s Finn at his most open-throated:
young, wired, taking in the world at full volume.

It’s the sound of the door swinging open on everything that would follow—from the great epics (Separation Sunday, Stay Positive, Teeth Dreams) to the late-career short-story gems. You can hear the whole project of The Hold Steady rumbling under this song, even if Finn himself shrugs the song off as a joke at the expense of DJs and critics.

Maybe that’s the secret: sometimes the songs artists dismiss end up revealing more than the ones they cherish.

For me, this one captures something essential about the moment you step into the night—
when the lights go up, the bass starts running, and you feel, for just a second, like anything could happen.

It’s a snapshot of youth, of movement, of mischief and possibility.

And yeah—
I still feel pretty sweet.

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On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”

I. Opening Notes

This is my third piece dealing with the songwriter Craig Finn. I wrote at length about his song “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” and a little more in my piece on Katie Park and The Bad Moves. Although my primary allegiance will always be to Dylan, if I am totally honest Finn is my favorite songwriter. Dylan is a transcendent force, world-historical, and therefore also sort of unapproachable. Finn is down-to-earth—I can imagine having a drink or three with Finn, whereas Dylan would probably have his hoodie up.

So, for the record: my favorite band is Luna, my favorite songwriter is Craig Finn, and the greatest is Dylan. My three favorite Finn songs are “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” and “Killer Parties.” This post takes a close look at “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” with the aim of explicating both the song and Finn’s delivery.

II. Premise and Setup

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is track three on Craig Finn’s 2019 album I Need a New War, released by Partisan Records. For my money, it is not only the standout track on the record, but one of the three greatest songs of my all-time favorite songwriter. The song is ostensibly about an old friend of the narrator (I will refer to him as C.) called Francis, but it’s also about trying to make it in the big city, and about moving on from the past. Making it—or not making it—in the big city is a classic Finn theme.

III. Verse One — The Accident and the Past

The song opens with a report of an accident. The nature of the event is unspecified, but my best guess is an overdose.

The lightning clarity typical of Finn is all over these four lines. We learn that C. and Francis have a relationship shaded by deception, that they still move in overlapping circles, and that both originally came from somewhere else. The final line delivers one of those Finn-isms that cut both ways: city transplants trying to recreate a tiny town, while C. himself is still entangled in the very past he’s trying to escape.

IV. Verse Two — Money, Health, and Elegance

By the second part of the verse it seems Francis has recovered somewhat, and C. has met with him again.

Finn’s concision is astonishing. In eight lines we understand the dynamic completely: C. has money he could give, but knows it’s probably enabling; Francis is perhaps an addict, though neither man states it. We also glimpse Francis in better days—The Parkside, elegant companions, a life C. once aspired toward. And already C. is trying, gently, to pass responsibility to someone else.

This touches something universal: the friend who needs more than we can sustainably give. Or the times we’ve been that friend ourselves.

V. The Chorus — Youth, Longing, and New York

The chorus arrives, one of Finn’s most moving and beautiful. His voice rises on I was drinking, I was dancing, packed with emotion.

This is a flashback to young C. in New York—broke, naive, crashing on Francis’s couch. Finn underlines C.’s passivity three times: waiting, hoping, desperate for New York to ask me out. That phrasing is brilliant. It captures the essential vulnerability of arriving in New York with dreams, no plan, and a subway map.

The memory sends me to my own first visit to New York. Stepping out of the station at 42nd Street into the noise, I felt the shock of sensation—an energy I still feel every time I return. I’ve been to many great cities—Tokyo, London, Singapore, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur—but there is nowhere like New York.

And in a city like that, it can be nearly impossible to get your footing. Everyone is already in motion. Finn evokes that perfectly.

VI. Verse Three — Present-Day Francis

Back to the present:

Francis has been in New York for twenty-three years, and C. nearly as long, since he knows the number by heart. The “bathtub in the kitchen” signals the classic New York starter apartment—a detail so iconic it becomes the song’s title. Francis still goes to the roof for better reception. Phones get disconnected. Life is fraying. C. registers all of this without overt judgment, but with distance. A sense of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

VII. Chorus Reprise — Guilt and Gratitude

The chorus returns with slight changes—“doing things I shouldn’t”—and doubled gratitude: Francis let me crash out on his couch. Repetition becomes confession.

My father read my “Fair Fight” draft and, not knowing anything about Craig Finn, immediately said he sensed a strong midwestern Catholic vibe. He was spot-on. Finn grew up Catholic in Minnesota; guilt, forgiveness, and redemption run through almost everything he writes.

There is also a phenomenal YouTube video of Finn performing this at the Murmrr Theatre, and during the post-chorus especially the performance takes on a spiritual intensity you can’t miss.

VIII. Post-Chorus — The Confession

The lines:

I can’t keep saying thank you, Francis…

These cut two ways. C. is saying:

  1. The couch surfing was long ago, and he has done what he can.
  2. And simultaneously: I’m not the person who can save you.

The confession is directed at Francis—but maybe just as much at himself.

IX. Verse Four — The Old Ropes and the New Distance

The final verse returns briefly to the past: Francis teaching C. how to navigate New York nightlife—befriend bartenders, tip big on the first round. These are the rules of the game. C. remembers them vividly.

Then we snap to the present: Francis’s job rumors, his terrible landlord, the $200 that will “help him breathe a bit easy.” And the repeated question: Francis, do you even have a plan? C. has given him money, but not much, and not with much faith. The trust between them has frayed into obligation.

X. Outro — The Spiritual Release

The outro repeats the confession. Again, it’s worth watching the Murmrr Theatre live version to feel how Finn leans into this. It becomes a kind of secular prayer, a release and a resignation all at once.

XI. Closing Thoughts

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is about youth and aging, about friendship and how it lasts and decays, about guilt and human selfishness in the face of real need. More than anything, it captures what it feels like to try to survive in New York.

I think this song, like “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” is more personal for Finn than some of his strictly narrative pieces. The narrator here has “made it.” Finn himself is an immigrant to New York, from Minnesota, and has sampled deeply from the nightlife he writes about. Few songwriters have chronicled nightlife with more range, consistency, or compassion.

Even if C. can’t keep saying thank you, I can. This song moves me in ways I’ve tried to describe here but still can’t fully encompass.