THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “My fifth solo album A Legacy Of Rentals was largely written during 2020, in the shadow of the pandemic and the George Floyd murder that occurred in my hometown of Minneapolis,” Craig Finn says. “It was recorded in 2021 with producer Josh Kaufman, engineer D. James Goodwin, and a number of other friends and collaborators.
“These songs deal a lot with memory: How we remember people that are gone, places that have changed, major events that are part of our past. It’s about how memories become the stories that we tell others and ourselves. It’s about the distortion that happens to our own histories when stretched by time and distance. It’s about finding joy in the mundane and engaging in hope in our everyday.
“Josh and I decided early on to feature strings on this record, as opposed to the wind and brass-heavy compositions of the last three albums. But when we came to the song Birthdays we kept hearing Stuart Bogie’s saxophone, so we got him to do this solo and he crushed it. We thought it suggests a bit of a bridge back to my previous records. This song is about family, the way we honor these connections, and how both positive and negative things are carried through blood lines — genetic traits as long-term memories. Coincidentally, it was recorded on Josh’s actual birthday.”
