ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MARCH 26, 2008
By Steve Newton
On his debut CD, I’ll Be Lightning, 24-year-old Liam Finn is a real do-it-yourselfer. He plays nearly every instrument on the disc and, apart from two cowritten tracks, penned all the music. He also recorded, produced, and mixed the CD, and took all but two of the 24 photographs in its accompanying booklet. As the Kiwi explains over the phone from a North Carolina pub, he comes by the DIY ethic honestly.
“I’ve always just recorded home demos and taken photos,” he says, “so it’s kinda natural at some point to make something where I get to be the complete control freak.”
Among the few musicians allowed to grace Finn’s CD is his famous father, Crowded House main man Neil Finn. But even he only got to play bass on one song, the title track. “He’s always hangin’ around, tryin’ to get on the record,” jokes the younger Finn, “and I’m like, ”˜Come on, Dad, just leave me to it.’
“But no, actually, it was just kinda coincidence [that he wound up on the CD]. I’d written that song just that day with my friend Connan, and went out to dinner with my dad—my mom was away, so I think he was a bit lonely, and wanted to hang out with the boys. So we went out and had a few wines, got a bit rosy-faced, and then he came back to the studio and we just recorded the song in a coupla takes.”
The vino-induced father-son collaboration begins with a dreamy, early Pink Floyd kind of vibe, and winds up with elements of a cosmic jam session. For the most part, the eclectic music on I’ll Be Lightning isn’t reminiscent of Crowded House, but that doesn’t stop people—like customers at Amazon.com—from comparing Finn’s music to that of his dad’s multiplatinum pop band. Some even claim that they like it more!
“I guess it’s an easy thing to do,” says Finn, who opens for Eddie Vedder at the Centre in Vancouver on Wednesday (April 12). “I don’t really see it. But if there are people who are Crowded House fans that are into what I do, that’s really cool. It’s flattering to me that people feel the need to say it.”
When Crowded House played Stanley Park’s Malkin Bowl last September, the younger Finn was there, casually strumming along on guitar behind his father and the other band members. For his own concerts, the stage is less crowded. It’s just him and his friend Eliza Jane Barnes, daughter of Aussie rock legend Jimmy Barnes, ex–Cold Chisel.
“She’s sort of a folksinger,” he explains, “but she sings and does vocal loops and plays Autoharp, and I do the thing where I play guitar, and loop that, and add bass lines to the loops, and then get on the drums, and basically just go a bit mental. It’s quite experimental really, but it keeps it interesting for us.”