Kiwi musician Finn Andrews on being a songwriter and aspiring poet

9:34 pm on 26 January 2025

RNZ Online

Black and white close up of Finn's face, partially obscured by a blurred light.

The Veil's Finn Andrews Photo: Katya Brook

This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions.

New Zealand songwriter Finn Andrews was just 16 when he was signed to a major record label.

As his band, The Veils, prepared to tour their seventh studio album Asphodels, Andrews spoke to Charlotte Ryan about the difference between songwriting and poetry, overcoming impostor syndrome and using ChatGPT to write song blurbs.

After years of "noodling" with his song lyrics, Andrews said when it was time to describe each one for Spotify he felt like the last person who could offer something insightful.

The "big" and "scary" themes they covered - generally love, life and death - were things he could not process his feelings about in day-to-day life.

"I lean on the songs for that."

This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions.

When The Veils were signed to Rough Trade Records - "an incredible label with such an amazing history" - Andrews had written just 14 songs.

At 16, it was overwhelming to suddenly be entrusted with something as sacred and beautiful as a major record deal, which seemed like "a lovely old British motorbike" he had to not crash.

"I didn't feel ready to operate this heavy piece of machinery in any way."

Andrews said because he took songwriting very seriously, he wanted to prove he was really good at it - even though he was still very young.

"I just felt so frustrated with myself that I wasn't everything I wanted to be right now.

"Over time I realised songwriting is something that I'll spend my life learning about and trying to get better at and to understand. But I wasn't able to look at it that way when I was younger."

When The Veils were signed to Rough Trade Records Finn Andrews had written just 14 songs. Photo: Katya Brook

The process of writing lyrics is "the central joy" of being a musician for Andrews.

"That's the little part of this whole thing that spirals around me out of control. That's the one little bit I have that I cling to and I adore every waking minute. It's a beautiful thing."

Andrews said he even tried using AI to help write song blurbs.

"We just put the lyrics in [ChatGPT] and it came out with some really good stuff. I learned a lot from that."

Asphodels - the title of The Veils' new album - took its name from a flower that the Ancient Greeks believed lived forever.

Andrews first discovered the word, which "bloomed" into a song and eventually a record title, in Derek Mahon's poem 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford'.

Although he is proud to be a songwriter, Andrews said his "first love" was poetry and a few years ago he learned the hard way how different it was as a medium.

Feeling "kind of cocky", Andrews showed some poems to an older friend who had written poetry all his life and was "very lovingly eviscerated with good reason".

This friend's advice - that while music was about sound, poetry was really about silence - is something Andrews now keeps in mind as an "aspirational poet".

The songs Andrews painstakingly crafted for Asphodels were recorded in just four days at Neil Finn's Roundhead Studios, which he described as "an incredible gift to this country".

"The pianos are amazing, the microphones, the desk and the tape machines ... I wanted to really exploit that, I suppose, so we recorded it all live to tape, which solved a lot of problems as well. Everything just sounded so, so beautiful."