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Lifting Off
by Katherine Kelly
Craig Finn is a storyteller. The thing is, he doesn't just tell stories, he sings them. And they're not just regular stories -- they're these chaotic combinations of adjectives and verbs thrown together in such a way that they actually have greater meaning by the time he's done with them. Or maybe he's just a guy in a band, with three other guys, who write good songs.
Finn is the frontman for local band Lifter Puller. If the name doesn't sound familiar to you, it will. After years of playing around the Twin Cities (and throughout the country), the band just released their second album, Half Dead and Dynamite (No Alternative) -- with the exuberance most groups reserve for a debut.
Much of this joy can be credited to Mike Wisti (of the Rank Strangers), who recorded the album. Unlike the recording engineer used on Lifter Puller's eponymous first release, Wisti is not only a friend of the band's, but was very familiar with their music before making the album. "Him having seen us live all those times really helped," Finn says. "Any suggestions he made were taken as very valid."
Feeling more comfortable with the recording process and having more enthusiasm for the songs themselves allowed Lifter Puller to create a great follow-up to a not-so-great beginning. For those of you who heard their debut (and not many did), Half Dead and Dynamite has more feeling, more energy, and it's tighter. The steady rhythms and solid guitars are great accompaniment to the band's strongest force -- Finn's lyrics.
"Yeah, it's wordy," Finn says of Lifter Puller's lyrically skewed sound. (And it's hard to peg -- "We're not heavy enough for the punk kids but we're too much for the pop kids," he says.)
Every song is a combination of stories -- "You know, little things that you'll see maybe over a year and you boil them down and put all the interesting things together," he says. "There are very few Lifter Puller songs that are things that happened to me exactly that way."
Finn's ability to combine fact and fiction shows up on "Nassau Coliseum." One of the best songs on the album, it was inspired by Finn's experience at a Grateful Dead show he attended in Long Island. "It ended up being like the biggest drug bust in Grateful Dead history," Finn says. "They had cops on horses, there were people getting beaten up, there was crying, screaming -- it was crazy." Drawing on this experience, Finn added a girl and created an interesting, semi-love song. ("Didn't think you would diss me/ did you sleep with that hippie?")
Another gem is the title-track, "Half Dead and Dynamite." Backed by heavy drums and a moody keyboard, Finn sings from the perspective of a man waking up from an all-night binge. "He goes out," Finn says, "and has this wild, shady adventure and 'half dead and dynamite' is just that ... 'Dynamite' would be looking good, ready to party and 'half dead' would obviously be feeling awful." The song reflects a motif that can be found throughout the record -- things getting fucked up.
"I think it's a pretty dark record," Finn says. "It's kinda interesting when you put the songs together in a certain order and listen to it as a body of work rather than just song to song. Some themes come out."
Many of these scenes involve drug dealers, hustlers and underground activity. "It's a big crime scene basically," Finn says, laughing. "Stuff that none us have probably really lived, but you know, it's exactly parallel with the kind of movies I like and the kinda stuff I read."
When he's not playing with Lifter Puller, Finn does something alien to most musicians -- brokerage. "[I] basically manage people's money who have a lot of it," he says. "It's a lot different than rock'n'roll ... I read the business section first."
Finn enjoys both of his jobs. "I don't think I'd be happy if I was doing [just] one or the other," he says; then again, he doesn't have to wear a tie for either.
The rest of the band have alter egos as well. Bassist Tommy Roach is a grad student at the U of M, teaching a class in music and culture; Dan Monick, the band's drummer, doubles as a photographer, and guitarist Steve Barone works for a company that caters all the big concerts that come to town -- and writes a fashion advice column.
"We work hard," Finn says, "but everything we do ... is in pursuit of fun." Dark, scary fun, the kind all financial advisors could probably use.
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