Clear Heart Full Eyes is the first solo album by Craig Finn of the Hold Steady, who recorded the album over the summer in Austin TX. While working on the album, Finn kept a Tumblr, uploading pictures of barbecue, microphone cables and the backyards of his friends almost daily to satiate eager fans. Looking back at these pictures and the subdued composition of the blog itself, the product which has emerged is not all that surprising. 

Clear Heart Full Eyes is a melancholic, country-infused drive with Finn through an alternate universe — a place that is both familiar and foreign to those who know him and embodies both the best and worst qualities of his previous work. On Clear Heart, Finn applies a similar lyrical formula as the one he employs with the Hold Steady, here incorporating a surrogate cast of characters with the customary drug and mental health issues. While the characters may seem familiar, loneliness is definitely a much more predominant theme as evidenced in songs like “No Future” and “Rented Room,” and fans of Finn will likely note an absence of the joyful reveries which comprise a big part of The Hold Steady’s music. 

However, in a lot of ways, the gloomy ruminations on Clear Heart can be seen as the logical extension of the direction Finn has taken his band over the past few years. He seems almost hyper-aware of his freedom to exercise new artistic liberties as a solo artist, and this is achieved with mixed results. Songs like “Western Pier” and “When No One’s Watching” highlight Finn’s strengths as a songwriter, while other songs come across as clich-ridden and trite. Lyrics like “I only died on the inside” in “No Future” would be more at home in a song written by Dashboard Confessional, and it is this sort of melodrama that downgrades the quality of the album. As Jacob Ganz said in his preview of Clear Heart on NPR’s All Songs Considered, “it sounds like somebody needs to give Craig Finn a hug”.

Overall, the album succeeds where Finn does what he does best, which is creating a world populated by people who remind you of people you know. The biggest difference is the absence of the romanticism of the Hold Steady and the infusion of, at times, banal aphorisms with little of the themes of redemption that have made Finn such a joy to listen to in the past. However, there are a few strong tracks that are worth a listen, and if you are able to overlook certain missteps in some of the lyric-writing, Clear Heart Full Eyes offers something in the way of an interesting interlude for fans of Finn’s work.

Review by Cate Czarnecki