Tim Finn
Tim Finn is one of those rare New Zealand creatures - a living legend, an icon. From his days in Split Enz he is even part of that exclusive group, alongside pavlova and Phar Lap, to be “stolen” and claimed by Australia as one of their own. He sat down with Channel’s Michael Campbell to talk about his new album, tour and even a little mention for his favourite spot in the world.
Generations from grandparents down to the very young know and love Tim Finn’s songs. They embody and inspire nostalgia, life, love and longing, and for anyone travelling abroad, his lyrics conjure all the romance and memories of home.
Finn’s career has spanned near-on 40 years at the forefront of New Zealand music. From his earliest days in the great spectacle of madness, costumes, make-up and bizarre movement that was Split Enz, through a stint in forever favourites Crowded House and collaborations with his brother Neil as The Finn Brothers – well done if you were lucky enough to see them open the Rugby World Cup fan zone – to an impressive solo career.
His latest solo album – The View Is Worth The Climb – has just been released and The Music is Worthy the Career. It’s another solid performance from one of New Zealand’s most reliable songwriters, and holds its own against an impressive body of work and legacy.
“When I did the anthology double CD (North, South, East, West...Anthology, released 2009) it felt to me like that was the end of the cycle and I thought, well I’ve made eight solo albums and I did eight in Split Enz, so I thought I would just do more collaborative based work for a while,” says Finn as he’s about to begin his tour in support of the album. “The moment I really did decide to do that and let go of any notion of sitting around the piano or the guitar writing songs, I found myself doing exactly that: sitting around writing songs.”
“So there was something about that letting go that gets things moving in a strange way, but it has to be genuine.”
That was the beginning of the process to make The View, one which would take another year to develop, span two continents and involve a sort of back-and-forth collaboration between Finn and producer Jacquire King.
“I got a lot more momentum going for that once I contacted
my producer,” explains Finn. “I knew he had done the Kings of Leon record, which was out around this period and was all over
the radio, but I also knew he had done an album that we have in the house called Mule Variations, a Tom Waits album, and I
thought that’s an interesting journey that he’s been on, he’s
worked with an eclectic bunch of different artists.”
So Finn sent him an email to ask if he wanted to come down
to New Zealand and make an album.
King’s tight schedule prevented him from flying out to work on the album straight away, so the pair spent the next 12 months emailing ideas and demos back and forth, building a rapport.
“That suited me fine because I didn’t want to rush and suddenly write songs, I wanted to just let them come up naturally from daily life and family life and friendships and all the daily ups and downs of that.”
“Songs of friendships, of disappointment, encouragement and love,” these are some of the themes that Tim explores in his music.
“My best songs are about relationships,” he says. “Either relationships between me and a women I’m with, or now my wife, my kids, you know those kind of intimate relationships but also friendships – the degrees and dynamics of those. It’s an endless source of inspiration.”
He finds those human relationships to be an endless source of inspiration and he gets a lot out of them; song writing, for him, is a matter of finding new images and new ways of talking about it.
“Of course as you get older you see it differently.”
Following on from the anthology, it feels, for Finn himself, that the new album is being measured against the best of the last 35 years.
“The songs on the anthology have endured and I would have been quite happy to have done nothing, if I hadn’t developed a body of work that is quite strong to follow on from the best of.”
By letting go and not worrying if he still had it in him to make great music, ironically he found that he has.
“Song for song, I’m putting this up against the last 35 years so I must feel pretty good about it.”
There has always been a certain subtlety to Finn’s work and not everyone is going to get it, and he accepts that himself, but if you go
in and listen to the album you won’t
be disappointed.
He’s now on the road in support of the album and readers will be able to see him in Auckland at the end of
the month.
Fans can expect a good mix of both old and new.
“I’ve found that the live event has its own intrinsic reality to it,” he says. “It’s not about the new songs, it’s about what’s happening between you and these people and if you’ve got old songs that they want to hear, and you play them, it takes everything to a really great level.
“Of course I’ll play some new songs but I balance it out and there will be as many old songs as new, I just love to play them, songs like “Persuasion” or “Charlie” or “Weather With You”, I’ll never tire
of them.”
After 25 years of living abroad, mostly in Sydney, Melbourne and London, Finn is now based back at home and has been living here on the Channel’s North Shore in Devonport for the last five years.
“We love Devonport - I think it’s the best place to live in the whole world I reckon,” he says. “It’s not perfect, there’s problems and issues and things, but it’s just phenomenal, especially for kids to grow up there.”
“They don’t realise it, our kids, my son’s 13 and my daughter eight, they don’t realise it yet, how much they’re getting, but when they get older they’ll get nostalgic and they’ll remember their days in Devonport. It’s so idyllic.”
To the future and life in general, Finn wants to continue his exploration and his discovery of the art he loves. He still loves writing songs and he can sit down by the piano and discover a new chord or way of singing and it just never stops.
At the moment, he’s working on a sound track for a song called “Mr Pip”. He’s finding he loves writing instrumental music, and the themes and tunes he discovers in the music he can keep as melodies and doesn’t have to turn into songs as such.
“It’s beautiful, there’s something very pure about it.”
While music is certainly his passion, Finn’s a dad now and his kids are still young so after the soundtrack, it might be time to lay low for a little bit, play with the kids and enjoy the hysteria and drama of family life in Devonport.
Doing what I love doing
