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

I saw the Finn album tour in NYC and I could swear they performed Mary of the South Seas. (Aha - false memory, just checked with setlist.fm )I do remember them doing Time for a Change and when Neil described it as being written by the great Phil Judd, Tim chimed in "that bastard".

 

They did perform it in 1996 -- it's on the Mood Swinging Men fan club album, which I neglected to mention.

 

At the Supper Club in NYC? Then setlist.fm is incomplete.

 

No. I didn’t mean they performed it at the show you were at...The Miod Swinging Men one was recorded in LA.

I have the Supper Club on bootleg and it’s not on there.

 

@Lance—I’m right with you regarding “Mary”. It’s so lovely that it sometimes moves me to tears. Very well done Neil, Tim, Andy White, and Donal Lunny.

4.5/5.

 

Mary of the South Seas is lovely, but as has been said, it's too long. It also happens to be the song that made me wary of Celtic waltzes. I have a sizable collection of trad Irish music (Donal Lunny and Davy Spillane are musical geniuses), and the numerous waltzes never bothered me until I got the Common Ground album and heard this song. I tried editing a 3 minute version, and it just never worked.

3.4/5

 

Mary of the South Seas is another track I really havn't heard in a while, though I used to always include it on compilation CD's I used to make of miscellaneous Finn tracks. Really Beautiful Song!
4/5

 

Huh. Must be a lot of Tim stuff I had no knowledge of. Guess I’ll be discovering it soon.

 

“Mary Of The South Seas” is a beautiful song, well arranged and performed. A lovely tribute to their mother. The Common Ground project was very well done by all involved.

4.1/5

 

I agree with jimbutsu: this is a very nice song that falls apart at the chorus. What an odd thing to happen to a Finn song--the chorus is often Neil's strength.

3/5

 

Was "Mary" recorded during the "Finn" sessions?

 

No, it wasn't. It was written and recorded in 24 hours for the Common Ground album. Tim had the melody for the verse apparently pre-written; Andy White suggested the title and came up with a few lines of lyric; the rest of the lyric was written by the Neil and Tim; Neil "came through" with the chorus the next day.

It was recorded in Ireland with Donal Lunny producing.

 

Was this info in the CD booklet? I bought it when it came out but I haven't played it/looked at it in quite a while.

 

No, (or actually, I don't know: I don't have the CD, only Other Enz); it's in the clip that Jaffaman posted above.

 

Mary of the South Seas has always felt more "Donal Lunny project" than Finn Brothers to me. It's a pleasant listen but not something I ever really actively seek out to listen to.

'Local'/off topic notes about the recording:

From the credits (Brian Masterson engineering) and from the clip from the EPK, it looks like it was recorded in Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin. I recognize the control room from sessions I've been at in there. Brian Masterson owned the studio until the mid 2000s, then sold it to Van Morrison who had block-booked it for so long to do archive and remastering work that when the bill came in, it was cheaper to buy the studio than pay the bill. Van sold it on in 2009/10. It's now a recording college but is still bookable for outside sessions.

Ray Fean, who played drums on this track is the touring drummer for "Horslips" - an Irish folk/rock group. He is the brother of Johnny Fean, their guitar player and does shows in place of Eamonn Carr, the group's original drummer. I played a wedding with Ray once. I had no idea he played on Mary of the South Seas or I would have asked him about it.

Donal Lunny, Davy Spillane and Eoghan O'Neill were all members of "Moving Hearts" - another folk/rock group from Ireland who mostly toured in the 80s.

 

Mary of the South Seas is pleasant enough, but is one of many Finn-related 'obscure' songs that I consider to be below their best work. Of course this is bound to happen with such prolific songwriters, everything can't be brilliant. So with lots more better stuff to choose from I hardly ever listen to it, but nevertheless I am still glad it exists and that I have it available in case I ever do want to listen to it.

3/5

 

"Mary of the South Seas" is a beautiful song, a lovely tribute to their mother. Great vocal harmonies and very well played by all the musicians. I agree that it is a bit on the long side but that fits the lyrical theme - it must have been a very long boat journey from Ireland to New Zealand and this was nearly 100 years ago too.
4/5

 

Finn: At the time I thought it was an album of small glories, and enjoyable enough. With 20 years of distance, and with better hindsight of what a fertile creative era the mid-90's was for many artists, it's still an album of small glories for me, but there's a dusty layer of disappointment that's settled on top of it, particularly coming off the back of 'Together Alone'. Part of it is the weaker material, part of it is the uniformity of texture to the recording, part of it is the sense that it could have been much more.

After spending a couple of weeks with Emma Paki's great 'Oxygen of Love' album, and reconsidering why 'Time On Earth' doesn't speak to me and 'Together Alone' and 'Intriguer' do, I have come to suspect what appeals to me about Crowded House is mainly what Mark Hart contributes to Neil's songs, far more than when Tim co-writes with him.

 

That Emma Paki album is a revelation about Mark Hart, isn’t it?

 

I've had the pleasure of hearing that Emma Paki album recently and I agree that it's really good.

Our votes for "Mary of the South Seas"

1-0
2-0
3-4
4-6
5-1
Average: 3.7

 

Today's song is "Comet [demo]", written and produced by Tim Finn. I'm afraid it doesn't stream, but most of the songs we'll be covering over the next few weeks will stream.

"Comet[demo]" was released on on the fan-club release "I Like It Rare" in 2000, but was recorded in 1996, perhaps as a response for either The Haley-Bopp comet or Comet Hayukutake, both of which were prominent in the skies of 1996-1997.

The lyric isn't google-able so....:

There's a comet burning
Burning in the skies tonight
For me and my baby
There's a comet burning so bright

There's nothing like a well-kept secret
To keep you up at night
There's nothing like a heavenly body
To make you wanna run outside

There's a comet burning
Burning in the skies tonight
For me and my baby
There's a comet burning so bright, yeah, yeah

I travelled through the universe
With You By My Side
We can make a constellation
We can go for a cosmic ride, yeah, yeah

There's a comet burning
Burning in the skies tonight
For me and my baby
There's a comet burning so bright

There's a comet coming
Coming through the sky tonight
It's gonna catch my baby
It's gonna catch her in a real good light

There's a comet burning
Burning in the skies tonight
For me and my baby
For me and my everything, yeah, yeah, yeah
Oooh, ooh
Yeah, Yeah

 

"Comet", using an old sing-along folk rhythm, (also similar to the rhythm of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight") sounds pretty tossed off and not seriously meant, but it also sounds extremely happy. I suppose that this is around the time that Tim was falling in love with Marie Azcona who would become his wife and sometime songwriting partner, and the joy he was feeling is palpable in this very simple song.

A couple of notes: although this sounds mainly done by a couple of acoustic guitars, I'd say this was very much a precursor towards his work from 1998-2001, in which he walked down a more guitar-based, rockier path music-wise than he had generally done before (something I also credit to Azcona's influence). It's also notable that from about 1999 on his work is a lot more consistent than it had been since, oh, 1980 or so. I think that his late-gained domestic stability agreed with him in much the same way it agreed with Neil.

I also note that Tim's gritty voice sounds pretty great here: not the pure voice of his youth, to be sure -- it's gritty and grizzled; but it no longer sounds like it pains him to sing like it did in 1994-1995.

Finally, I do have a bit of nostalgia for those comets, as I remember walking to work in the early morning before sunrise and seeing one of them for quite some time and marvelling at it. And I think that might nudge my score up a couple of decimals.

I don't think the song is great or anything, but it's enjoyable trifle, and I'm glad Tim let it out on I Like it Rare. I hope someday the rest of his vault is opened.

3.1/5

 

"Comet" is a seemingly simple song, very catchy. I quite like it and it wouldn't have been out of place as an album track on "Say It Is So" and it definitely would have been a high quality bonus track on a single at that time.
It's not quite top rank for me - once you've heard it a couple of times it doesn't really reveal any new dimensions to itself.
3,5/5

 

Thanks for the Sloan recommendation. I just finished listening to 'Never Hear The End Of It'. When I saw there were 30 songs and 76 minutes of music, I was expecting a slog of filler, but, surprise, every song, even the short punk ones, had strong, memorable melodies, the hooks extending into interesting motifs, which has been highly out of fashion over the last 10 years, and brought to mind McCartney / Lennon aping the Brill Building writers. I never grew bored. By about Track 20, I was coming to the realisation that - sigh - now I'm going to have to buy every CD by this band, aren't I?

Maybe that's why 'Finn' has fallen in my estimation. The hype was that the brothers knew how to write strong melodies together.

I'm looking forward to reading about how Crowded House fell apart. I remember it was just announced without warning.

 

While I would not say "far more", personally, Mark Hart is definitely my favorite Neil collaborator; it's a pity it's really only been the two albums.

I mean, I suppose it's possible that Neil thinks Mark is tapped out so wants to move on to fresh musical input.