Craig Finn, Katy Kirby - SOLD OUT

Doors 7PM / Show 8PM

Seated show

$35ADV / $40DOS

Craig Finn is a Minnesota-bred singer/songwriter based in New York City, best known as the singer of The Hold Steady. Finn spent the ’90’s leading Minneapolis indie band Lifter Puller, which released 3 albums and an EP. After relocating to New York, he joined with Lifter Puller member Tad Kubler to form The Hold Steady in 2003. The Hold Steady quickly achieved critical acclaim and a worldwide fanbase with their unique pairing of dense lyrical narratives with big rock guitars. The Hold Steady’s ninth album, The Price Of Progress, was released in March 2023, commemorating the band’s 20th Anniversary. 

Finn released his first solo album in 2012 with three additional solo LPs put forth from 2015 - 2019: Faith in the Future, We All Want The Same Things, and 2019’s I Need a New War - which coalesced into a sign-of-the-times musical trilogy. Finn’s debut book “I Can’t Keep Saying Thank You”, a collection of his song lyrics, was also released in 2019. A double album of B- sides/outtakes All These Perfect Crosses was released in 2021 accompanied by a limited-edition graphic novel/comic book.

Finn’s fifth solo album, A Legacy of Rentals, was released in May 2022 to great fanfare. Pitchfork praised it saying, “The writing remains the main attraction in Finn’s work, and both as a storyteller and a rock songwriter, he has never sounded more in control. From the beginning, he had a gift for meticulous, vivid world-building, and his wordplay has gotten tighter as his subjects have come down to earth.” That’s How I Remember It is Craig Finn’s podcast series, which just started it’s third season. Co-produced and distributed by Talkhouse, the podcast series examines the connection between memory and creativity. Each episode features a discussion between Finn and one creator – including musicians, authors, filmmakers, and more – about the role memory plays in their art. These exclusive conversations reveal the different ways each creator synthesizes their remembered life experience to tell stories about themselves and the world we live in.

Let’s face it: There’s no such thing as “real life”. There is only experience and the negotiations we undertake in order to share it with other people. On her second album Blue Raspberry, the New York-based songwriter Katy Kirby dives headlong into the artifice of intimacy: the glitter smeared across eyelid creases, the smiles switched on with an electric buzz, the synthetic rose scent all over someone who’s made herself smell nice just for you. An exegesis of Kirby’s first queer relationship, Blue Raspberry traces the crescendo and collapse of new love, savoring each gleaming shard of rock candy and broken glass along the way.

Originally from Spicewood, Texas, Kirby was living in Nashville when she started writing Blue Raspberry’s title track, the first of the album’s songs to take shape. “‘Blue Raspberry’ is the oldest song on the record. I began to write it a month or so before I realized, I think I’m queer,” she says. “There’s a tradition of yearning in country love songs. I like the male yearning songs better, usually. I started writing ‘Blue Raspberry,’ and I was thinking about, if I was in love with a woman, what would I love about her? Especially if she was someone that I couldn’t touch, but that I was pining for. What would I be caught on? And I thought that I would probably be particularly charmed by the choices she made on how to look after she woke up in the morning.  I thought about tackiness, and the ways that’s a dirty word. That’s where the title comes from—loving someone for those choices, for the artificiality.”