On a cold night at the end of January, a room in Dublin’s city center is packed to the brim. Everyone is silent, raptly listening to the stories unfolding from the stage. The songwriter Craig Finn and the three musicians that make up The Band of Forgiveness unfurl tale after tale of dignified people struggling with undignified situations, the complexity of love and the heavy burden of regret. These songs mostly come from Finn’s newest album, “Always Been,” which features a series of songs that follow the travails of a disgraced former priest.

Among the crowd, I spot a man carrying an armful of beers. He starts handing them out to people all around him. There is a profound appreciation of the storytelling craft on display from the performers, but there is also a joyous camaraderie among the members of the crowd. It seems some arrived as strangers and will leave as friends.

After the gig, I got talking to the beer benefactor, Howard Roberts. He explained to me that he is a corporate insolvency lawyer and a father and lives in England. He traveled to Ireland just for this gig, accompanied by some friends. He confessed that the music brings out a “childlike enthusiasm” in him. Something in him responds deeply to the songs, particularly to the “wise, witty and wonderful” lyrics. But he has also been captivated by the community that surrounds Craig Finn’s gigs and that of his band, The Hold Steady. 

“It is remarkable to think back,” Howard reflected, on “how many people I’ve shared beers with at these shows who were strangers at the start of an evening. To me, the hallmarks of these musicians and their community are honesty, trust, respect, integrity and kindness. That is always illustrated at the shows.”

This atmosphere of “honesty, trust and respect” that Howard finds so transcendent is likely, in some diffuse way, informed by Finn’s own background growing up in suburban Minneapolis. In an interview with me for America, he confessed that because he “didn’t grow up, like a lot of people I meet in New York, with these incredibly artistic families,” he has always brought a sense of gratitude when finding people who have come out to connect to his music. 

Catholicism was an integral part of that Midwestern upbringing. “Growing up around Catholic grandparents and uncles and with Catholic friends, being in church a lot” shaped his view of the world. Religion was ever-present but not intense or overbearing. “My parents were not like heavy Catholics…a lot has come by osmosis, just being interested in the beauty and the good parts” of the tradition. 

In his teenage years, he discovered punk music. Traveling into the city by bus to get new records became his weekly ritual. Soon he was going to gigs and finding community in the scene around the Twin Cities. During his years studying communications at Boston College, he was very taken with the Jesuits he encountered there. “I actually thought I’d become a Catholicism minor,” he said, because of his abiding interest in the way faith provided a framework for deeper questions. 

The distance from the mosh pit to the pews may not be as great as some people might imagine. Finn argues that “there’s some part of a rock and roll show which obviously has its roots in church.” In both places, you find a group of people gathered in a room looking for relief, or community or an encounter with the transcendent power of beauty. 

The Ethics of Detail

One of the classic slogans of Ignatian spirituality is “finding God in all things.” But the devil is in the details. And that’s where so many of Finn’s songs land—attending to the stores and streets and cities in which the stories unfold to help the listener locate themselves. In his lyrics, characters don’t just go to a convenience store; they go to an “S.A.” (SuperAmerica). And when time passes in that song, the store becomes Speedway, communicating to those in the know in Minneapolis-St. Paul that the events are unfolding around 2018, when a rebranding took place.

For Finn, these details are the bedrock of his craft. “I always think about the hollow bunny at Easter,” he explains. “If you get the details wrong, it’s like that. It’s empty. But if you get the details right, the story has a weight. It becomes a thing you can hold.”

This weight is what allows his songs to connect on a deeper level. By being relentlessly local, he touches on something global. “I’ve never robbed a bank,” he confesses, “but if I wrote a story about robbing a bank, I’d put it in the bank that I walk by 400 times a year.” That way, “I can tell that story more believably.”

This commitment to detail is also tied to his fascination with the “shaky foundation” of memory. “There’s three versions of everything,” he suggests, “yours, mine and the truth.” And the creative process sits in the tensions established by those three realities. Finn’s work often explores “how we remember things wrong” yet build our entire identities on these flickering recollections. He cites David Carr’s The Night of the Gun as a pivotal influence, a memoir about Carr’s hometown that wrestles with how objective reality so often fails to match up with our own memories.

This concern with memory drives “That’s How I Remember It,” Finn’s fascinating podcast that asks artists—mostly songwriters, but novelists, comedians and moviemakers are also included—about the role of recollection in the creative process. It began as an offshoot of writing and recording his 2022 album, “A Legacy of Rentals.” Fascinated by that connection, he says, he “just sort of stumbled across an interesting way to talk about these things.” 

These things—how we remember and how unreliable our memories can be—are a prominent theological concern. Consider the narratives of Passover and Easter. Both are remembered through liturgical actions. If it was left just to those who were there for parting of the Red Sea or who encountered the resurrected Jesus, these events would be forgotten, or remembered wrongly. These religious traditions can thus be understood as means by which human communities wrestle with the challenge of recollecting rightly. These are themes that echo through much of Finn’s work. 

Liturgy—or, at least, ritual—is something that Finn finds embedded at the heart of a rock concert. Just as the collective “kneeling and standing” of a congregation at Mass builds a kind of connection, the “physical aspect of a gig connects us to the people around us,” he says. This topic of ritual bonding is one that he has researched, and he thinks that “we are craving ritual sometimes in our lives.” 

I put it to him that his role as a frontman often mirrors that of a member of the clergy: He is the focus of attention, performing the role of someone who knows what steps should be followed, guiding people through the ritual. Finn does not shy away from the comparison. He cites Little Richard as someone essential to the emergence of rock music who was thoroughly formed by his involvement in church. “That preaching style is what rock and roll comes from.” 

For Finn, the stage can be a site for communal “inherent remembering,” whereby an audience’s commitment to “enjoy tonight, while we’re here,” is a way to honor the value of life. He feels that “there’s such a strong desire to find meaning in this world” that “whether you find that through taking Communion on your tongue or through punk rock,” that moment of clarity is to be treasured.

And that brings us back to that winter’s night in Dublin, where a corporate insolvency lawyer from England is buying rounds of Guinness for strangers. In Finn’s theological and creative universe, Howard Roberts isn’t just a fan. He is a member of a community participating in a “Band of Forgiveness.” 

Finn says he chose that name for his ensemble because he finds forgiveness to be “the most beautiful and heavy concept” in Christianity. Forgiveness has been a central theme in his work, stretching back even to the early days of The Hold Steady and their classic second album, “Separation Sunday,” which explores forgiveness and redemption. It demands a clear-eyed consideration of those messy situations his characters find themselves in, but it refuses to allow them to have the last word. It encourages us to remember a future where things might be better, a reason to stay positive.

Kevin Hargaden is a theologian with the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice in Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age, published by Wipf and Stock.