Stranger than Fiction, Larger Than Life: the Finn Brothers song-by-song discussion thread

As I mentioned upthread (and is evident by my scores), the album suffers greatly from having all my least favourite songs collected together on side two. That works well in the sense that I can stop listening after Niwhai, but as an album, this is a major failing, and a real barrier to my enjoyment of it as a whole.

A long time ago, in another thread on this forum (about another act), someone mentioned that running orders could make or break an album, and I thought back to my own experiments with McCartney's Pipes of Peace album (another record that suffers greatly from falling apart across its second side).

So I set myself to trying to remedy the situation. Now, I should say that, for those who enjoy the songs in the second half of this album, my alternative running order may be no more than randomly shuffling a good hand. However, for me, breaking up the poorer material and giving me something good to look forward to has paid real dividends. This is one of only two albums where I've totally abandoned the official running order in favour of my own. So here it is, for those who - like me - find the second half to be a real drag:

1. Only Talking Sense (I played around with several alternative openers, but in the end, concluded that this was one thing the Finns got right)
2. Niwhai (every album needs a strong 1-2 opening, and I really love this track. I know others don't)
3. Where is My Soul (something mellow to follow the more raucous track 2. Works really well as a nice change of pace)
4. Last Day of June (keeps the mellow mood going just that little bit longer, but I like this song more, so it's a step up)
5. Mood Swinging Man (perhaps the mellow mood is beginning to over-stay its welcome, but strong material is so lacking that there's little alternative)
6. Angel's Heap
7. Eyes of the World (just when things are beginning to get a little too mellow, we liven things up)
8. Bullets in My Hairdo (it has to go somewhere, so I sandwich it between two of my favourite tracks. It'll soon pass...)
9. Suffer Never (the highlight of the set for me, and well worth waiting for)
10. Paradise (a mellow ending to a fairly mellow set)

On reflection, this running order really sags in the middle, but the dearth of strong material means it has to falter somewhere. Better in the middle where, at least, I have something to look forward to, than at the end. I could, perhaps, move Niwhai to somewhere central, perhaps after Last Day of June. But I've found that the run of more laid back tunes helps me "settle in" to the set in a way that the official running order doesn't. YMMV

 

I really like the Finn album - it feels slight in places, but the strongest songs (especially Suffer Never and Angel's Heap) are magical. Feels like the end of a ten year period where Neil Finn was at his best - the first four Crowded House records, then this fun little record to cap it off.

 

I really enjoyed re-discovering the first Finn Brothers album, it had been a really long time since i'd last heard it. I can honestly say that I really like every song here and I love the raw, experimental nature of some of the tracks. Yeah, not every track is perfect, but it really seems like this was the start of an extremely creative period for both Neil & Tim, the solo albums that followed took their music to a whole new level, IMO. I will definitely be re-visiting this one more often.

4.5/5

Did someone mention earlier that this album is being released on vinyl?

 

It's been nice going through the Finn album these past 11 days. Before we reached this record here on the forum, I hadn't listened to it in its entirety for a long time. It really has a unique atmosphere and a real NZ/South Pacific flavour right from the opening line "There's a wild thing in the woolshed" through using tea-chest bass, ukulele, optigan, references to NZ persons and ending with what sounds like a musical postcard from a South Pacific island ("Paradise") followed by "Kiss The Road of Rarotonga". I like that they played almost everything themselves. Tim might be limited as a drummer, Neil might be limited as tea-chest bassist but those limitations also gives the record a lot of character.
At the time of its release, I was initially disappointed because it didn't feel like a true Finn Brothers album - more like a Neil Finn solo album featuring Tim Finn as an occasional guest. In terms of lead vocals, Neil dominates the album with five songs featuring him on lead vocals (plus the songs which both sing on). I remember at the time wondering if it was an ego thing, the record company meddling too much (wanting it to be as much like a Crowded House record as possible) or something else. In hindsight, it may have been due to Tim starting to have some issues with his voice at the time. I think I'm now at long able to get past that and listen to the album for what it is.
Song-wise, I think it's a rather uneven album though. There are five indispensable tracks (the first four plus "Angel's Heap"), three that I think are very good ("Where Is My Soul", "Paradise" and "Kiss The Road of Rarotonga"), one that I think is an okay album filler ("Niwhai") and two tracks that are among my least favourite Finn tracks ever ("Suffer Never" and "Bullets In My Hairdo"). Both in the discussions at the mailing list back in 1995/96 and on this forum now, it seems that many fans agree that the album has two or three weaker tracks - but there is no consensus which those "lesser" tracks are. Yes, you can skip the tracks you don't like, but it makes the album quite short and there aren't really any tracks to insert in their places. With Woodface, Together Alone and Before & After, there were outtakes released as bonus tracks so for those albums it is at least possible to ponder what those albums would be like with songs substituted (though I wouldn't change a thing about Together Alone which is just perfect in every way the way it is). I remember reading an interview with Eddie Rayner in early 1996, when ENZSO was happening, and he was asked to comment about the Finn album, which the interviewer found uneven. I don't have the article in front of me, but Eddie's comment was along the lines of "I think Tim and Neil were really pushed for material when they did that album". And to me, that makes sense - it's easier to understand that the weaker tracks on Finn are there because they didn't have that much to choose from, it would be harder to grasp if they had had 20 recorded songs to choose from and still thought, say, "Bullets In My Hairdo" was one of the eleven best.
From afar, it seems they really squeezed in the writing and recording of Finn between a lot of other commitments - the Crowded House world tour ended in June 1994, ALT recorded their album in July 1994, Neil produced and played on Dave Dobbyn's album Twist, then they did the Finn album in late 1994, in early 1995 Crowded House toured Australia and New Zealand and by mid-1995 Tim had ALT touring to do and Neil was committed to demo sessions with Crowded House. I can well understand that neither Tim nor Neil wanted their first duo album to take as long to record as Woodface and Before & After, but I think the Finn album suffers a bit from not being given more time. I think if I had been the A&R guy at the record company I would have said, when they submitted the 11 tracks for the album, "this is a good start, do you have five more songs I can hear before we decide the track listing?"
So, a flawed album in some ways, but I've really enjoyed rediscovering the best songs on it and think I will play the album more regularly from now on.
3,8/5

 

My main complaint about the Finn album concerns the graphics. The lyrics that are printed on top of photographs are near unreadable, "Angel's Heap" being the most egregious case. This is Graphic Design 101 stuff - it is Just Not Done. As someone who has been involved in print design most of his life, I had to get that off my chest (although it's not influencing my rating).
The record is not the brothers' best work by a long shot, but there are several songs on it that I quite enjoy listening to. I give it 3.8/5.

 

I loved Finn when it came out and enjoyed the lack of polish. Still do. Not sure if the EPK has been published here already?

 

I enjoy every song on Finn, and absolutely love many of them. I’m so very glad Neil and Tim did something different. I think we all expected “Woodface 2”. I loved the album on first listen. It’s a hidden gem in the vast Finn universe.

Attached below is an excellent blog post, from a Kiwi perspective, about the album. I rate Finn 4.5/5.

Great Kiwi Albums You Must Revisit: # 13 Finn

 

Thanks for posting, never saw that one. Wish it was longer....

 

I've really enjoyed this exploration of Finn, even though I find it a wildly uneven album with a production style that isn't my favorite.

I can't remember if I bought the album in 1997 (my first phase of Crowded House obsession) or 2000 (my second, deeper phase). Whichever time it was, I remember being very disappointed and essentially putting the album aside. I took it back out when 7 Worlds Collide came out, with its live version of "Angel's Heap," but I quickly decided that I preferred the live version, and Finn went back on the shelf.

Thanks to our exploration of the album here, my opinion of the album has improved. It will never be my favorite piece of Finn work, or even close to it, but I can appreciate it more now. Perhaps its place in the Finn oeuvre makes more sense from the distance of a quarter century; perhaps it simply helps that I approached the album this time with lower expectations than I originally had.

There are a few indispensable songs here, but as a total album it only rates a 3.5 for me.

 

So do I! Hope the rest of it turns up one day.

 

Our votes for Finn:

1-0
2-0
3-1
4-5
5-3
Average: 3.8889

 

Today's song is "Mary of the South Seas", written by Neil Finn, Tim Finn and Andy White and produced by Donal Lunny. It was arranged by the Finn Brothers, Andy White and Donal Lunny, mixed by Donal Luny and Brian Masterson and recorded by Tim Martin, with Pete Lewis and Richard Rainey and Julie Gardiner.

Lead vocals are by Neil and Tim.


The song is a tribute to the Finns' mother, Mary Finn, who emigrated from Ireland at a young age.

"Mary of the South Seas" was released on an album called Common Ground in 1996, which featured mostly Irish popular musicians playing traditional folk songs. The Finns as representatives of the Irish diaspora contibuted an original that was highly influenced by Irish folk songs that they had grown up on.

Co-written with Andy White, I seem to remember reading that the entire writing and recording of the song took place over a few hours.

Neil played ukelele and piano on the track. Otherwise the line up is:

Accordion [Button Accordion] – Mairtin O Connor
Backing Vocals – Andy White
Bass – Eoghan O Neill
Bouzouki [Electric Bouzouki] – Donal Lunny
Drums – Ray Fean
Guitar – Donal Lunny
Low Whistle – Davy Spillane
Additional Vocal– Julie Gardiner
Additional Vocal– Pete Lewis

The song was re-released in 1999 on the Other Enz compilation.

A live version was released on the fan club live compilation Mood Swinging Men.

 

This song irks me. It's so incredibly charming, sweet, and easy to listen to and I'm absolutely taken by it - but then for some reason the chorus makes it completely fall apart for me. It just feels musically off, or wrong, or something to my ear. But then it pops back into the really nice sound when we float back into the verses. No need for lyrical interpretation on this one. It's pretty straightforward.

Verse: 4+/5
Chorus: 2/5
Total: I choose to abstain.

 

Finn has always been an album I'm happy to pull out and listen to (almost) all the way through. It could be because it was something I listened to often when I was a stay-at-home dad with my older son. (Take a look at my avatar and guess his name.) I got the import when it first came out, my son was 6 months old. (He's now in his second year of Pharmacy School.) Finn hasn't worn out its welcome, and neither has my son. It's a great record to have on while doing other things, but it's also a great record to listen to closely. It works to listen to it in reverse order, but I usually simply listen to it in Tim and Neil's running order.

The stronger songs elevate the weaker ones, the weaker ones are strong enough that they don't drag the album down (excepting Kiss The Road, and I've solved that simply never listening to that song). The album is best listened to as a whole, but individual songs are also welcome.

3.9/5

 

"Mary of the South Seas" actually moves me to tears. It's very pretty and almost instantly likable. It strays a little on the adult contemporary soft rock side, especially in comparison of the edgier Finn; on the other hand that's a side that the brothers do pretty well.

I really like the chorus! In fact, there's something in the gentle movement of the chorus that reminds me of the sea waves endlessly moving up and down in tandem, and helps me envision the boat that Mary Finn travelled on rolling up and down the waves to the other side of the world.

The harmonies and back ground vocals are very well done and I think that Neil and Tim's leads both sound beautiful and expressive. I really like the whistle in this one, it has a yearning, longing feel to it.

The whole song has that lemonade (the American summer drink, I mean) feel to it to me.



4.3/5

 

Before I comment on the song at hand, I need to say how absolutely brilliant Common Ground is. As a long-time student and player of trad and not-so-trad "Celtic" (yes, I know) music, I see genius arranger/producer/composer Donal Lunny as one of the major influencers whose work has been invaluable since the 1970s in keeping Irish traditional music (ITM) from becoming extinct and re-popularizing it by moving it forward into a modern-sounding sonic realm. I won't recap his resume here as it's readily available. For Common Ground he assembled some of the biggest pop/rock stars of the era (Bono and Adam Clayton from U2, Elvis Costello, Liam O Maonlai, Kate Bush) and Ireland's top singers (Maire Brennan, Paul Brady, Sinead O'Connor, Christy Moore, Andy Irvine), matching them up with a number of the best trad players (Sharon Shannon, Davy Spillane [of "Many's the Time (In Dublin)]", Nollaig Casey etc).

The result is an amazing, inspired piece of art that I still count among my five all-time favorite records. Y'all check it out.

 

From the Common Ground documentary:

 

Good god, man, do you have more of that documentary? I didn't know it existed.

 

Here you go.

 

I don't think this is really true. Tim's work was certainly more obscure than Neil's, and sometimes was written for other artists; or was essentially a collaborative project; but he actually released just about the same amount in the late nineties, as we will see.

We're about to have 9 days of Tim written or co-written songs before the last gasp of Crowded House, and then 19 days of Tim songs, released under his name, before Try Whistling This. In terms of songs written and actually released in their time, I think Tim was more prolific than Neil was in all decades until the 10s, though Neil has more obscurities from this time out then he had previously. Of course both have unreleased songs and no one knows how many -- Peter Green says unreleased songs outnumber released songs.

 

This describes my feelings about Mary of the South Seas almost exactly. I don’t really think I can add anything or say it any better.

Although I’m not so put off by the chorus that it kills the song for me, it definitely brings down an otherwise lovely song that I would have rated much higher without that chorus.

3.5/5

 

Ireally enjoy Mary of the South Seas but it's just too long. It's so pretty and light that it just melts into the background. A shorter version would be ideal. 3/5.

 

Not meant to be voted on but as we leave the Finn Brothers for a while tomorrow, here's a live version of "History Never Repeats" by them with Eddie Vedder and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam. Three part harmony only ALT might envy, recorded in Auckland on 24 March 1995, and released in 1996 as a Crowded House B-side.
History Never Repeats

 

Not a fan of that b7 Tim is singing I would guess.

 

"Mary" embodies all that I love about the Finn brothers' music: the folk-with-a-twist composition, the soaring melody, the quirky lyrics, the spine-tingling harmonies. That flattened 7th in the chorus, if that's what it is, both surprises and works perfectly to my ear. And when the low whistle comes in, I just melt. 5/5

Jaffaman, thank you for posting that EPK.