By Amos Barshad at
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Craig Finn is worried about getting old. He’s 40 and has played in bands for roughly the entirety of his adult life: Lifter Puller in the '90s and The Hold Steady in the 2000s. His first solo album, Clear Heart Full Eyes, drops this week. And he’s worried about getting old. “There’s this youthful music,” Finn tells me while we sit at a marble-top table at a dimly lit bistro-type café near his apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “And then you’re this 40-year-old guy that’s trying to be OK about being 40, and not feel like you’re in an arrested development. Not feel like, ‘Oh, what am I doing.’”
Landing a verse from André 3000, the Big Foot of hip-hop, is a great way to show your industry pull. The problem here for Jeezy, though, is that Drake’s album just had a brand new 3 Stacks feature, while this “I Do” verse has been floating around for over a year. Come on, ‘Dre: goddamn Ke$hagets a new one, but Jeezy has to settle for scraps?
A headline from Sunday’s New York Times "Arts & Leisure" section: "Chris Martin of Coldplay Asks: What Would Bruce Do?" In the article, Martin explains he’d been “watching a lot about Darkness on the Edge of Town” and other “real albums” in preparation for Coldplay’s latest, Mylo Xyloto; he also calls Springsteen, along with Jagger and Bono, one of his “great teachers.” So Martin’s caught the Bruce bug! It’s really been going around. In the last five years or so, both pup bands like the Gaslight Anthem and the Hold Steady, as well as megastars like Lady Gaga and the Killers, have recorded albums inspired by Bruce (reportedly, at some point during the Sam’s Town promo tour, for a minute or so, Brandon Flowers actually managed to convince himself he was Bruce Springsteen). Now, it’s Coldplay’s turn.
