In every Finn song, you sense a shrewd musician at work. You sense he has sought and found the perfect chord and instrument to express each idea and emotion. It's what Yeats meant when he said that a successful poem will "come shut with a click, like a closing box." Listen to "It's Only Natural" from Crowded House's third album, "Woodface," and the world all of a sudden makes sense in a three-minute pop song. It's a fantastic feeling and why you wouldn't want to try to parse the song for meaning. You'd be puzzled by the contiguity of chords and lines like "shaking like mud/ building of glass." Only as a whole does "It's Only Natural," one of Finn's best songs, endlessly bloom in your heart.

As a lyricist, Finn is a musician first. He once told Mojo magazine that he often chooses words purely for their euphony. "Initially, I get just a natural image like sky, sea, sun, earth and then something very domestic like washing," he said. "The juxtaposition of those things is endlessly interesting." That acute eye on quotidian reality, the snapshot of mundane possessions, charged with vertigo, is in fact one of his signatures. You have to love this couplet in "Weather With You," which almost sounds like a lullaby: "There's a small boat made of china / Going nowhere on the mantelpiece."

"It's like working with clay," Finn said of writing lyrics. "You've just got to mould the words until they fit the type of rhythm and meter of the song really well. That's where the craft comes in." And Finn is a clever craftsman. Let your mood downshift in the dusk one evening and the next thing you know a line you've heard a hundred times floors you.

In the deceptively gentle ballad "Into Temptation," from "Temple of Low Men," the singer confesses to being smitten with another woman. By surprise, he meets her one day, offering: "You in your new blue dress, taking away my breath." He never acts on his desire, though, offering: "The guilty get no sleep/ In the last slow hours of morning." The meaning of that couplet is hard to miss. But the other day, in one of those clarion moments, I heard for the first time the last line of the chorus, which blends so seamlessly into the song's subtle orchestration: "Safe in the wide open arms of hell." Such a wonderful contradiction, so true.

Finn's finest accomplishments are his melodies. They take your hand, take you out for an evening stroll, make you fall in love, and there's no telling why. I'm thinking, in particular, of "Better Be Home Soon" from "Temple of Low Men" and "Fall at Your Feet" from "Woodface." As American composer Aaron Copland once wrote, "Why a good melody should have the power to move us has thus far defied all analysis." Great melodies tap into some unconscious song that we were born singing. Still, Copland wrote, X-ray a melodic backbone and you'd find that "melodies, like sentences, often have halfway stopping places, the equivalent of commas, semicolons and colons in writing."

I might compare Finn's melodies to Raymond Chandler's sentences, and not only for their perfect pitch and fluency. Like the great Los Angeles writer, Finn is the kind of romantic who would never admit that he is one. Behind his acerbic view is one always striving to protect some unsteady ideal or natural beauty. Bad songwriters look only inward; good ones find emotional correlatives in the world outside them. Finn's songs are bursting with moonlight, tall trees and volcanoes; in his determination to sing phrases that belong only to him, he gives us a "cumulo nimbus coming in from the distance," and "the straw daylight desire," an odd image he follows with, "I wrote that, some Eskimo gave me the line."

Finn invariably shapes his anxious sense of fleeting beauty into songs about New Zealand itself, the "land of the long white cloud," its natural heritage threatened by modernity -- sprawl, consumerism and violence. New Zealand springs radiantly and wistfully to life on Crowded House's fourth album, "Together Alone," recorded in a remote country house on Kare Kare Beach (where "The Piano" was filmed), featuring Maori drumming on the title track and the haunting voices of the Te Waka Huia Cultural Group Choir on others. Finn's talents merge on the album's cathartic "Fingers of Love," my favorite of his songs. An electric guitar line snakes through a bed of acoustic guitars, a simple rhythm churning in the distance. "I hear the endless murmur of every blade of grass that shivers in the breeze," Finn sings. "And the sound that comes to carry me/ Across the land and over the sea."

When's Finn's solo albums, "Try Whistling This" and "One All," were released in America in, respectively, 1998 and 2002, they landed so far afield of the marketplace -- major record stores, radio play, media interviews -- that you practically had to travel to New Zealand to find them. While on first listen they may not sound as accessible as Crowded House, they represent in every way a culmination of Finn's talents. For one thing, "Try Whistling This," the title track, shows off his wit, as it can be interpreted as a cheeky repudiation of his image as a simple pop songwriter. In fact, the predominantly modal tune, awash in the moody keyboards and minimalist rhythms of Phillip Glass (it was recorded in Glass' New York studio), is a plea by the songwriter to a former lover to remember him, as these "words are ringing in your ears," and the words do ring, unforgettably.

I wish I could tell you the new album, "Everyone Is Here," represents Finn at his best. An affecting sonata, it lacks the symphony of his talents so evident on Crowded House's "Together Alone" and his solo album "One All." If you haven't listened to those two albums lately, or ever, listen to them now. They sound timeless and timely, the work of a masterful songwriter, a poet, forever restless.

"I could go at any time," Finn sings in "One All." Yes, death is the mother of beautiful pop music. The melody soars, his voice right behind. "There's nothing safe about this life."

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