apple music essentials neil finn music's most influential artists and the stories behind their songs you've given us some of the most amazing and um interesting adventurous music in what i would consider to be your 3.0 you know when you when you moved away from crowder house first time and you just were like you know i'm going to go and follow my follow my instincts and it's been an incredible journey that part of
it i've been blessed with a incredibly mixed and varied musical life and part of it is because i've got a restless nature and part of it just um is chance happenings you know got it got asked to join my brother's band a bit of nepotism right at the front of the whole the whole thing when i was 18. and i was hired as an electric guitar player and really i was i was an okay acoustic guitar strummer it took me a while to
get my chops up but there's nothing like being dropped in it you know in the deep end in your life if you're lucky you have three or four or five artists that are super instrumental in in shaping who you are split ends and subsequently you and i've told you this after record are one of those artists and what really dawned on me is i knew we can have this conversation was just how weird this band is and i think about like that you
know the the breakdowns in those songs you know the arrangement kind of flies off into outer space how you made sense of that at the time when everyone was trying to stay so linear you guys were willing to go left and right quite hard there was a very um eclectic set of influences with the band and coming from new zealand especially i think there was a liberation in that it was so far away from everything you
didn't have to feel uh behoven to some tradition nothing was imposed in the early days we didn't know you know we didn't really know the differences we loved british pop music um with it with a passion and then slowly became exposed to things that had been on the radio when we grew up you know like soul music and motown stuff so you could pick and choose and i think that's enabled weirdness to come to the fore they
thought we might as well just go as go for broken you know go down in flames as try and be part of some movement you remained weird and i stand by that statement and you know i really do yeah i gotta use a weird song i mean it's one of the biggest songs of split ends as canon it's a strange song well eddie rainer's keyboards were also quite um dramatic and odd at the time i think you know on that
album true colors which was our most pop um outing and we really enjoyed hearing those songs come back to us in such an immediate fashion you know it was we do a rhythm track would come in and there was the record um you know it was exciting time split ends ended it was the most heartbreaking i mean that was the biggest news story in new zealand that year the reason why i alluded to message to my girl being a a
brick in the foundation the final foundation of split ends was because i think it shows an ambition as a songwriter for you to want to to move into a space that ultimately would become kind of crowded house i do remember that at the time i wrote message to my girl i i had become aware of and interested in music with a with a groove and in that sense yeah i would say it is a linear there is a line to crowded house because one of the things
crowded house discovered in the early days of recording working with mitchell as well who was very good at pointing out that my song you know something so strong might work as a with a sole bass line it hadn't occurred to to us with split ends to step outside of british pot tradition um it was wonderful to be opened up to new arrangement ideas because it made me write differently and think differently about the way i could use my voice now
we're moving into crowded house era um this was an amazing moment for music because here come these players who have such an incredible chemistry you know most bands i see that good live don't make great records what came first the friendship or the or the k or the ability to write to write together to make music together what drew you to each other well paul hester and i um formed a relationship out of uh the
ending of split ends and he was just a huge huge shot in the arm for us in split ends his energy we were the same age he and i um started talking about forming a band we found nick seymour who had a mad energy we didn't really become a good band until we we almost had made the first record and nobody was really responding to the record in the first six months we we went out and played these little party shows we did a
restaurant tour of america um and you know something about that really sparked people's interests and then we got a bit of radio play don't trim it's over took off anyone who's ever spent any time with the amazing new offend we'll know that humility definitely comes along for the right first major understatement don't dream it's over kind of took off but it's like it's considered one of the great okay
carry on it was a surprising development really at the time because the album um hadn't really done much at all even in new zealand really i don't think it got on the radio before much before that and and our shows you could tell something was happening because the shows were people going nuts shows and we were developing a kind of a we'd walk off every night exhilarated because something really wacky had
happened and that's what became our mantra yeah we established some kind of really strong um presence and and at the same time as as we were developing that uh we suddenly got one of those um breakthrough moments that you were that you were elaborating on before are you any closer neil to identifying what it is when that happens like what that manifests how it manifests to you i've heard it from various artists who have
been lucky enough to conjure some kind of spiritual or subconscious creative moment that leads to a life-changing experience for everybody including yourself are you any closer to understanding where that comes from um i don't know what it was that day that particularly made that one turn up i went on tour last year with fleetwood mac and i got the pleasure of singing it with stevie every night and she used to do a very um
very warm and generous and kind of over the top uh announcement where she said this song this kind of song when it comes around once every million years that's true that's true that's a really long time what about beethoven what about boys to men but put it on the list and that's the point the point she's trying to make regardless of the million years which i agree but that song is on that list well it just had a
really great life you know it's really gone off and done a lot of really cool things and had some dates with some cool people and uh you know i enjoy it i just enjoy the mystery and magic of it it's had two a couple of two rayo versions in new zealand now which is a really pleasurable thing to hear there's an aboriginal version of it it's been translated into so many other languages yeah fantastic something so strong it's not like there
was a one it was just a one hit on that out that debut album that crowded house moment is a big moment and i want to pay respects to the song you chose to something so strong why you picked that out of all your essentials for us to discuss today and what it means to you the interesting thing about that song is that it started its life as a kind of folky ballad more or less with 12 strings ringing and
mitchell froome bless him suggested it could be transformed he now is slightly guilty about it to be honest he thinks he maybe changed it too much but i think he did did us a favor he suggested a an r b baseline he suggested changing the form of the chorus a little bit and i'd actually love to have those tapes but apparently he he doesn't want anybody to hear them well he's not got them though he doesn't think they should be heard i
think they probably would be of great interest and then there's better be home soon which from the second you wrote it to the minute it was recorded and released became what it would inevitably go on to be nothing can get in the way of that song because it came from a very real place right chasing your own dreams but at what cost the disconnection or the conflict between escapism and domesticity well
i'd i would accept that as a um a rationale and i'm quite happy to have songs that are open-ended enough to lend themselves to any occasion and that song indeed has been um you know embraced by people uh who have been homesick embraced by people who have separated from their loved ones embraced by people who've just fallen in love and there's something about it the fact it's a little open-ended that
enables that so i'm happy about that woodface was a very exciting album for crowded house fans but also for split ends fans because the brothers got back together and it was a really wonderful moment how was that getting your brother in crowded house for that for that brief moment it was a very amazing time uh we had started another the third crowded house album we had come up with a few real good ones but we didn't have a full
album and at the same time i brought tim and i had really felt the need to work together uh we had this golden two weeks of writing uh we came up with you know the very first day we came up with weather with you uh there goes god all the songs that ended up um we at the time didn't know that they were going to be crowded house songs really yeah there was a glorious piece of period of songwriting and it was only
after a little while that i was conflicted there's these two bodies of songs you know the new crowded house album not quite finished these amazing bunch of songs that tim and i had just finished and done really good demos of and we just thought oh glorious solution to all of our um immediate uh concerns let's get them in the band there's nothing from together alone on there i mean together alone is my favorite crowded house house my favorite
crowded house album um we have that in common and we can lean in to an album that was made on the west coast of new zealand you know in the north island in the most beautiful incredible location and turned into this relationship between home and nature at a time when the band i feel realized that that you had to make this particular album this was the moment to make it it was a potent mix of influences on that record
and and being out of carry carry which as you well know is a very elemental place and you know got a lot of energy um some really strong positive energy and also occasionally some kind of brooding uh quality and we would finish every night with big playback where greg our engineer would do dub mixes of what we've just done that day so we were immediately kind of reassembling our best laid plans it kept everything in a
really nice ethereal plane crowded house uh your initial reunion when you when you came back together was conflicting because on the one hand i was so happy to have the band back and to know that there was a sense of renewal and new music to come but obviously um you know core member of the band was missing must have been sort of a real a really sort of a real decision a real moment for you
at that to make that decision when paul um passed on quite a few years later there was so much weird um again conflict in my mind about um that huge full stop on that whole experience and i and i had a lot of conflicting and confronting things to consider i lost a very dear friend um but something about what we've done together seemed to have a weight and a gravitas again for me and so i suppose in a way i wanted to go out
and put some good history into that name so i think it just kind of evolved i was making music anyway i'd already made half of time on earth it just started to feel like it was a crowded house album and a lot of the lyrical content a lot of the subject material was you know and i listened to it now it's quite a sad record i i i don't know if i fully appreciate it at the time but um you know worth it's worthy but it's a
sad record and it just seemed to need to be a crowded house record it people would have had different feelings about it and you know some would have said better left alone for me it felt like part of the grieving process and an important part of reestablishing some some good new some good history in the band you know kind of a sacrament for us for us to go and um and you know in celebration of what we had done and and
you know in honor of paul to some degree you know whatever you want you and new new new players new members of the band but people that you know better than almost anybody you've ever played with um you know your kids which is must be a nice a nice sensation to know that you've you've got that traveling family band that everybody kind of always really wants that's the thing it was sort of there in front of
my face really we were in la together liam and i had made a record together i really enjoyed getting a deeper musical relationship with him after all the experience he'd had um similarly already played a lot of stuff with elroy who's now gathered an amazing ability to arrange and write songs and there's all this talent right in front of me it just seemed like the right time to to put some new energy and commitment into that you