Tim Finn's 21-year-old son Harper is the latest to join the family songwriting business. He's just released two piano-pop songs that might have him swatting away comparisons to his dad, but also show his own emerging style. He speaks with RNZ Music's Kirsten Johnstone.
Harper Finn Photo: Stephen Langdon
Being the son of Tim Finn, you obviously grew up in a musical household. Tell me about what music looked like in your house growing up?
It was ever-present. It was one of those things where I could always hear my dad playing the piano around the house, writing songs. And probably for the past eight or so years, he's been writing for musicals. So throughout my whole teenage years, Dad was in the house, in his studio, playing the piano, writing songs for theatre.
It feels like him making records, him touring is quite a distant memory for me now. One of the strongest memories as a kid is probably watching the videos for Split Enz. But yeah, for me, it really felt like he was more just a songwriter and a dad.
So what kind of dad is he?
He's a great dad, you know, he's at home. He's available. He came to all my sports games as a kid. And he still operates in the world of songs and music, which always makes for great conversation at dinner. But it never felt like it was something where I was sort of stepping on his toes, or vice versa. It really felt like he was a dad first.
You've just released two songs, 'Teenage Queen' and ‘Conversations With The Moon’. Where did ‘Teenage Queen’ come from?
'Teenage Queen' I wrote around the time me and my friends were going out for the first time, and I guess I was quite inspired by the girls who would go out to town, and I feel like we live in an age now where everyone sort of knows each other, without ever meeting anyone, you know, everyone's sort of famous online.
So it was kind of that idea of seeing girls out that I knew from Instagram or Facebook, but hadn't met. You know, they're [like] teenage queens walking around, owning the place.
That's a little bit creepy.
Yeah, I mean, if you listen to the lyrics of the song, it's got a dorky kind of vibe, but it felt fun for me to write that. I mean, a lot of my friends, we discuss it like that.
And what about 'Conversations with the Moon'?
With that song, the music came to me first. There's that really jarring discord in the chorus when I figured that out, I knew that that had to be the centrepiece of the song.
Then the phrase ‘conversations with the moon’ just came out of nowhere, really, and inspired me to think back to this idea of walking home from a party, by myself, quite an introspective experience, you know, going over the night.
I'm sure people can relate to that experience of a night not turning out the way you'd hoped. Kicking stones, walking through the empty suburban streets, it resonated visually, with me, I think it was quite a filmic experience.
These songs are a little more ‘art’ pop, than the plethora of ‘pop’ pop we're getting out of New Zealand at the moment. That's what made me take notice of you.
They're also probably going to get you comparisons to your Dad's songs, which are a little more off-kilter than even Neil [Finn]'s songs. How do you feel about those comparisons to your Dad?
Yeah, I can see it. I mean, my music is more of a reaction to what's been happening in the past 10 years. One thing I do really share with my Dad is the emphasis on the song, the quality of the lyric and the melody. If he's passed on anything, it's: make sure you've got a really great tune and a great lyric, so that people when they sing something, it's something that means something.
When your cousin Liam - Neil Finn's son - started out as a solo artist, he used a pseudonym, Lester Osborne. I always thought that that was his attempt to break away from the sort of shadow of the Finn name, right? Did you ever feel like that's something that you could do? or would do?
Not really. If I did that, it would maybe feel like it would draw more attention to it. I'm still super proud of my family and what they've done. So I guess it's something that, it's important to me that I come from that, I guess it's just one of those things where I don't see it as something that will ever hinder me or get in the way of people discovering my music and, and discovering what I want to say as an artist.
Who's really inspiring you at the moment?
This really brilliant artist called Rosalia. She's absolutely brilliant. I stumbled across her stuff towards the end of last year, I saw that video Malamente and it just blew me away. There was someone who was doing something super original, super authentic, steeped in tradition, but also very contemporary in a way that people today could fully understand. That's something that I'd love to be able to do with my music.
You've done some writing sessions with other people recently. Where did you go and who did you write with?
I went to LA, and I wrote with a guy called Dan Wilson, who was in the band Semisonic. He's a really brilliant songwriter. I also wrote with some other writers and I think one of the things I took away was that everyone does it slightly differently.
The most popular form of writing sessions nowadays is the artists going in with a producer, and you're building up the track, on the computer, from the get-go, as the vocalist is writing the song. Within a day, you can have a song completely done, tracked and vocals, lyrics, all that.
Whereas working with someone like Dan Wilson, he is probably more traditional and more aligned with how I like to write in terms of sitting at the piano, and just staying there all day and at the end of the day, you come away with a piece of paper with the lyrics and the song in your head.
I think most of the time, you'll come away with the strongest song that way, because you're not relying on production, or the excitement of hearing something really loud through speakers, I think, for songwriting, if you can play it on the piano, and it sounds really good, going into the studio to produce that you're going to be in good stead.
Harper Finn Photo: Stephen Langdon
