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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
In Finn's homeland New Zealand, though, his career is another story. His celebrity stature is second only to that of a handful of rugby players and "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson. Visiting New Zealand not long ago, and walking through the town square in Wellington, I had to smile as I strolled by a busker, singing -- really well, I should add -- Crowded House's "Weather With You." All of Down Under, in fact, reveres Finn. Crowded House's farewell concert was held in a packed amphitheater next to the Sydney Opera House.
Similarly, pop musicians' eyes lights up when talking about Finn. In spring 2001, he invited some of his favorite artists to New Zealand to form a temporary band and play a selection of his songs at a concert in Auckland. They all gladly made the trip, including Johnny Marr, Eddie Vedder and Ed O'Brien from, respectively, the Smiths, Pearl Jam and Radiohead. You couldn't name many rock bands from the past two decades with more passion and integrity.
All of this may sound impressive. But it doesn't capture what is incredibly special about Finn. That's the problem with writing about a favorite pop musician; it all begins to sound like rock criticism, a literary form that's run its course, like English Tudor farce or Sting. Or so it seems. In truth, saying so is my attempt to shed the skin of what has already been written about Finn.
From the moment that "Don't Dream It's Over" topped the charts, his work has been clouded by comparisons to Beatles tunes. That a mass audience heard the influence of Paul McCartney and John Lennon in the hit song was understandable. That people expected every other Crowded House song to replicate the hit's hook, and when it didn't -- Finn wasn't about to write "Don't Dream It's Over, Pt. II" -- wrote off the band as another Beatles wannabe, was also predictable.
The mystery is how Finn got to be such a fantastic songwriter. He grew up in a close family -- Tim and two sisters -- in Te Awamutu, a farming community of 7,000. His mother was an amateur pianist, his father an accountant for sheep and cattle farmers. Both were fans of Big Band music, which the Finn siblings absorbed. "My childhood was quite removed from cities and quite naive for that reason," Finn once told me in an interview. "I look back and it all seems very rose-tinted: playing cricket, riding bikes around in sunshine and mounds of dirt all day."
Tim was the rebellious one, taking off for Auckland to play in rock bands, experiencing his first dram of success with Split Enz. Teenage Neil, emulating his brother, learned the guitar and piano and listened to the usual batch of Beatles and Rolling Stones. He later said it was listening to David Bowie's "Hunky Dory" that first awakened him to the craft of writing soulful, lyrical pop.
Finn's gift for pop first surfaced in the late '70s, when he joined Split Enz. With Neil in the band, and over the course of seven albums, Split Enz evolved from sounding like teenage fans of Genesis (when Peter Gabriel used to wrap his head in a giant papier-mâché flower) to a crisp rock band, proud of its infectious hooks. Neil wrote Split Enz's lone American hit, "I Got You."
By the time he got to Crowded House, Finn was in full command of his talents. Unlike most pop, and like a lot of classical music, his songs renew themselves with each listen. Polychromatic, full of motion and energy, they shift tempos like animated conversations -- although the talks can get a little grim. "Don't stand around like friends at a funeral," Finn sings in "Never Be the Same" from Crowded House's second album, "Temple of Low Men," a smoldering rhythm building behind him. "It could've been you."
Never mind his lyrics for a moment. There's a minatory undertow in Finn's music itself. Crowded House producer Mitchell Froom, ex-husband of Suzanne Vega, and the guiding force of recent Richard Thompson albums, once told me that one of the things seldom acknowledged about Finn is how incredibly dark he is, exposed by his addiction to minor keys. Lisa Germano also performed with Finn at the 2001 Seven Worlds Collide concert. In an interview on the DVD, she says, "It was so intense. We all had to learn like 50 songs. And being a fan, I thought I knew them. And when I got the list of what to figure out, I'd go, 'Oh, I know that song.' Then I'd get on the keyboard and all his songs are in D-flat and E-flat and A-flat -- all the black keys. And I don't do black keys."
