The first words most listeners heard from Craig Finn were a Jack Kerouac reference in a song about Minneapolis poet John Berryman’s suicide. “There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right. ‘Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together,’” he sang on the opening track of Boys and Girls in America, the 2006 breakthrough album of his band The Hold Steady. Jack Kerouac had been dead for almost forty years, and the generation of literary songwriters influenced by the beat poets were dying or releasing late career efforts to little fanfare. Finn was out of place.

He looked out of place too. He looked like who he was: a kid from the upper-class Twin Cities suburbs who went to prep school, graduated from Boston College, and went to work at a consulting job. He wore glasses but not the cool kind of glasses, and he was never able to sing. But somewhere along the way, likely at a First Avenue Replacements all ages matinee, he got baptized in the church of Rock and Roll. Not the church of pop punk or indie rock, but the church founded on the literature of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and, further back, Hank Williams and Robert Johnson. He found a Vocation: to spread the gospel of Rock and Roll through stories about ne’er-do-well Catholic school kids and their drug dealers and make certain that the human joy, sadness, and hope came across loud and clear before the guitar solo led the crowd into a pentecostal rage.

On his new album Always Been and the accompanying book of short fiction Lousy with Ghosts, Finn investigates a man with a more traditional vocation. The album is a group of interconnected songs about a guy named Nathan, whose life leads him to becoming the pastor of a megachurch only to discover he doesn’t believe in God, at least not yet. This character might seem like a strange fit for a rock album, but not for Finn. An off-and-on practicing Catholic, Finn’s second album with The Hold Steady was a rock opera about a hard-partying Catholic girl who burns out and stumbles into her redemption at the Easter Vigil mass.

Nathan is less flashy than Finn’s previous characters, but he’s more fully fleshed out than any of them because of the prose work done in Lousy with Ghosts. Reading Lousy with Ghosts alongside the album is a lesson in artistic process. The book is unedited and self-released on Finn’s merch store. It isn’t great—Finn can paint a scene with just a few details in a song, but he struggles when asked to stay in the scene in longer prose. But the book does help fill in the gaps of the album. For instance, “New Developments” explains the reason “the cuffs they made a click as they wrapped around [Nathan’s] wrists” in the opening track “Bethany”: Nathan was harassing his ex-wife and her new husband at the Jersey shore. The book also gives a fuller narrative of Nathan’s marriage and of the guys in suits who promised to build him a megachurch with a crystal cross as they “made a big show of joining hands and praying” at the restaurant, only for the deal to fall through (“Missing Numbers”). These stories provide useful context, but they lack the same captivating urgency as his lyrics. Finn finds himself hovering above his characters or deep in their internal monologues but rarely at the table with them. The struggle to enter the scene might come as a surprise to fans of The Hold Steady: his great gift is to tell the stories like he was the kid at the party who’s still “all powered up on some new upper drug.” He never reaches that level of presence in these stories. Once again, he’s a man about a song.