Neil Finn has been assuming for years with a mixture of resignation and bitterness the certainty that none of his new compositions will come close to reaching the popularity that they achieved Don’t Dream It’s Over, Weather With You, Fall At Your Feet either Distant Sunthe biggest hits he recorded for Crowded House between 1986 and 1993 and which any average fan, just by reading the titles on this page, could easily start humming. The lament of the New Zealand singer, composer and guitarist does not come so much from a desire for notoriety that at 66 years of age he has more than tamed, but from the intimate conviction that the muses have never eluded him since he signed the contract in his post-adolescence I Got You (1980), by far the most widely known Split Enz page. A group that was theoretically led, due to life’s circumstances, by his older brother, Tim Finn.
In a conversation with this journalist 10 years ago, Neil Mullane Finn was already smiling at the “mystery” that none of his works from the new century rival the impact and significance of those that guarantee him immortality in the history of pop and ensure a fertile inheritance in terms of copyright for several generations of heirs. “I suspect that, among the many factors that influence the success of a song, it helps a lot right now that its author is a new face,” he reflected then with the “pride” of someone who has around 250 songs to his name.
Although he has never been seduced by commercial impulses, this sort of McCartney from the antipodes has taken advantage of the fact that no one around him conjugates the verb “go viral” to continue doing whatever he wants. As a solo artist, for example, he debuted in 1998 with an album with a challenging title, Try Whistling This (try to whistle this), alluding to the labyrinthine nature of some of his melodies, and how soon he has leaned towards psychedelia (Dizzy Heights2014) as he decided to do without guitars and drums in the beautiful and little-known Out Of Silencefrom 2017. In between, he occasionally recovered his old fraternal alliance as The Finn Brothers or has allowed himself a half-hearted prank with his son Liam Finn (Lightsleeper2018), in which it was never entirely clear who was the young one and who was the old one. Oh, and Fleetwood Mac! signed him to replace the ousted Lindsey Buckingham during the 2018-2019 tour.
In any case, we will always associate the favourite son of Te Awamutu, a town of just 14,000 inhabitants on the North Island of New Zealand, with the name Crowded House. And he, who knows this better than anyone, has once again opened the jar of essences on the occasion of the publication of Gravity Stairs, the eighth title in the band’s Guadiana-esque career.
No one like him is capable of building four-minute monuments based on structures that are impossible to predict.
We gave up on the boys from the packed house when they officiated their “farewell concert” at the end of 1996 at the Sydney Opera House, and their goodbye seemed even more irreversible following the suicide in 2005 of their original drummer, Paul Hester, an episode that Finn always found traumatizing because he “had not understood or noticed” the depression that his soul mate was suffering from. But the brand reappeared unexpectedly for two new LPs, Time On Earth (2007) and Intriguer (2010), which our protagonist had initially considered as solo works. The third and current reincarnation of the quintet, which corresponds to Dreamers Are Waiting (2021) and the mentioned one Gravity Stairs, points to more solid and lasting ways. Above all, because a careful listening to this latest release, almost a samurai sudoku of sophisticated baroque pop, places us before an author in a state of grace.
The key may lie in the subtle balance of sensibilities that Finn has managed to generate around him. In the current line-up, the original bassist, Nick Seymour, lives on as guardian of the primordial essences, while the emergence of producer Mitchell Froom as keyboard player – responsible for albums by Dylan, McCartney, Elvis Costello, Randy Newman, Bonnie Raitt, Rufus Wainwright, Roy Orbison or Sheryl Crow – provides the pedigree, and the family connections come from Liam and Elroy, offspring of the leader and responsible for the guitar and drums, respectively. Neil has thus generated a reliable ecosystem in which everything is possible: from the twilight melancholy of ‘Magic Piano’, elevated to the honors of inaugural court, to the African touch of ‘Oh Hi’, the nineties echoes of ‘All That I Can Ever Own’ or the waltz with wickerwork of eternity that beats in that beauty entitled ‘Some Greater Plan (For Claire)’. None of these cuts are very hummable (or whistleable), with the probable exception of the very refreshing ‘Teenage Summer’, a title suggested in extremis by Neil’s grandson (family, always family) which still bears its previous name, ‘Life’s Imitation’, on the back cover.
In this world of pop dominated by simplicity and in which – according to the classic definition of country singer-songwriter Harlan Howard – “three chords and the truth” would be enough to round out a great song, Neil Finn has become the great architect of unexpected forms. No one like him is capable of building four-minute monuments based on structures that are impossible to predict. And no one like the musicians themselves to admire this quality. The singer and composer Litus, the fetish vocalist of presenter Andreu Buenafuente during the seven seasons that he was on the air, has become the architect of unexpected forms. Late Motiv, He confesses that his “ultimate aspiration” is to record an album in New Zealand with Neil Finn as producer. And he admits that no creator knows right now how to “combine risky harmonies with beautiful melodies” and establish the “very difficult balance” between cheerful choruses and an undercurrent of nostalgia. Solving the pop puzzle has never required as much effort as when trying to unravel the scores of the fertile sexagenarian Neil Mullane Finn.
Crowded House
Gravity Stairs
Lester/BMG
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